You have
all the poverty of solitude, nothing of its elevation."
This passage is from a letter of Wordsworth's to Sir George Beaumont,
who was engaged at the time in rebuilding and laying out Coleorton.
The poet himself planned and superintended some of these improvements,
and wrote for various points of interest in the grounds inscriptions
which form dignified examples of that kind of composition.
Nor was Sir George Beaumont the only friend whom the poet's
taste assisted in the choice of a site or the disposition of
pleasure-grounds. More than one seat in the Lake-country--among them
one home of preeminent beauty--have owed to Wordsworth no small part
of their ordered charm. In this way, too, the poet is with us still;
his presence has a strange reality as we look on some majestic
prospect of interwinding lake and mountain which his design has made
more beautifully visible to the children's children of those he loved;
as we stand, perhaps, in some shadowed garden-ground where his will
has had its way,--has framed Helvellyn's far-off summit in an arch
of tossing green, and embayed in towering forest-trees the long
lawns of a silent Valley,--fit haunt for lofty aspiration and for
brooding calm.
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