“O, what’s the
matter? what’s the matter?
What is’t that ails
young Harry Gill?”
Mary B—— began:—
“Oft I had heard of
Lucy Grey”;
Nancy C—— piped up:—
“‘How many are
you, then,’ said I,
‘If there are two in
heaven?’
The little maiden did reply,
‘O Master! we are seven.’”
Among the group I seemed to recognize poor pale little
Charley F——, who they told me years
ago was laid in St. John’s Churchyard after they
took him out of the pond, near the mill-stream, that
terrible Saturday afternoon. He too read from
his well-worn, green-baize-covered book,—
“The dew was falling
fast, the stars began to blink.”
Other white-headed little urchins trotted along very
near me all the way, and kept saying over and
over their “spirit ditties of no tone”
till I reached the village inn, and sat down as if
in a dream of long-past years.
Two years ago I stood by Wordsworth’s grave
in the churchyard at Grasmere, and my companion wove
a chaplet of flowers and placed it on the headstone.
Afterwards we went into the old church and sat down
in the poet’s pew. “They are all
dead and gone now,” sighed the gray-headed sexton;
“but I can remember when the seats used to be
filled by the family from Rydal Mount. Now they
are all outside there in yon grass.”
"I care not, Fortune, what you me
deny: You cannot rob me of free Nature’s
grace; You cannot shut the windows of the sky,
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face;
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace The
woods and lawns, by living streams at eve: Let
health my nerves and finer fibres brace, And I
their toys to the great children leave: Of
fancy, reason, virtue, naught can me bereave."
THOMSON.
VI. MISS MITFORD.
That portrait hanging near Wordsworth’s is next
to seeing Mary Russell Mitford herself as I first
saw her, twenty-three years ago, in her geranium-planted
cottage at Three-Mile Cross. She sat to John Lucas
for the picture in her serene old age, and the likeness
is faultless. She had proposed to herself to
leave the portrait, as it was her own property, to
me in her will; but as I happened to be in England
during the latter part of her life, she altered her
determination, and gave it to me from her own hands.
Sydney Smith said of a certain quarrelsome person,
that his very face was a breach of the peace.
The face of that portrait opposite to us is a very
different one from Sydney’s fighter. Everything
that belongs to the beauty of old age one will find
recorded in that charming countenance. Serene
cheerfulness most abounds, and that is a quality as
rare as it is commendable. It will be observed
that the dress of Miss Mitford in the picture before
us is quaint and somewhat antiquated even for the time
when it was painted, but a pleasant face is never out
of fashion.
