I sowed the flowers, William helped me. We then went and sate in the orchard till dinner time. It was very hot. William wrote The Celandine.[1] We planned a shed, for the sun was too much for us. After dinner, we went again to our old resting-place in the Hollins under the rock. We first lay under the Holly, where we saw nothing but the holly tree, and a budding elm tree mossed, with the sky above our heads. But that holly tree had a beauty about it more than its own, knowing as we did when we arose. When the sun had got low enough, we went to the Rock Shade. Oh, the overwhelming beauty of the vale below, greener than green! Two ravens flew high, high in the sky, and the sun shone upon their bellies and their wings, long after there was none of his light to be seen but a little space on the top of Loughrigg Fell. Heard the cuckoo to-day, this first of May. We went down to tea at 8 o'clock, and returned after tea. The landscape was fading: sheep and lambs quiet among the rocks. We walked towards King's, and backwards and forwards. The sky was perfectly cloudless. N.B. it is often so. Three solitary stars in the middle of the blue vault, one or two on the points of the high hills.
Tuesday, 4th May.—Though William went to bed nervous, and jaded in the extreme, he rose refreshed. I wrote out The Leech Gatherer for him, which he had begun the night before, and of which he wrote several stanzas in bed this morning. [They started to walk to Wytheburn.] It was very hot. . . . We rested several times by the way,—read, and repeated The Leech Gatherer. . . . We saw Coleridge on the Wytheburn side of the water; he crossed the beck to us. Mr. Simpson was fishing there. William and I ate luncheon, and then went on towards the waterfall. It is a glorious
- ↑ Doubtless the second of the two poems, beginning thus—
Pleasures newly found are sweet.
