Of Silver How, and Grasmere's placid lake
And one green island”
could be distinctly seen. That friend never returned, but perished by shipwreck in the discharge of his duty. Here, too, in this beautiful lake country, both at Grasmere and at his later and more celebrated home, Rydal Mount, in Westmoreland, Wordsworth lost others dearer yet—two of his children, who died young, and Dora, his favorite daughter, who died six years after her marriage. When on his own death-bed, three years later, his wife, brave and self-forgetting to the last, comforted him by whispering: “William, you are going to Dora.” His poems are so complete a guide-book [pg 801] to the lake country, as well as a series of living sketches of the people of the north, that it is almost unavoidable to treat them as tourists in Scotland do The Lady of the Lake, or tourists at Rome Childe Harold. In his day, however, many popular traits were in full vigor which now have almost disappeared. For instance, he says himself that “the class of beggars to which the old man here described belongs will probably soon be extinct. It consisted of poor and mostly old and infirm persons, who confined themselves to a stated round in their neighborhood, and had certain fixed days, on which, at different houses, they regularly received alms, sometimes in money, but mostly in provisions.” In his verse he describes the “Old Cumberland Beggar” thus:
“Him from my childhood have I known; and then
He was so old, he seems not older now.
He travels on, a solitary man—
His age has no companion.”
The passing horseman does not throw him a careless alms, but stops, lingers, and drops a coin safely into the old man's hat; the toll-bar keeper sees him from a distance, and leaves her work to lift the latch for him; the post-boy slackens his horse's speed, and turns with less noisy wheels out of his path; the very dogs do not bark at him.
“But deem not this man useless. Statesmen! ye
Who are so restless in your wisdom, ye