t of
sculpture that he walled into his home he found pictures of far-away
scenes that printed in vague shape of tower or abbey all his limited
horizon.

Christopher North carried his Scotch love of mountains to his home among
the English lakes. I think he counted Skiddaw something more than "a
great creature." In all respects--saving the pipes and the ale--he was
the very opposite of Charles Lamb. And yet do we love him more? A
stalwart, hearty man, with a great redundance of flesh and blood, who
could "put the stone" with Finlayson, or climb with the hardiest of the
Ben-Nevis guides, or cast a fly with the daintiest of the Low-Country
fishers,--redundant of imagination, redundant of speech, and with such
exuberance in him that we feel surfeit from the overflow, as at the
reading of Spenser's "Faerie Queene," and lay him down with a wearisome
sense of mental indigestion.

Nor yet is it so much an indigestion as a feeling of plethora, due less
to the frothiness of the condiments than to a certain fulness of blood
and brawn. The broad-shouldered Christopher, in his shooting-jacket, (a
dingy green velveteen, with pocket-pouches all stuffed,) strides away
along the skirts of Cruachan or Loch Lochy with such a tearing pace, and
greets every lassie with such a clamorous outbreak of song, and throws
such a wonderful stretch of line upon every pool, and amazes us with
such stupendous "strikes" and such a whizzing of his reel, that we
fairly lose our breath.

Not so of the "White Doe of Rylstone"; nay, we more incline to doze over
it than to lose our breath. Wilson differs from Wordsworth as Loch Awe,
with its shaggy savagery of shore, from the Sunday quietude and beauty
of Rydal-Water. The Strid of Wordsworth was bounded by the slaty banks
of the "Crystal Wharf," and the Strid of Wilson, in his best moments,
was as large as the valley of Glencoe. Yet Wordsworth loved intensely
all the more beautiful aspects of the country, and of country-life. No
angler and no gardener, indeed,--too severely and proudly meditative for
any such sleight-of-hand. The only great weight which he ever lifted, I
suspect, was one which he carried with him always,--the immense dignity
of his poetic priesthood. His home and its surroundings were fairly
typical of his tastes: a cottage, (so called,) of homely material
indeed, but with an ambitious elevation of gables and of chimney-stacks;
a velvety sheen of turf, as dapper as that of a suburban haberd