said to his brother: “If I fall, and Christ our Saviour demand my sinful soul, do thou come back straight-way, and sound the horn, that we may have a living house in thee.” And Hubert promised. But out in Palestine Sir Eustace disappeared, and, when the news was brought to Hubert that his elder brother lay “deep in Jordan flood,” he said darkly to the messengers: “Take your earnings. Oh! that I could have seen my brother die.” He went home, and whether he sounded the horn or not none knew; it was never heard, but Sir Hubert lived in glee for years, with wife [pg 800] and sons and daughters, until one day
“A blast was uttered from the horn
Where by the castle gate it hung forlorn,”
and Sir Eustace came back safe and unsuspecting. Hubert rose up and fled in silence, and it was years before he was again heard of; then he came and asked forgiveness, and obtained it, and ended his penitent life in the cloister; so that Eustace's “heirs of heirs, through a long posterity, sounded the horn which they alone could sound.” The same legend is told of the Hall of Hutton John, an old house of the Huddlestones in a lonely valley on the river Dacor, also in these parts.
Or it might be the tradition of Henry, Lord Clifford, the shepherd-boy, whose father lost his title and estates during the wars of the Roses. Henry was restored, after twenty-four years of shepherd life, in the first year of the reign of Henry VII., and it is recorded that, when called to Parliament, he behaved nobly and wisely, but otherwise came seldom to London or the court, and rather delighted to live in the country, where he repaired several of his castles, which had gone to decay during the late troubles. “There is a tradition,” says Wordsworth himself, “current in the village of Threlkeld (in Cumberland, where lay the estate of his father-in-law, Sir Lancelot Threlkeld), that in the course of his shepherd life he had acquired great astronomical knowledge.” The poet clothed this incident (as he did every other that struck his fancy in that poetic land of the north) in verse, singing a lay of the Red Rose, revived at last, the flower of Lancaster, and weaving in the tale of the boy's wanderings on “Carrock's side,” in “Rosedale's groves,” and “Blencathara's rugged coves.” The common name of this last-mentioned mountain is Saddle-Back. Near Threlkeld, hidden in the gorges of the purple hills, lies Bowscale Tarn, where the people of the country still believe two immortal fish to dwell. Tarn signifies, in north-country dialect, a small mountain mere, or lake. Wordsworth's descriptions of scenery are exquisite; everywhere you find the traces of that personal love of the places he paints, that patient, detailed minuteness of touch which only comes of long gazing on a favorite scene, and of familiarity with its every aspect, in winter and summer, in storm and sunshine, in mist and rainbow. Every place has some tender associations in his memory; the stately fir-grove whither he was wont
“To hasten, for I found beneath the roof
Of that perennial shade a cloistral place
Of refuge, with an unencumbered floor,”
reminds him of a dear friend, “a silent poet” but a sailor by profession, after whom he called the pathway to the grove, whence
“The steep