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GRASMERE LAKE.
A SKETCH, BY A COCKNEY!
ERTAINLY when one is young, one is taught a great deal of useful knowledge; why it is called useful, I can’t tell; it has never been of any use to me: but among other things which I then learnt by heart, is a piece of ancient history. Plato ordained that poetry should not be permitted in his republic. I wish I had lived under such a well-regulated government, I had not then been the victim of an over-excited imagination. Some persons have had their happiness destroyed by their wives; others by their children; others, a still more numerous class, by their creditors. Mine has been destroyed by poetry. Oh! that I had never read Cowper’s Task, or Thomson’s Seasons; or that the days of my youth would return, attended by my present experience, or they would be no good to me. The truth is, that I am an unfortunate individual smitten with
"The sacred loves of nature and of song."
Not that I ever wrote verses; I respected them too much, to dream of attaining unto them myself. No, I merely read them at every leisure moment; was never without a book in my pocket; and resolved to practise their precepts at my earliest convenience, the country became
"My hope by day, my dream by night."
I never passed through the Strand, without repeating
"Oh, for a home in some vast wilderness!
A boundless contiguity of shade,
Where noise of human suffering or guilt
Might never reach me more."
I never drove out in my gig on a Sunday, and saw a cottage with a green door, a pear-tree nailed against the wall, and French-beans growing naturally in the garden, without wishing,
"Oh, that some home like this for me would smile!"
My taste for the beauties of nature, as pointed out by the poets, showed itself even in the arrangements of my shop window. I always whispered to myself as I watched the graceful ribbons mimic some gay parterre,
"Such beauties does Flora disclose,
When she smiles on the banks of the Tweed."
Red ribbons always suggested,
"The rose, which here unfolds
Her paradise of leaves."
And white satin was like
"The lady-lily, paler than the moon."
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