Lake country sketches

by H. D. Rawnsley

JAMES CROPPER OF ELLERGREEN.

He was Chairman of a Kendal Education Society which anticipated much of the present endeavour of the Code to secure better instruction for elementary teachers. He was never so happy as when he could gather the teachers on the lawn at Ellergreen, and hold counsel with them as to their future aims and their present progress. The idea of a pupil-teachers' centre at Kendal was his, and as Chairman of the County Council he was able to lend it substantial aid. When the Voluntary School Association came into being, he took up the idea warmly, and personally visited every school within his area, and made its wants and its difficulties his own.

There was not a day that this public benefactor did not do something to help his time. And if one asked oneself why it was he had the power to be a pillar of good in his generation, a kind of beacon and standard for higher and happier life in all classes of society round about him, the answer seemed to be that he had a heart which was for ever young, in a body that seemed as if age could not touch it—that his sympathies were not with the past, but with the present and the future; that his enthusiasm for the better time coming never failed him; that he believed that all things work together for good to them that fear God and keep His commandments.

The grace of this abundant hopefulness flowed out in all he did and said. 'Age could not stale his infinite variety,' because he never grew old. To see him with young men or little children was to see him at his best. To know him in his home life was a privilege for which to be thankful.

But deeper than all his spring of hope and sympathy with the young and the new lay the fountain of poetry at his heart. He did not, I think, write poetry, but the love of it was a continual presence. He had the poet's heart, and entered into the poet's mind. For him, the practical public county magistrate and councillor, the spirit of the innermost was the joy of the imagination. This was the secret of his swift sympathy with nature and with man.

We met by appointment in the Tapestry Room of the Spanish Palace at the Paris Exhibition on October 12th, 1900. He was as cheery as ever.

'I have had a delightful week,' he said, 'I wish all my friends could have seen this wonderful exhibition. Yesterday I was at Chartres Cathedral. I never knew what stained glass was before; pray visit Chartres. It is a revelation to one.' Then he turned to the Spanish tapestries and went with deepest pleasure through the historic scenes that the needles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have left on deathless record. He seemed as young-hearted as a boy, and as fresh in his enthusiasm as if this Paris Exhibition was the first he had ever seen, but he was seventy-seven and had seen more than falls to most of us to see, of all this world can show. I did not know as I shook hands and parted that Death already had shaken him by the hand.

That night the sharp pain of pneumonia was upon him. I saw him once again, at the bedside celebration of his last Holy Communion, and then I saw him dead. His beautiful lace without a wrinkle in it with all the look of youthfulness come back—but, alas, without the bloom, beneath that ample crown of snow-white hair which for years past had added such dignity to his refined and kindly presence. As I gazed, the one thought that came to me was this, did ever man pass so little weary, so full of keen interest and unabated enthusiasm after so long a pilgrimage, right up to the doors of that other world where, as we trust, all his fullest powers shall find full play, or enter these gates of life with so little pain?

He died in France and his body was borne across the sea and laid to rest in the valley he held most dear. It seemed as if all Westmoreland and Cumberland had come to Burneside to do him honour at the homegoing.