he countenances of the inmates, partake, when bidden, of
their homely fare, enter feelingly into their pathetic human histories.
They came there not to criticise, but to know and feel.

Again, their intense love for their Westmoreland dales and meres did not
send them to look on those of Scotland with a sense of rivalry, but of
brotherhood. They were altogether free from that vulgar habit of
comparing scene with scene which so poisons the eye to all true
perception of natural beauty,--as though the one great end were to
graduate all the various scenes of nature in the list of a competitive
examination. Hence whatever new they met with, they were ready to
welcome and enjoy. They could appreciate the long, bare, houseless,
treeless glens, not less than the well-wooded lakes. And yet Miss
Wordsworth's home-heartedness makes her long for some touches of home and
human habitation to break the long bleak solitudes she passed through.
The absolute desolation of the Moor of Rannoch, so stirring to some, was
evidently too much for her.

'The loneliness
Loaded her heart, the desert tired her eye.'

Again, throughout the Journal we see how to her eye man and nature
interact on each other. That deep feeling, so strong in her brother's
poetry, of the interest that man gives to nature, and still more the
dignity that nature gives to man, is not less strongly felt by her. It
is man seen against a great background of nature and solitude that most
stirs her imagination. The woman sitting sole by the margin of Daer
Water, or the old man alone in the corn-field, or the boy solitary on the
Moor of Crawfordjohn--these in her prose are pictures quite akin and
equal to many a one that occurs in her brother's verse. This sense of
man with 'grandeur circumfused,' 'the sanctity of nature given to man,'
is as primary in her as in her brother. I cannot believe that she merely
learnt it from him. It must have been innate in both, derived by both
from one original source.

One is struck throughout by the absence of all effort at fine or
imaginative writing. But this only makes more effective those natural
gleams that come unbidden. After the dulness of Glasgow and the Vale of
Leven comes that wakening up to very ecstasy among the islands of Loch
Lomond,--that new world, magical, enchanting. And then that plunge into
the heart of the Highlands, when they find themselves by the shores of
Loch Katrine, alone with the n