Lake country sketches

by H. D. Rawnsley

WILLIAM PEARSON OF BORDERSIDE.

It is a pleasant thing for a Cumberland Crosthwaite man to have to speak of a man of the Westmoreland Crosthwaite. It is a special pleasure when one realises how Cumberland helped Westmoreland to give us the gentle mind and life of enthusiasm for Truth and Nature which closed here at Borderside, with 'unbroken trust in God,' and 'in hope of immortal life,' on the 16th December, 1856.

I have read no life that seems to have been so genuinely the fruit of enthusiasm for the poet Wordsworth as was the life of William Pearson. He was ten years the junior of the poet, and survived him six years. We may nevertheless look upon him as a contemporary. He was of the same kind of North yeoman stock, and with greater opportunities might have made himself a name in the annals of literature. As it is, like Elihu Robinson of Egglesfield, like Wilkinson of Yanwath, like the late Wilson Robinson of Winfell, Lorton, Pearson's name was not known far beyond his native valley, but of him, as of the others named, it is truth to say that he was a living monument of what 'the soul of Nature,' if it be received into the heart of man, can do to elevate, to strengthen and refine. Of none other in his simple estatesman rank that I have read of can it be more truly said, that from:

'... Nature and her overflowing soul
He had received so much, that all his thoughts
Were steeped in feeling.'

Wordsworth once wrote that 'Nature never did betray the heart that loved her'; William Pearson proved by all he said and did that Wordsworth spoke the truth. Wordsworth spoke felicitously of the

'Harvest of a quiet eye
That sleeps and broods on its own heart.'

William Pearson gathered that harvest to the full, ere he too, like a shock of corn, was in a full time garnered. Wordsworth declared that

'Who feels contempt for any living thing
Hath faculties that he hath never used,'

and William Pearson put that assertion to good proof. Few men in his day and station in this country went down to the grave with larger heart, of wider sympathy and more love for all created things.

William Pearson was born at the Yews in the Winster Vale on the 9th of October, 1780. His father, who died at the age of 81 in the year 1840, was long remembered as a quiet, studious farmer, who would ever read a book at his meals, and made a practice of going afield at nights to gaze upon the heavens. The stars in their courses helped him to reverence and to thought. William's mother—a Little from the Borderland—survived her husband and died at the age of 88 in 1842. While she span at her flax-wheel she used to delight her little son William with folklore stories and fairy tales, but she was chiefly remembered in the village for her bright activity and energy to the last. Many a time, when she was between seventy and eighty years old, on market day morning, though the horse stood saddled at the door, the old lady would say, 'Nay, hang it, I'll never fash wid it,' and would set off on foot to Kendal, with her butter basket containing twenty to thirty pounds of butter, a distance of six miles and a half, and after 'standing the market' and shopping, would walk home again with her purchases.

As a youngster, William's education was left to the wild beauty of his native vale. If ever there was a boy of whom Nature might have said:

'Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The Boy, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain,'

it was the boy who went afield with his father as soon as he could toddle, and who in Nature's kindly school got to know by heart and eye the hills and scars of the neighbourhood, the tarns and moorlands, the trotting brooks, the rivers running to the sea, the great estuary and marsh, with all their bird and beast and flower life. He never forgot his first sight of Windermere and Morecambe Bay, nor his first journey up Troutbeck over the Kirkstone Pass; and no sooner had he left home for work elsewhere than he felt that there was only one place on this earth where life was worth living and that was the Winster Vale.

It is true that he went to the Crosthwaite school and proved himself early to be a master of figures. The author who fascinated him then was Defoe. The Memoirs of a Cavalier and Robinson Crusoe were his teachers. From Crosthwaite school he went to Underbarrow and distinguished himself there chiefly for having the pluck to stand up to the big bully and thrash him in defence of the oppressed youngster. He became out of school times an expert and ardent follower of Isaac Walton. Years after, he wrote an appreciative paper which is extant on Walton and Cotton's Complete Angler, which he begins with the sentence, 'Among our most favourite books is The Complete Angler of Isaac Walton.' The boys of Underbarrow noticed that he hugged his garret where the owls built, and was often deep in old romances of Amadis de Gaul and Roncesvalles when others were out and away up the fells. But in the holidays he followed bark-peeling, not so much as that thus he might earn something that would pay for his schooling, as because in the months of May and June when the bark-peelers went to their fragrant task in the woods, there was a fine chance of becoming acquainted with the life-history of many of our feathered visitors that were nesting at that time. In autumn his delight was to be after the woodcocks, and great was his joy,

'With store of springes o'er his shoulder hung,
To range the open heights where woodcocks run
Along the smooth green turf. Through half the night,
Scudding away from snare to snare, he plied
That anxious visitation.'

In his copy of Wordsworth's Prelude, the marker, at his death, was found placed at this passage, and he never tired of telling the story of his woodcock adventures.

His first work in life was to act as teacher in the Winster village school; he went thence to be tutor to the four children of a widow body at Cartmel Fell, but at the end of the year gave up teaching to take the place of a grocer's assistant at Kendal.

He was only there a year, but it was an eventful one in William Pearson's life. He made the acquaintance of Benjamin Gough, the blind botanist, and it is possible that he was led by him into enquiry not only into the wonders of plant life, but of the life of that most delicate of all plants, the religious faith of the human soul. It is certain that during this year William Pearson's chief study was the study of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Church Doctrine, and the end of it was that he reasoned and read himself out of Episcopalianism into Unitarianism, as his father had in the past done before him. He found rest to his young soul in the thought of the great Fatherhood of God, and worshipped in the old Presbyterian Meeting House, where sometimes in after years Wordsworth also worshipped, and near by which lie the ashes of the James Patrick of Kendal, who was the original of the Wanderer in The Prelude. It may be fancy, but I like to think that it was in that chapel that the young lad first saw the man whose writings did more for him all through life than any other—I mean William Wordsworth.

From Kendal, William went, as was the wont of many a Kendal apprentice, to a grocer's shop in London, and at the end of three months he returned to the Winster Vale, broken in health from the stifle of London air, and the fact that he had no better resting place after long days of work in a city store than a shake-down underneath the counter. He was now in his twenty-third year. The 'poddish' and fresh air of the Yews set him 'agate' again, and he determined to try Manchester life, and on the 16th March, 1803, he set out for that metropolis of the North. He obtained a situation on the next day after his arrival as clerk in the bank of James Fox & Company, in King Street, and for the next seventeen years he endured

'The fierce confederate storm
Of sorrow barricadoed evermore
Within the walls of cities.'

How simple and frugal his life was there, we may gather from the fact that out of his first year's stipend of £75 he sent back a deposit to one of the Kendal banks. He was not very happy. He wanted friends of his age 'who united,' as he tells us, 'those first of blessings, virtue and knowledge,' and they were not. 'Indeed, sir,' he writes to James Watson of Kendal, 'I think Manchester, in proportion to its population, very deficient in men of cultivated understanding. Immersed in business, or carried down the stream of dissipation, slaves to "Mammon" and to "Bacchus," they have seldom time for the rational amusement of reading or for the calm pleasure of reflection.'

This seems somewhat priggish, but it was the real and earnest William Pearson who spoke. Sociable as he was, fond of seeing a good play, his chief delight, if he was not out in the fields, was a book that would set him thinking or a poem that would touch his imagination, and Pearson was old beyond his years. He joined the Didactical Society, the Mosley Street Library, subscribed to the News Room and made one or two friends for life.

There in most uncongenial surroundings for seventeen years he stuck to 'the drudgery at the desk's dead wood' with one thought, that a time would arrive when he could come back to his native vale, and live a student's and a naturalist's life in simple competence. As a matter of fact his health broke down after five years of Manchester smoke, and he had to come back in 1808 to the Yews in his native vale for country air and restoration.

He was at this time nothing if not a keen sportsman, and he was, if one may judge from a letter he sent at this time to a Kendal paper, vexed at heart by the vigorous application of the game laws as enforced by the worthies of the local bench. Three young men, who, with nothing but a knob-stick, could run down a hare, had been caught hunting on Cartmel Fell. 'We must pity the Robinsons,' he says, 'young men who can run down a hare, an animal that often escapes the fleetest greyhound, who pursued their sport without fear in the open day, and so generously, that they left a hare with the farmer on whose ground they happened to take it. These fine young men have been made to pay £3 13s. 6d. for their sport. The age of chivalry is indeed gone. The ancient Greeks would have crowned them with laurel, but this is the age of taxation and little men. We are fallen on evil days; we only wish the surveyor and commissioner had heard them at their joyous sport, and had heard their shouts, as we did, which made the old mountains ring again even to Gummershow, to be echoed back from the far-off Coniston Fells.'

It was during his Manchester residence that he became a student of William Wordsworth. It was not fashionable then to care for Wordsworth's poetry, but William Pearson was never without the Lyrical Ballads of 1805, or his copy of Poems by William Wordsworth, of 1807. The young bank clerk, who was often heard muttering, 'I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh aid,' felt in these poems 'all the beauty of a common dawn.' He knew that Wordsworth walked on the shining uplands of a noble aspiration, and was the apostle, in a time 'that touched monied worldlings with dismay,' of the simpler life of honest poverty and high endeavour. He felt that in Wordsworth he could find that sympathy with all things, that

'Look to the Uncreated with a countenance
Of admiration and an eye of love.'

He knew that Wordsworth had realised the power of Nature to chasten and subdue

'and intertwine
The passions that build up our human soul
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man
But with high objects and enduring things.'

He also knew how Wordsworth taught men the secret of the gentle heart,

'Never to blend its pleasure or its pride,
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.'

It was this knowledge that soon made him love rather to watch a wild bird than shoot it. One is not surprised therefore to find him constantly referring to Wordsworth's writings, and yet to feel him so eminent as a man that years after, though communing in spirit with him day by day, he could not summon courage to go up the path to Rydal Mount, and abashed at his own boldness for venturing to call, came away from the door of the Rydal poet, without seeing his hero, like a thing ashamed.

It was owing to mutual love and admiration for Wordsworth's poetry that he found in a poor Gorton silk-weaver, Thomas Smith by name, so congenial a companion. The last six years of Pearson's life at Manchester can chiefly be known from the letters that passed between these two friends, which towards the end seem almost to degenerate into a series of begging letters from a poor weaver out of work and 'thrice dispirited.' But this at any rate is seen in their correspondence, that even in abject poverty high thinking is possible, and Wordsworth's poems seem to be medicine for the mind; while on the other hand there is always the ready and generous response of the yeoman of Winster Vale, and such delicacy in act of gift as makes one feel how finely strung, how nobly sensitive was the mind of the benefactor.

Pearson sends Thomas Smith a copy of The Excursion. 'Your tidings about Wordsworth,' says the poor weaver, under date of April 15, 1821, 'I will not call him Mr., he is too great for that, were good tidings indeed; his Excursion I have been longing for ever since it was first published, but the price has been an unsurmountable obstacle to a weaver.'

The two friends unbosom their hearts to one another in these letters, and there is seen something of the deep religious side of Pearson's character in some of them. 'I cannot,' he writes to Smith in 1831, 'conclude without a word about what you write of your being unhappy. Read your Bible. Trust in that Good Being who gave you your existence. Consider the many in your situation who from ignorance and want of education have not the arguments of hope that you have; ... only the wicked need be unhappy; at anyrate do not despair.' And again in 1838, 'I wish I could console you under your troubles. Be thankful you have not a guilty conscience—the greatest of evils. Read your Bible, read Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Milton. Do you go to worship, public, I mean? You have a chapel at the foot of your hill, join yourself to them.'

When Smith lay dying, Pearson wrote a letter full of tender sympathy. 'So long as reason and memory remain, I shall never forget the many delightful hours we have passed together, whether in reading some favourite poet or rambling among the beautiful scenes of Nature.' 'I believe,' he added, 'that seldom have two persons come together more in sympathy than we two, and I have often felt that my separation from you was one of my greatest losses in leaving your part of the country.'

Those rambles he mentions were walking-tours he took in 1817 through Derbyshire, and in 1818 in the Craven country of Yorkshire. He kept journals, and full of delightful observation of men and things they are, redolent of real joy in sunshine and cloud. He writes, 'We walked forward on this delightful morning with vigorous steps. The lark was our constant companion, cheering us overhead with her song, the fresh air of the mountains bathed our cheeks, there was freedom from care and the feeling of liberty

'When the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world
Hung not upon the beatings of our hearts.'

'We felt something,' he adds, 'of

"That blessed mood
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened: that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on."

At the end of his Derbyshire journal he says that 'the remembrance of those happy days in Derbyshire will lie in the landscape of his memory, like spots of stationary sunshine; they will be to him and his friend as wells of pure water amid desert sands to which their souls may fly for refreshment hereafter in hours of weariness amid the din of towns and cities and the many shapes of joyless delight.'

Did ever city man take back to city roar and barrenness more quiet and more profit from a country ramble?

In his last letter to Thomas Smith, he spoke of having left the Manchester neighbourhood. In the autumn of 1820 he gave up his work in the Manchester Bank. He never could think of his native vale without a sense of heartsickness; his work was irksome and city life hateful. In his poem to the river Winster dated 1821, he writes:

'And in the heavy time of after life,
When buried in the midst of toil and strife
In trading towns, if intermission sweet
I sought from my dull toil, my fancy fleet
Was straight amid thy vernal meads and flowers,
Thy hanging fields, wild woods, and leafy bowers.
Nor could I think of beauty on this earth,
But still 'twas seen with thee—as if thy birth
And mine had been together. Now at ease
And free to wander whereso'er I please,
What charms I find along thy simple stream,
Beloved Winster!'

It is no wonder that a yeoman farmer's son who could thus write, should have felt irresistibly drawn from exile in Manchester to his native vale, and we find him back at the Yews, in correspondence, now with the editor of a county paper, now with Miss Wordsworth, now writing a ballad or a poem, now a natural history note, now wandering off down Duddon Vale, and through the Lake District, and now keenly interested in a little dilapidated estate in the Crosthwaite township called sometimes Borderside, sometimes Balderside, or perhaps more accurately in Viking phrase, Bauta-side, and determining to go into the farming line.

He became purchaser of the Borderside estate in 1822; at once he determined to let it for five years, and gave his whole time and the rent to boot, to the improvement of it.

In the summer of the same year that he became an estatesman, he planned a tour into Scotland. Wordsworth wrote him a full and particular itinerary, and William Pearson followed the footsteps of the bard, and really made the same journey as Wordsworth's first excursion to Scotland.

There is an interesting note of the peasants recollection of Burns in Ayrshire, and of the Sabbath manners of certain of the Auchterarder folk, but the journal otherwise is a little tiresome.

The next ten years were spent in the not very profitable work of mending the fences and outbuildings of Borderside, and then of attempting to make its crops pay the rent and leave something over. But in 1841 he 'declined' farming, not without the secret joy of getting back to his mother's house at the Yews, where all his books were stored, and where the Encyclopædia, just bound, was awaiting him.

He had not been idle, he had made the Corn Laws a study, and had concluded that they were unjust, cruel, and impolitic. He had done what he could to get the Kendal folk to abolish the old system of selling fruit by baskets, or paniers containing sixteen quarts, and had introduced the better system of selling by weight.

In the spring of 1842 his mother died, and now, at the age of sixty-two, William Pearson felt free to marry. He married Ann Greenhow of Heversham in May.

He was by instinct a tiller of the ground; he used to say that 'no one felt more dependence upon God than the farmer in his fields.' He turned his attention to fruit culture, planted a large orchard with 300 trees and two lesser ones, and felt that he had not lived in vain. It was during this period that he began making notes of the habits of the bird and beast life round about him. Some observations on the habits of the hedgehog which he sent in 1836 to Mr. Wordsworth were sent by the poet to the members of the Kendal Natural History Society, of which Pearson had been a member almost from the first.

The result of this communication evoked, so Cornelius Nicholson, the then secretary, tells us, so much enthusiasm, that a class was determined on for mutual instruction in the habits and distinctive faculties of birds and beasts. It was Pearson's habit to attend the monthly discussion meeting of this Society, and he thought nothing of setting off after an early tea and walking in nearly seven miles to Kendal and walking back by starlight after the lecture.

It was to this part of his life between the years 1825 and 1833 that belong the glimpses of his intimacy with the Rydal Mount family, as shown by the letters, chiefly from Dorothy Wordsworth, that have been preserved to us. It is clear that William Pearson was a most welcome guest at Rydal. Excursions up Helvellyn are planned with the Wordsworths, and natural history notes are exchanged. The letters are chiefly interesting as giving us hints of the simplicity of the life there, and are often full of thanks to him for a panier of apples, or a leash of partridges, they contain a request for straw for the stables, they seek his advice in purchase of a pony, they send requisition for more potatoes and the like. William Pearson was looked upon as the henchman who could be best trusted to supply the Rydal Mount with farm produce, and it is clear that to do the bidding of the bard and be steward of his stable economics was a real pleasure to him.

He also sent to Dorothy Wordsworth's sick-room just those delightful little nature anecdotes which cheered her in her retirement. He admired and honoured the poet's sister. 'Never,' says he in one of his letters to Smith in 1832, 'have I known a more amiable woman. Her understanding and judgment are of the highest order. I have heard Mr. Wordsworth say that he had been more indebted to her judgment than to that of any other person.'

The correspondence gives little facts and dates of household matters that are interesting to students of the poet's life at Rydal. For example, we learn on May 5, 1830, that on the next day will be finished the new terrace, to the poet's satisfaction; we learn also of Wordsworth's constant trouble from 1833 and onward by reason of the inflammation of his eyes. We hear incidentally how poor a horseman, but how good a walker the poet is, and the simplicities and hospitalities of Rydal Mount are brought before us.

But it was not only as steward of the farm and orchard that Pearson was so truly honoured by the Wordsworths. It was because the poet felt that in him he had a real lover of his art, and a real understander of his poetry and his philosophy. One is not surprised to find that Wordsworth thanked him on the occasion when, in the Kendal paper, the worthy yeoman took up pen in defence of the poet. And those who years after honoured the dead poet's memory—his personal friends, Dr. Davy and others—were grateful to William Pearson when, in 1854, he championed, in a letter full of feeling and knowledge, the Protestantism of the bard, which had been called in question by a lecturer of the Protestant Alliance in Kendal, who had described Wordsworth's poetry as being 'one of the principal means of the revival of priestly domination in the Church of England.'

It is very touching to see how really he valued the friendship of the poet he so well understood and so honoured. 'What claim have I,' he wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth, 'on the notice of a man like your brother? My chief obligations to him for conferring on me his society and hospitable notice I hope I shall feel to the latest hours of my life.' Writing to Wordsworth from Borderside under date 1849, he says, 'I felt very grateful for your letter. On reading the first few lines I was sorry to think how much Mrs. Wordsworth's handwriting had changed, but when I found it was indeed your own hand the tears came into my eyes. I shall preserve this kind memorial and shall not part with it till I part with everything in life.' These were the words of a real hero-worshipper, and he had cause for hero-worship.

What Wordsworth's poetry did to inspire and keep pure and true and serene the heart of William Pearson, it will still do for men of humble country life in the years that are to be. We need to-day more of soul among our farmer folk, we want a vade mecum for the tiller of the soil that shall lift his soul to Heaven. I cannot doubt that if men would study Wordsworth and receive his 'heart into their own,' there would be dignity and happiness added to many a daleside home.

To return to William Pearson. He found the farm life on the whole a happy one. He would not have given it up had he not determined to marry. His orchards prospered, and his hay grass was generally well got. His frugal ways ensured him competency, and all day and every day he was learning more of Nature's secrets, more of the pleasant ways of birds and beasts about him. He was making observations, too, on the changes that had come over the vale of Lythe and the neighbouring fells and common lands, since the packhorse had ceased to be, and the common enclosures and the larch planters had come in.

But his ears were open also to the quaint sayings and superstitions, and his eyes were on the quaint ways and customs of the dalesmen amongst whom he dwelt and moved, and these observations bore good fruit in the paper written in 1841, the year before his marriage, for the Kendal Natural History Society, entitled 'A Sketch of some of the Existing and Recent Superstitions of Westmoreland.'

It was doubtless a source of gratification to William Pearson that the son of the poet should be the officiating minister in Bowness Church the day he led his wife to the altar, in May of 1842. And he must needs have been pleased on his return to Low House after a wedding jaunt through the lakes, to find that Hartley Coleridge, who had called to congratulate him on his marriage, left behind him an impromptu sonnet. It had, as most of Hartley's sonnets have, a little touch of description of the life both of himself and of his friend, the gentle estatesman:

'A little man of solitary life
And half an idiot too—more helpless still—
Can wish all joy to thee and to thy wife;
Thy love must be as constant as thy will.
My gentle friend, how happy mayst thou be!
Thou hast a wife to pray—and pray with thee.'

During the coming June of 1842 Pearson took his wife to the Continent. He had long planned this trip; writing to his friend Thomas Smith in April of 1841, to tell him of his intended venture on 'that variety of untried being,' marriage, he says that Mr. Wordsworth has advised him to make a Swiss and Italian tour before age renders him unfit for foot-travel, and adds that his future wife 'is an excellent walker, and is quite willing to share the fatigue, and he is sure she will share the pleasure.' There is a note of simplicity in this intention to see the Swiss and Italian lakes afoot—the bridegroom now more than three score years, but a 'young heart travels many a mile,' and William Pearson's heart was young to the last.

Wordsworth supplied him with an itinerary which he faithfully followed. After the tour they stayed on until the spring at Versoix, near Geneva, and his journal shows that he was busy making naturalist notes all the while. There is a touching note in his journal of his delight on getting back to his Westmoreland home. The blue mountains and the well-known fells, and the ivy-covered cottage of Low House, and the happy greetings from beloved friends. These deeply moved him.

There was no suitable house for the happy couple in Crosthwaite, and after staying at Low House for the winter, he went into lodgings at High Crag. Lodgings were not William Pearson's ideal of home life, and though he was a man of sixty-seven he determined in 1847 to build a house on his own estate.

It was a glad day for him when, as he tells us, on the last day of July, 1848, he crept into the bosom of his own cheerful cot 'with measureless content,' a cottage 'unclothed by rough-cast,' as he told Wordsworth, 'but exhibiting a goodly row of chimneys with pretty round tops on square pedestals, the only specimens yet in Crosthwaite of the revived good old fashion.'

We have a poet's description of this Borderside home from the pen of Perceval Graves, who, writing from Dovenest in 1862, thus describes it:

'Red roses flush its native stone,
The grassy slope, the rocky mount
Are gay with flowers,—a shadowy fount
Murmurs with cool delicious tone.
Beneath, an orchard far and wide
Its blossom on its front displays;
Across the valley friendly rays
From neighbour houses hail Borderside.'

Here for the next eight years dwelt the refined and thoughtful yeoman, reading such books as he felt he could afford to buy, such books as he could borrow from Kendal, or were lent him by Coleridge or Perceval Graves or Wordsworth; corresponding with such naturalists as Waterton and Gough, such students as Perceval Graves and Dr. Davy, keeping up constant communion with the friends at Rydal Mount; getting hold of the best that could be had of the scientific treatises of the day; dipping here and there into theologic problems; studying his Shakespeare and his Milton, enjoying his Carlyle, his Burns, and his Scott, his Reed's English Literature, impressing, when he met him, such a man as Sir William Hamilton, examining the theories of Agazziz and Brewster as to moraine and glacier action, comparing his own natural history observations with those of Waterton and White of Selborne; and from time to time, when he had returned from some ride on 'Nep' or 'Camel,' his favourite ponies, sitting down to chronicle the beauty of the day's outing, or the wild life of bird and beast he had observed. Amongst the latter must be noted his papers on the partridge and the squirrel, in 1846; on the woodgrouse, that 'new bird' which appears to have come to Colthouse first in the autumn of 1845 (this paper was written in 1850), and again on the hagworm, 1852; 'Notes on Characters and Habits of Domestic Animals, 1854'; and 'A few Recent Notices in Natural History, 1855.'

All Pearson's prose has a dignity and simplicity and directness that makes one realise he had been a reader of the masters of English style, but it makes one feel also that he is a poet at heart, as he writes his prose. Take for example his account of the glede or kite—alas! long vanished from our land, though nesting at the ferry as late as the beginning of last century;—'I have seen,' says he, 'the glede and his beautiful flight, no words of mine can adequately describe it. It was on a windy day in autumn or winter that he generally made his appearance. Imagine a bird measuring five feet between the tips of his wings. To glide along it required apparently no mechanical effort, no fluttering of the wings, not the tremor of a feather. It was not flying but sailing on the bosom of the air, as if by an effort of the will, such ease, such grace, such dignity.'

The evenings at Borderside were spent in reading. A mellow musical voice with much feeling in it, would render a passage from some favourite poet, and as often as not the old man's voice would falter and he would say, 'I cannot go on,' and with tears rolling down his cheeks he would put the book down. Perceval Graves, his great friend of the later years, would ofttimes come over for high discourse and heart communion from Dovenest to Borderside. He described those pleasant visits thus:

'And when our cheerful meal was o'er,
A meal which friendship seemed to bless
And elegance and homeliness
With charm we scarce had known before.

How swiftly flew the hours away,
As thought and feeling deeply stored
By mind and heart all forth were poured
In loving faith and lively play!'

The summer of 1856 was memorable for a waterspout that fell in hay-time on the 8th of August, upon Carnigill, near Borrow Bridge; we who travel by the L.N.W.R. from Tebay to the south can still see the wounds upon the mountain side the fury of the torrent made. The phenomenon was minutely described by the old meteorologist in a letter to Mr. Davy. It was the last August he would see.

The long walks over fell and moor gave way to pony-back, and pony-back gave way to a carriage. It was clear to all who knew that delicately chiselled face and noble brow of the yeoman poet and naturalist, that with all his mental powers clear and his eye undimmed, his natural strength was abating. In the spring of 1856 the Winster folk noticed that though he visited, as was his wont, all the orchards for miles round, he visited them in his gig, and men knew by his constant cough that his old enemy, bronchitis, was pressing him sore. But every sunny day found him sitting with his book under the shadow of the famous ash tree at Borderside, and still at night time, if the stars were clear, they saw a tall figure wrapped in a plaid, and stick in hand, pacing slowly the garden path, before the door was shut and lights went out.

As for his own light, that went out, painlessly almost as it seemed, on December 16th. A day or two before, he had gone to the window of his sick room, and said, 'In another month the snowdrops will be here.' The snowdrops came, but alas! for eyes of others almost too dim for tears to see them. On the day of his death, or more properly, his falling on sleep, the sunset brightened in the west, and the dying man with the instinct of an observer keen to the last, turned his face to the window to see the glory grow. Then he sighed and passed to other glory beyond all sunsetting.

Of his work that remains, little need be said. It is always thoughtful, accurate of observation, pure in style, refined in diction, and delicate in poetic appreciation. One much regrets that he who had in 1808 espoused the 'Terza Rima' should have so soon quitted the sonnet's scanty plot of ground and left so few examples of his work. Amongst the miscellaneous papers and letters on natural history that remain are three which we of this county cannot be too thankful for. One is a paper 'On certain changes that have taken place of late years in a part of the Lake District,' with its notes of 'pack-horse-routes,' 'implements of primitive husbandry,' 'the introduction of larch planting,' 'commons enclosure,' and with its interesting account of the ancient Lythe Marsh.

Another is a paper in form of six letters to Thomas Gough containing 'notes on a few subjects in the natural history of Crosthwaite and Lythe, and the valley of Winster.' He prefaced this series of letters with an apparent quotation which really was his own saying and which, as a lover of St. Francis and of all his true followers, I dare to repeat.—'These lonely denizens of the earth, our fellow pilgrims on the journey of life, have their appointed tasks as we have, set out by the great Creator.' There spoke the heart of the wise old Winster estatesman, who long had known the bond of love that binds the travailing creation into one, who as he moved among his brother birds and flowers, and felt the glory of his brother sun, or of his sister the homeside fire, also then

'With bliss ineffable
Could feel the sentiment of Being spread
O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still
O'er all that leaps and runs and shouts and sings
Or beats the gladsome air, or all that glides
Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself
And mighty depth of waters.'

The last two papers to be mentioned are 'The Sketches of some of the existing and recent Superstitions of Westmoreland': most valuable these are, as written just in the nick of time. The two generations that have passed since he collected his material and penned his notes, have ceased to hand on the traditional sayings and become too matter of fact to be 'boddered wid sic things as Charms or Boggles or Dobbies or Barguests or Wisemen or Witches.'

There is no one in the county of Westmoreland to-day who would care to take their children when plagued with the kink-cough up to Cartmel-fell, on chance of clipping a hair from the cross on an ass's back and then tying it round the bairn's neck as a sovereign remedy for the troublesome whoop.

But if it had not been for William Pearson I doubt if we should have known that the Winster dalesfolk, notwithstanding that the Cross was set here in the clearing so many centuries ago, were actually fire-worshippers and carrying on the rites of Baal with their Beltane-fires as late as the year of Our Lord 1840. Pearson tells us he talked with a farmer who had actually been present at the sacrifice by fire of a calf in this neighbourhood, and that there were two places within the memory of men then living, Fell Side in Crosthwaite and Hodge Hill on Cartmel-fell, where, to prevent the death of calves after birth, large fires were kindled in the open air near to the farm house and a living calf laid upon them and burnt to death.

As for the reality of this superstitious relic of sun-worship, in the year 1840, William Pearson actually witnessed it here in Crosthwaite, and, with a quotation from his paper upon this point, I will close this notice of his life and work:

'The Need Fire has again made its appearance. There is at present a rumour of a dreadful epidemic among cattle, which has shown itself in different places in this part of our country, to which it has been coming slowly up from the South, where it prevailed last summer. On Sunday afternoon, the 15th of last November, returning from Kendal by way of Brigsteer, when I reached the brow of the hill that overlooks that pleasant village, and from whence there is a glorious prospect, I was somewhat surprised to see, in Crosthwaite, two or three large masses of white smoke "rising up like the smoke of a furnace." I thought it was lime-burning, from some kilns that are not usually occupied. But when I reached Crosthwaite, I found myself in the immediate neighbourhood of one of these "smokes," which was rising very thickly below the Church Tower. I enquired of a young woman standing in the road what was the meaning of all this smoke. "Oh," said she, "it is the Need Fire." Well, thought I, much as I have heard of it, I have never seen the Need Fire. I will not miss this opportunity of having ocular evidence of all its mysteries. On reaching che spot, I found the fire burning in the narrow lane called Kirk Lane, within about twenty yards of the Kirk Tower, and about half a dozen cattle huddled together and kept close to the fire, and amongst the smoke, by a number of men and boys standing on each side of them, in that narrow lane. Sometimes they drove them through the fire, and such was the thickness of the smoke that I could scarcely perceive the actors in this strange ceremony—men and cattle. "So," said I, "you are giving them a smoke." "Yes," replied the owner of the cows, "we wish to be like our neighbours." "But have you got the real Need Fire?" "Yes, we believe so, it came down Crook yesterday." Now I had heard that it had been at Low Levens a few days before, so that this superstitious fire was evidently moving about in all directions through the length and breadth of the land: nor do they appear to give it any rest, even on Sundays!'