To see an acre's breadth of that wide cliff One roaring cataract! a sharp May-storm Will come with loads of January snow, And in one night send twenty score of sheep To feed the ravens; or a shepherd dies By some untoward death among the rocks: The ice breaks up and sweeps away a bridge; A wood is felled:-and then for our own homes! A child is born or christened, a field ploughed, A daughter sent to service, a web spun, The old house-clock is decked with a new face; And hence, so far from wanting facts or dates To chronicle the time, we all have here A pair of diaries, — one serving, Sir, For the whole dale, and one for each fire-side — Yours was a stranger's judgment: for historians, Commend me to these valleys! Leonard. Yet your Churchyard Seems, if such freedom may be used with you, To say that you are heedless of the past: An orphan could not find his mother's grave: Here's neither head-nor foot stone, plate of brass, Cross-bones nor skull, — type of our earthly state Nor emblem of our hopes: the dead man's home Is but a fellow to that pasture-field. Priest. Why, there, Sir, is a thought that's new to me! The stone-cutters, 'tis true, might beg their bread If every English churchyard were like ours; Yet your conclusion wanders from the truth: We have no need of names and epitaphs; We talk about the dead by our firesides. And then, for our immortal part! we want No symbols, Sir, to tell us that plain tale: The thought of death sits easy on the man Who has been bom and dies among the mountains. Leonard. Your Dalesmen, then, do in each other's thoughts Possess a kind of second life: no doubt You, Sir, could help me to the history Of half these graves? Priest. For eight-score winters past, With what I've witnessed, and with what I've heard, Perhaps I might; and, on a winter-evening, If you were seated at my chimney's nook, By turning o'er these hillocks one by one, We two could travel, Sir, through a strange round; Yet all in the broad highway of the world. Now there's a grave — your foot is half upon it, — It looks just like the rest; and yet that man Died broken-hearted. Leonard. 'Tis a common case. We'll take another: who is he that lies Beneath yon ridge, the last of those three graves? It touches on that piece of native rock Left in the churchyard wall. Priest. That's Walter Ewbank. He had as white a head and fresh a cheek As ever were produced by youth and age Engendering in the blood of hale fourscore. Through five long generations had the heart Of Walter's forefathers o'erflowed the bounds Of their inheritance, that single cottage — You see it yonder! and those few green fields. They toiled and wrought, and still, from sire to son, Each struggled, and each yielded as before A little — yet a little, — and old Walter, They left to him the family heart, and land With other burthens than the crop it bore. Year after year the old man still kept up A cheerful mind, — and buffeted with bond,
