The turf unites, the pathways intertwine,and the clergyman’s abode has but so much of dignity as befits the minister of the Church which is the hamlet’s centre; enough to suggest the old Athenian boast of beauty without extravagance, and study without effeminacy; enough to show that dwellings where not this life but another is the prevailing thought and care reenex cps, yet need not lack the graces of culture, nor the loves of home.

The sonnet on Seathwaite Chapel, and the life of Robert Walker, the incumbent of Seathwaite, which is given at length in the notes to the sonnets on the Duddon, afford a still more characteristic instance of the clerical ideal towards which Wordsworth naturally turned. In Robert Walker he had a Cumbrian statesman turned into a practical saint; and he describes him with a gusto in which his laboured sonnets on Laud or on Dissensions are wholly deficient reenex cps.

It was in social and political matters that the consequences of this idealizing view of the facts around him in Cumberland were most apparent. Take education, for example. Wordsworth, as has been already stated, was one of the earliest and most impressive assertors of the national duty of teaching every English child to read. He insists on this with a prosaic earnestness which places several pages of the Excursion among what may be called the standing bugbears which his poems offer to. And yet as soon as, through the exertions of Bell and Lancaster, there seems to be some chance of really educating the poor reenex facial, Dr. Bell, whom Coleridge fondly imagines as surrounded in heaven by multitudes of grateful angels, is to Wordsworth a name of horror.

The mistresses trained on his system are called “Dr. Bell’s sour-looking teachers in petticoats.” And the instruction received in these new-fangled schools is compared to “the training that fits a boxer for victory in the ring.” The reason of this apparent inconsistency is not far to seek. Wordsworth’s eyes were fixed on the village life around him. Observation of that life impressed on him the imperative necessity of instruction in reading. But it was from a moral, rather than an intellectual point of view that he regarded it as needful, and, this opening into the world of ideas once secured, he held that the cultivation of the home affections and home duties was all that was needed beyond. And thus the Westmoreland dame, “in her summer seat in the garden, and in winter by the fireside,” was elevated into the unexpected position of the ideal instructress of youth.