The point here fixed upon in my imagination is half way up the northern side of Loughrigg Fell, from which the Pastor and his companions are supposed to look upwards to the sky and mountain-tops, and round the vale, with the lake lying immediately beneath them.
But turned, not without welcome promise given
That he would share the pleasures and pursuits
Of yet another summer's day, consumed
In wandering with us.
When I reported this promise of the Solitary, and long after, it was my wish, and I might say intention, that we should resume our wanderings and pass the Borders into his native country, where, as I hoped, he might witness, in the society of the Wanderer, some religious ceremony—a sacrament say, in the open fields, or a preaching among the mountains—which, by recalling to his mind the days of his early childhood, when he had been present on such occasions in company with his parents and nearest kindred, might have dissolved his heart into tenderness, and so done more towards restoring the Christian faith in which he had been educated, and, with that, contentedness and even cheerfulness of mind, and all that the Wanderer and Pastor by their several effusions and addresses had been unable to effect. An issue like this was in my intentions. But alas!
——'mid the wreck of is and was,
Things incomplete and purposes betrayed
Make sadder transits o'er thought's optic glass
Than noblest objects utterly decayed.[H]