e with
the whole, he who is Nature and Law and divine Necessity, can be blest
with that blessedness which Nature is able to give only by her presence.
There is a labor and a rest that are the same, one fact, one felicity;
in this are power, beauty, immortality; by existence as a whole it is
always perfectly exemplified; to man, as the eye of existence, it is
also possible; but it is possible to him only as he is purely man,--only
as he abandons himself to the divine principles of his life: in other
words, this Sabbath remaineth in very deed to no other than the people
of God.

* * * * *

LIGHTS OF THE ENGLISH LAKE DISTRICT.

At the opening of the present century, the Lake District of Cumberland
and Westmoreland was groaned over by some residents as fast losing its
simplicity. The poet Gray had been the first to describe its natural
features in an express manner; and his account of the views above
Keswick and Grasmere was quoted, sixty years since, as evidence of
the spoiling process which had gone on since the introduction of
civilization from the South. Gray remarked on the absence of red roofs,
gentlemen's houses, and garden-walls, and on the uniform character of
the humble farmsteads and gray cottages under their sycamores in the
vales. Wordsworth heard and spoke a good deal of the innovations which
had modified the scene in the course of the thirty years which elapsed
between Gray's visits (in 1767-69) and his own settlement in the Lake
District; but he lived to say more, at the end of half a century, of the
wider and deeper changes which time had wrought in the aspect of the
country and the minds and manners of the people. According to his
testimony, and that of Southey, the barbarism was of a somewhat gross
character at the end of the last century; the magistrates were careless
of the condition of the society in which they bore authority; the clergy
were idle or worse,--"marrying and burying machines," as Southey told
Wilberforce; and the morality of the people, such as it was, was
ascribed by Wordsworth, in those his days of liberalism in politics, to
the state of republican equality in which they lived. Excellent, fussy
Mr. Wilberforce thought, when he came for some weeks into the District,
that the Devil had had quite time enough for sowing tares while the
clergy were asleep; so he set to work to sow a better seed; and we find
in his diary that he went into house after hous