e "to talk religion to
the people." I do not know how he was received; but at this day the
people are puzzled at that kind of domestic intervention, so unsuitable
to their old-fashioned manners,--one old dame telling with wonder, some
little time since, that a young lady had called and sung a hymn to
her, but had given her nothing at the end for listening. The rough
independence of the popular manners even now offends persons of a
conventional habit of mind; and when poets and philosophers first came
from southern parts to live here, the democratic tone of feeling and
behavior was more striking than it is now or will ever be again.

Before the Lake poets began to give the public an interest in the
District, some glimpses of it were opened by the well-known literary
ladies of the last century who grouped themselves round their young
favorite, Elizabeth Smith. I do not know whether her name and fame have
reached America; but in my young days she was the English school-girls'
subject of admiration and emulation. She had marvellous powers of
acquisition, and she translated the Book of Job, and a good deal from
the German,--introducing Klopstock to us at a time when we hardly knew
the most conspicuous names in German literature. Elizabeth Smith was an
accomplished girl in all ways. There is a damp, musty-looking house,
with small windows and low ceilings, at Coniston, where she lived with
her parents and sister, for some years before her death. We know, from
Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton's and the Bowdlers' letters, how Elizabeth and
her sister lived in the beauty about them, rambling, sketching, and
rowing their guests on the lake. In one of her rambles, Elizabeth sat
too long under a heavy dew. She felt a sharp pain in her chest, which
never left her, and died in rapid decline. Towards the last she was
carried out daily from the close and narrow rooms at home, and laid in a
tent pitched in a field just across the road, whence she could overlook
the lake, and the range of mountains about its head. On that spot now
stands Tent Lodge, the residence of Tennyson and his bride after their
marriage. One of my neighbors, who first saw the Lake District in early
childhood, has a solemn remembrance of the first impression. The tolling
of the bell of Hawkeshead church was heard from afar; and it was tolling
for the funeral of Elizabeth Smith. Her portrait is before me now,--the
ingenuous, child-like face, with the large dark eyes which alon