(_Distance walked twenty-two miles_.)
_Tuesday, October 17th._
GRASMERE. Our first duty in the morning was to call at the post office
for our letters from home, and then to fortify ourselves with a good
breakfast; our next was to see the graves of the poets in the
picturesque and quiet churchyard. We expected to find some massive
monuments, but found only plain stone flags marking their quiet
resting-places, particularly that of Wordsworth, which was inscribed:
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 1850
MARY WORDSWORTH 1859.
The grave of Hartley Coleridge, his great friend, who was buried in
1849, was also there. There are few who do not know his wonderful poem,
"The Ancient Mariner," said to have been based on an old manuscript
story of a sailor preserved in the Bristol Library. Strange to say, not
far from his grave was that of Sir John Richardson, a physician and
arctic explorer, who brought home the relics of Sir John Franklin's
ill-fated and final voyage to the Arctic regions to discover the
North-West Passage. This brought to our minds all the details of that
sorrowful story which had been repeatedly told to us in our early
childhood, and was, to our youthful minds, quite as weird as that of
"The Ancient Mariner.
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