ed minstrel did not know
How, by Heaven's grace, this Clifford's heart was framed:
How he, long forced in humble walks to go,
Was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed._

After restoration to his ancestral estates, the Shepherd-lord preferred
to live in comparative retirement. He spent most of his time at Barden
Tower (see notes to _The White Doe of Rylstone_), which he enlarged, and
where he lived with a small retinue. He was much at Bolton (which was
close at hand), and there he studied astronomy and alchemy, aided by the
monks. It is to the time when he lived at Threlkeld, however--wandering
as a shepherd-boy, over the ridges and around the coves of Blencathara,
amongst the groves of Mosedale, and by the lofty springs of
Glenderamakin--that Wordsworth refers in the lines,

_Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills._

He was at Flodden in 1513, when nearly sixty years of age, leading there
the "flower of Craven."

From Penigent to Pendle Hill,
From Linton to long Addingham,
And all that Craven's coasts did till,
They with the lusty Clifford came.

Compare, in the first canto of _The White Doe of Rylstone_ (p. 117)--

when he, with spear and shield,
Rode full of years to Flodden-field.

He died in 1523, and was buried in the choir of Bolton Priory.

The following is Sarah Coleridge's criticism of the _Song at the Feast
of Brougham Castle_, in the editorial note to her father's _Biographia
Literaria_ (vol. ii. ch. ix. p. 152, ed. 1847):--

"The transitions and vicissitudes in this noble lyric I have
always thought rendered it one of the finest specimens of modern
subjective poetry which our age has seen. The ode commences in a
tone of high gratulation and festivity--a tone not only glad, but
_comparatively_ even jocund and light-hearted. The Clifford is
restored to the home, the honours and estates of his ancestors.
Then it sinks and falls away to the remembrance of
tribulation--times of war and bloodshed, flight and terror, and
hiding away from the enemy--times of poverty and distress, when
the Clifford was brought, a little child, to the shelter of a
northern valley. After a while it emerges from those depths of
sorrow--gradually rises into a strain of elevate