"For they that creep and they that fly, Just end where they began!"
A May-morning on Ulswater and the banks of Ulswater--commingled earth and heaven! Spring is many-coloured as Autumn; but now Joy scatters the hues daily brightening into greener life, then Melancholy dropt them daily dimming into yellower death. The fear of Winter then--but now the hope of Summer; and Nature rings with hymns hailing the visible advent of the perfect year. If for a moment the woods are silent, it is but to burst forth anew into louder song. The rain is over and gone--but the showery sky speaks in the streams on a hundred hills; and the wide mountain gloom opens its heart to the sunshine that on many a dripping precipice burns like fire. Nothing seems inanimate. The very clouds and their shadows look alive--the trees, never dead, are wide-awakened from their sleep--families of flowers are frequenting all the dewy places--old walls are splendid with the light of lichens--and birch-crowned cliffs up among the coves send down their fine fragrance to the Lake on every bolder breath that whitens with breaking wavelets the blue of its breezy bosom. Nor mute the voice of man. The shepherd is whooping on the hill--the ploughman calling to his team somewhere among the furrows in some small late field, won from the woods; and you hear the laughter, and the echoes of the laughter--one sound--of children busied in half-work half-play; for what else in vernal sunshine is the occupation of young rustic life? 'Tis no Arcadia--no golden age. But a lovelier scene--in the midst of all its grandeur--is not in merry and majestic England; nor did the hills of this earth ever circumscribe a pleasanter dwelling for a nobler peasantry, than these Cumbrian ranges of rocks and pastures, where the raven croaks in his own region, unregarded in theirs by the fleecy flocks. How beautiful the Church Tower!
On a knoll not far from the shore, and not high above the water, yet by an especial felicity of place gently commanding all that reach of the Lake with all its ranges of mountains--every single tree, every grove, and all the woods seeming to show or to conceal the scene at the bidding of the Spirit of Beauty--reclined two Figures--the one almost rustic, but venerable in the simplicity of old age--the other no longer young, but still in the prime of life--and though plainly apparelled, with form and bearing such as are pointed out in cities, because belonging to distinguished men. The old man behaved towards him with deference, but not humility; and between them two--in many things unlike--it was clear even from their silence that there was friendship.