Will bring down half a mountain; what a feast
For folks that wander up and down like you,
To see an acre's breadth of that wide cliff
One roaring cataract! a sharp May-storm 155
Will come with loads of January snow,
And in one night send twenty score of sheep
To feed the ravens; or a shepherd dies
By some untoward death among the rocks:
The ice breaks up and sweeps away a bridge; 160
A wood is felled:--and then for our own homes!
A child is born or christened, a field ploughed,
A daughter sent to service, a web spun,
The old house-clock is decked with a new face;
And hence, so far from wanting facts or dates 165
To chronicle the time, we all have here
A pair of diaries,--one serving, Sir,
For the whole dale, and one for each fire-side--
Yours was a stranger's judgment: for historians,
Commend me to these valleys! 170

_Leonard_. Yet your Church-yard
Seems, if such freedom may be used with you,
To say that you are heedless of the past:
An orphan could not find his mother's grave:
Here's neither head nor foot-stone, plate of brass, 175
Cross-bones nor skull,--type of our earthly state
Nor emblem of our hopes: [22] the dead man's home
Is but a fellow to that pasture-field.

_Priest_. Why, there, Sir, is a thought that's new to me!
The stone-cutters, 'tis true, might beg their bread 180
If every English church-yard were like ours;
Yet your conclusion wanders from the truth:
We have no need of names and epitaphs;
We talk about the dead by our fire-sides.
And then, for our immortal part! _we_ want 185
No symbols, Sir, to tell us that plain tale:
The thought of death sits easy on the man
Who has been born and dies among the mountains. [E]

_Leonard_. Your Dalesmen, then, do in each other's thoughts
Possess a kind of second life: no doubt 190
You, Sir, could help me to the history
Of half these graves?

_Priest_. For eight-score winters past,
With what I've witnessed, and with what I've heard,
Perhaps I might; and, on a winter-evening, [23] 195
If you were seated at my chimney's nook,
By turning o'er these hillocks one by one,
We two could travel, Sir, through a strange round;
Yet all in the broad highway of the world.
Now there's a