’Vestibulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orci
  Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae;
  Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus,
  Et Metus, et malesuada Fames, ac turpis Egestas,
  Terribiles visu formae, Letumque, Labosque;
  Tum consanguineus Leti Sopor, et mala mentis
  Gaudia, mortiferumque adverso in limine Bellum,
  Ferreique Eumenidum thalami, et Discordia demens,
  Vipereum crinem vittis innexa cruentis. 
    In medio ramos annosaque bracchia pandit
  Ulmus opaca, ingens, quam sedem Somnia volgo
  Vana tenere ferunt, foliisque sub omnibus haerent.’

“The ‘Four Yew Trees,’ and the mysterious company which you have assembled there, ‘Death the Skeleton and Time the Shadow.’  It is a sight not for every youthful poet to dream of; it is one of the last results he must have gone thinking for years for.”

(Charles Lamb to Wordsworth, 1815.)

In Crabb Robinson’s ‘Diary’, a reference to the Yew-trees of Lorton and Borrowdale will be found under date Sept. 16 and 20, 1816.

“The pride of Lorton Vale” is now a ruin, and has lost all its ancient majesty:  but, until the close of 1883, the “fraternal four” of Borrowdale were still to be seen “in grand assemblage.”  Every one who has felt the power of Wordsworth’s poetry,—­and especially those who had visited the Seathwaite valley, and read the ‘Yew-Trees’ under the shade of that once “solemn and capacious grove” before 1884,—­must have felt as if they had lost a personal friend, when they heard that the “grove” was gone.  The great gale of December 11, 1883, smote it fiercely, uprooting one of the trees, and blowing the others to ribbands.  The following is Mr. Rawnsley’s account of the disaster: 

’Last week the gale that ravaged England did the Lake country much harm.  We could spare many of the larch plantations, and could hear (with a sigh) of the fall of the giant Scotch firs opposite the little Scafell Inn at Rosthwaite, and that Watendlath had lost its pines; but who could spare those ancient Yews, the great

“... fraternal Four of Borrowdale, Joined in one solemn and capacious grove; Huge trunks! and each particular trunk a growth Of intertwisted fibres serpentine Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved.”

    ’For beneath their pillared shade since Wordsworth wrote his poem,
    that Yew-tree grove has suggested to many a wanderer up Borrowdale,
    and visitant to the Natural Temple,

“an ideal grove in which the ghostly masters of mankind meet, and sleep, and offer worship to the Destiny that abides above them, while the mountain flood, as if from another world, makes music to which they dimly listen.”

    ’These Yew-trees, seemingly

      “Produced too slowly ever to decay;
      Of form and aspect too magnificent
      To be destroyed,”