ass what has been said will be of no
avail, but upon the two latter some impression will, I trust, be made.

To conclude. The railway power, we know well, will not admit of being
materially counteracted by sentiment; and who would wish it where large
towns are connected, and the interests of trade and agriculture are
substantially promoted, by such mode of intercommunication? But be it
remembered, that this case is, as has been said before, a peculiar one,
and that the staple of the country is its beauty and its character of
retirement. Let then the beauty be undisfigured and the retirement
unviolated, unless there be reason for believing that rights and
interests of a higher kind and more apparent than those which have been
urged in behalf of the projected intrusion will compensate the
sacrifice. Thanking you for the judicious observations that have
appeared in your paper upon the subject of railways,

I remain, Sir,
Your obliged,
WM. WORDSWORTH.

Rydal Mount, Dec. 9, 1844.

NOTE.--To the instances named in this letter of the indifference even of
men of genius to the sublime forms of Nature in mountainous districts,
the author of the interesting Essays, in the _Morning Post_, entitled
Table Talk has justly added Goldsmith, and I give the passage in his own
words.

'The simple and gentle-hearted Goldsmith, who had an exquisite sense of
rural beauty in the familiar forms of hill and dale, and meadows with
their hawthorn-scented hedges, does not seem to have dreamt of any such
thing as beauty in the Swiss Alps, though he traversed them on foot, and
had therefore the best opportunities of observing them. In his poem "The
Traveller," he describes the Swiss as loving their mountain homes, not
by reason of the romantic beauty of the situation, but in spite of the
miserable character of the soil, and the stormy horrors of their
mountain steeps--

Turn we to survey
Where rougher climes a nobler race display,
Where the bleak Swiss their stormy mansion tread,
And force a churlish soil for scanty bread.
No produce here the barren hills afford,
But man and steel, the soldier and his sword:
No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array,
But winter lingering chills the lap of May;
No Zephyr fondly sues the mountain's breast,
But meteors glare and stormy glooms invest.
Yet still, _even here_, content can spread a charm,
Redress the clime