which you have
assembled there, 'Death the Skeleton and Time the Shadow.' It is a
sight not for every youthful poet to dream of; it is one of the last
results he must have gone thinking for years for."

(Charles Lamb to Wordsworth, 1815.)

In Crabb Robinson's 'Diary', a reference to the Yew-trees of Lorton and
Borrowdale will be found under date Sept. 16 and 20, 1816.

"The pride of Lorton Vale" is now a ruin, and has lost all its ancient
majesty: but, until the close of 1883, the "fraternal four" of
Borrowdale were still to be seen "in grand assemblage." Every one who
has felt the power of Wordsworth's poetry,--and especially those who
had visited the Seathwaite valley, and read the 'Yew-Trees' under the
shade of that once "solemn and capacious grove" before 1884,--must
have felt as if they had lost a personal friend, when they heard that
the "grove" was gone. The great gale of December 11, 1883, smote it
fiercely, uprooting one of the trees, and blowing the others to
ribbands. The following is Mr. Rawnsley's account of the disaster:

'Last week the gale that ravaged England did the Lake country much
harm. We could spare many of the larch plantations, and could hear
(with a sigh) of the fall of the giant Scotch firs opposite the
little Scafell Inn at Rosthwaite, and that Watendlath had lost its
pines; but who could spare those ancient Yews, the great

"... fraternal Four of Borrowdale,
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;
Huge trunks! and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved."

'For beneath their pillared shade since Wordsworth wrote his poem,
that Yew-tree grove has suggested to many a wanderer up Borrowdale,
and visitant to the Natural Temple,

"an ideal grove in which the ghostly masters of mankind meet, and
sleep, and offer worship to the Destiny that abides above them,
while the mountain flood, as if from another world, makes music to
which they dimly listen."

'These Yew-trees, seemingly

"Produced too slowly ever to decay;
Of form and aspect too magnificent
To be destroyed,"

'have been ruthlessly overthrown. One has been uprooted bodily; all
the leaders and branches of the others have been wrenched from the
main trunk; and the three still standing are bare poles and broken
wreck