But deem not this man useless.
While thus he creeps

From door to door, the villagers in him
Behold a record which together binds
Past deeds and offices of charity.

Among the farms and solitary huts,
Hamlets, and thinly scattered villages,
Where'er the aged Beggar takes his rounds,

The mild necessity of use compels
To acts of love; and habit does the work
Of reason; yet prepares that after-joy
Which reason cherishes. And thus the soul,

My neighbour, when with punctual care, each week
Duly as Friday comes, though pressed herself
By her own wants, she from her chest of meal
Takes one unsparing handful for the scrip
Of this old Mendicant, and, from her door
Returning with exhilarated heart,

Sits by her fire, and builds her hope in Heaven.
Then let him pass, a blessing on his head!
And while in that vast solitude to which
The tide of things has led him, he appears
To breathe and live but for himself alone-
Unblamed, uninjured, let him bear about
The good which the benignant law of Heaven

Has hung around him; and, while life is his,
Still let him prompt the unlettered villagers
To tender offices and pensive thoughts.
Then let him pass, a blessing on his head!
And long as he can wander, let him breathe
The freshness of the valleys: let his blood
Struggle with frosty air and winter snows:

And let the chartered wind that sweeps the heath
Beat his grey locks against his withered face.

Be his the natural silence of old age!

Let him be free of mountain solitudes;
And have around him, whether heard or not,
The pleasant melody of woodland birds.

And let him, where and when he will, sit down
Beneath the trees, or by the grassy bank
Of highway side, and with the little birds
Share his chance-gathered meal; and, finally,
As in the eye of Nature he has lived,
So in the eye of Nature let him die!

A MOUNTAIN DWELLING.

You behold,

High on the breast of yon dark mountain, dark

With stony barrenness, a shining speck

Bright as a sunbeam sleeping, till a shower

Brush it away, or cloud pass over it;

And such it might be deemed a sleeping sunbeam ;

But 't is a plot of cultivated ground,

Cut off an island in the dusky waste;
And that attractive brightness is its own.
The lofty site, by nature framed, to tempt,
Amid a wilderness of rocks and stones,
The tiller's hand, a hermit might have chosen,
For opportunity presented thence
Far forth to send his wandering eye o'er land
And ocean, and look down upon the works,
The habitations, and the ways of men,
Himself unseen. But no tradition tells

That ever hermit dipped his maple dish

In the sweet spring that lurks 'mid yon green fields,

And no such visionary views belong

To those who occupy and till the ground,

And on the bosom of the mountain dwell—

A wedded pair in childless solitude.

A house of stones collected on the spot,

By rude hands built, with rocky knolls in front,
Backed also by a ledge of rock, whose crest
Of birch-trees waves above the chimney-top;

In shape, in size, and colour, an abode

Such as in unsafe times of border war

Might have been wished for and contrived, to elude

The eye of roving plunderer.

WORDSWORTH