And ash far stretching his umbrageous arm;
Of deeper green the elm; and deeper still,
Lord of the woods, the long-surviving oak.
Some glossy-leaved, and shining in the sun,
The maple, and the beech of oily nuts
Prolific, and the lime at dewy eve
Diffusing odours: nor unnoted pass
The sycamore, capricious in attire,

Now green, now tawny, and ere autumn yet

Have changed the woods, in scarlet honours bright.
O'er these, but far beyond (a spacious map
Of hill and valley interposed between),
The Ouse, dividing the well-watered land,
Now glitters in the sun, and now retires,
As bashful, yet impatient to be seen."

Quitting the alcove, we skirt the top of the park of the Throckmortons, on a retired grassy walk that runs straight as a tightened cord along the middle of the belting which forms the park's upper boundary-its enclosing hedge, if I may so speak without offence to the dignity of the ancient forest-trees which compose it. There is a long line of squat broad-stemmed chestnuts on either hand, that fling their interlacing arms athwart the pathway, and bury it, save where here and there the sun breaks in through a gap, in deep shade; but the roof overhead, unlike that of the ancient avenue already described, is not the roof of a lofty nave in the light Florid style, but of a low-browed, thickly-ribbed Saxon crypt, flanked by ponderous columns, of dwarfish stature but gigantic strength. And this double tier of chestnuts extended along the park-top from corner to corner, is the identical "length of colonnade" eulogized by Cowper in "The Task":

"Monument of ancient taste,

Now scorned, but worthy of a better fate.
Our fathers knew the value of a screen
From sultry suns; and, in their shaded walks

And long-protracted bowers, enjoyed at noon
The gloom and coolness of declining day.
Thanks to Benevolus-he spares me yet
These chestnuts ranged in corresponding lines

And, though himself so polished, still reprieves

The obsolete prolixity of shade."

Half-way on we descend into the diagonal valley—“but cau

tious, lest too fast"-just where it enters the park from the uplands, and find at its bottom the "rustic bridge." It was rustic when at its best-an arch of some four feet span or so, built of undressed stones, fenced with no parapet, and covered overhead by a green breadth of turf; and it is now both rustic and ruinous to boot, for one-half the arch has fallen in. The stream is a mere sluggish runnel, much overhung by hawthorn bushes: there are a good many half-grown oaks scattered about in the hollow; while on the other hand the old massy chestnuts top the acclivities.

Leaving the park at the rustic bridge, by a gap in the fence, my guide and I struck outwards through the valley towards the uplands. We had left, on crossing the hedge, the scene of the walk in "The Task;" but there is no getting away in this locality from Cowper. The first field we stepped into "adjoining close to Kilwick's echoing wood," is that described in the "Needless Alarm;" and we were on our way to visit "Yardley oak." The poet, conscious of his great wealth in the pictorial, was no niggard in description; and so the field, though not very remarkable for anything, has had its picture drawn.

"A narrow brook, by rushy banks concealed,
Runs in a bottom, and divides the field;
Oaks intersperse it that had once a head,
But now wear crests of oven-wood instead;

And where the land slopes to its watery bourne,
Wide yawns a gulf beside a ragged thorn;
Bricks line the sides, but shivered long ago,
And horrid brambles intertwine below;

A hollow scooped, I judge, in ancient time,
For baking earth, or burning rock to lime."

The "narrow brook" here is that which, passing downwards into the park, runs underneath the rustic bridge, and flows towards the Ouse through the diagonal valley. The field itself, which lies on one of the sides of the valley, and presents rather a steep slope to the plough, has still its sprinkling of trees; but the oaks, with the oven-wood crests, have nearly all disappeared; and for the "gulf beside the thorn," I could find but a small

oblong, steep-sided pond, half over-shadowed by an ash tree. Improvement has sadly defaced the little field since it sat for its portrait; for, though never cropped in Squire Cowper's days, as the woman told me, it now lies like the ordinary work-day pieces of ground beyond and beside it, in a state of careful tillage, and smelt rank at the time of a flourishing turnip crop. Oh," said the woman, who for the last minute had been poking about the hedge for something which she could not find, "do you know that the Squire was a beautiful drawer?" "I know that he drew," I replied; "but I do not know that his drawings were fine ones. I have in Scotland a great book filled with the Squire's letters; and I have learned from it, that ere he set himself to write his long poems, he used to draw 'mountains and valleys, and ducks and dab-chicks,' and that he threatened to charge his friends at the rate of a half-penny a-piece for them.” "Ah," said the woman, "but he drew grandly for all that; and I have just been looking for a kind of thistle that used to grow here-but the farmer has, I find, weeded it all out-that he made many fine pictures of. I have seen one of them with Lady Hesketh, that her Ladyship thought very precious. The thistle was a pretty thistle, and I am sorry they are all gone. It had a deep red flower, set round with long thorns, and the green of the leaves was crossed with bright white streaks." I inferred from the woman's description that the plant so honoured by Cowper's pencil must have been the "milk thistle," famous in legendary lore for bearing strong trace, on its leaves of glossy green, of the milk of the Virgin Mother, dropped on it in the flight to Egypt.

CHAPTER XVI.

Yardley Oak; of immense size and imposing appearance-Cowper's description singularly illustrative of his complete mastery over language-Peasant's nest-The poet's vocation peculiarly one of revolution-The school of Pope; supplanted in its unproductive old age by that of Cowper-Cowper's coadjutors in the work-Economy of literary revolution-The old English yeoman-Quit Olney-Companions in the journey-Incident-Newport Pagnell-Mr. Bull and the French Mystics-Lady of the Fancy-Champion of all England-Pugilism-Anecdote.

HALF an hour's leisurely walking-and, in consideration of my companion's three-score and eleven summers, our walking was exceedingly leisurely-brought us, through field and dingle, and a country that presented, as we ascended, less of an agricultural and more of a pastoral character, to the woods of Yardley Lodge. We enter through a coppice on a grassy field, and see along the opposite side a thick oak wood, with a solitary brick house the only one in sight, half hidden amid foliage in a corner. The oak wood has, we find, quite a character of its own. The greater part of its trees, still in their immature youth, were seedlings within the last forty years: they have no associates that bear in their well-developed proportions, untouched by decay, the stamp of solid mid-aged treehood; but here and there standing up among them, like the long-lived sons of Noah, in their old age of many centuries, amid a race cut down to the three-score and ten-we find some of the most ancient oaks in the empire-trees that were trees in the days of William the Conqueror. These are mere hollow trunks, of vast bulk, but stinted foliage, in which the fox shelters and the owl builds -mere struldbrugs of the forest. The bulkiest and most picturesque among their number we find marked by a white lettered

board; it is a hollow pollard of enormous girth, twenty-eight feet five inches in circumference a foot above the soil, with skeleton stumps, bleached white by the winters of many centuries, stretching out for a few inches from amid a ragged drapery of foliage that sticks close to the body of the tree, and bearing on its rough grey bole, wens and warts of astounding magnitude. The trunk, leaning slightly forward, and wearing all its huger globosities behind, seems some fantastic old-world mammoth, seated kangaroo-fashion on its haunches. Its foliage this season had caught a tinge of yellow, when the younger trees all around retained their hues of deep green; and, seen in the bold relief which it owed to the circumstance, it reminded me of Æneas's golden branch, glittering bright amid the dark woods of Cumea. And such is Yardley oak, the subject of one of the finest descriptions in English poetry-one of the most characteristic, too, of the muse of Cowper. If asked to illustrate that peculiar power which he possessed above all modern poets, of taking the most stubborn and untractable words in the language, and bending them with all ease round his thinking, so as to fit its every indentation and irregularity of outline, as the ship-carpenter adjusts the stubborn planking, grown flexible in his hand, to the exact mould of his vessel, I would at once instance some parts of the description of Yardley oak. But farewell, noble tree! so old half a century ago, when the poet conferred on thee immortality, that thou dost not seem older now!

1

"

Time made thee what thou wast-king of the woods;
And time hath made thee what thou art a cave
For owls to roost in. Once thy spreading boughs
O'erhung the champaign; and the numerous flocks
That grazed it stood beneath that ample cope
Uncrowded, yet safe sheltered from the storm.
No flock frequents thee now. Thou hast outlived
Thy popularity, and art become

(Unless verse rescue thee awhile) a thing

Forgotten as the foliage of thy youth.

While thus through all the stages thou hast pushed
Of treeship-first a seedling hid in grass;