Now has come the month of roses,
Children fill their hands with posies;
All the garden plots are fair,
Honeysuckle scents the air;
Meadow-sweet beside the way
Mingles with the breath of hay,
Rosy loosestrife decks the sedges,
Purple vetch is in the hedges;
Now the butter-wort gives place
To the sundew’s jewelled grace;
Now we gather on the fell
Cotton-grass and asphodel;
Bees make music in the limes,
Harebells ring their dainty chimes,
Chimes that only can be heard
When July has hushed the bird.

Underneath the sycamore
Shepherds count their fleecy store,
Neighbours come from far and near,
Neighbour-like the flock to shear.
Here the urchin fresh from school
Helps to load the clipping-stool,
Holds the tie for legs that kick,
Hands the tarry ‘smitting’-stick.
Very grave the grey-beards seem
Tho’ the bright shears click and gleam,
And the girls with laughter soft
Toss the fleeces to the loft,
While the little children run
To and fro in ceaseless fun.

Bark of dogs is in our ears,
And beneath the magic shears
Lo! the creature dumb from fright
Turns from tawny into white.
Then, at last set free, the sheep
From the clipping stool will leap,
While the lambs with plaintive cries
Greet their mother’s new surprise,
And the dogs as wise as men
Push their charge from pen to pen.

Not alone the fellside farm
Fells the busy July’s charm;
Lo! the mowers’ fragrant yield
Floods with grey-green waves the field;
Lasses with sun-bonnets gay
Laughing toss with hands the hay,
Where the crake at evenfall
From a minished world will call;
Strong of arm as they are blythe
Giants swing the giant scythe,
While the cart built up with skill
Leaves the dale and climbs the hill,
And the wildrose in the lane
Takes large toll from loaded wain.

Fair July! a second Spring
Seems its emerald gift to bring;
Green as April, bright as May,
Shine the meads just now so grey;
And while still upon the height
All the rosy ling is bright,
Dalesmen happy in possessing
Haytide’s spoil and fleecy blessing,
Thank the month whose genial grace
Ere it pass gives breathing space.

(Poems at Home and Abroad, pp. 48-50)

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He taught that the labourer was worthy of his hire, and that good wages meant better work.  Men know this now to be God’s very truth.  He taught that labour, if it is to produce its best, must be labour with joy in the doing of it: men believe this to-day. (p. 5)

He shewed that the wealth of the country was not in millions of gold hoarded or wasted, but in millions of good lives and golden hearts and kindly thoughts: the people are now beginning to see that the cash-nexus is wrong, and that only the bonds of sympathy and right feeling and high thought and noble ideal can bind us into a strong nation for the service of God and man.  He shewed us that education meant not the cramming of young folks with indigestible facts, but the opening their eyes to perceive the glory of God around them in earth and air and sea, in rock, in wood, in flower, in all tender life on earth, in strengthening their soul’s understanding to see God all around them, and to know His love encompassed them from cradle to grave.  Men scoffed and wagged their heads, and called him sentimentally aesthetic. (pp. 5-6)….

Many sided as a prism, and many coloured like the light seen through it, was the mind through which God’s truth was revealed to us by him.  He taught the joy in good work and its inherent nobility, the excellency of sympathy of heart, the grandeur of humility, the greatness of self-sacrifice, the beauty of obedience, the crowning glory of reverence for all things good and beautiful and true.  As a messenger from God, “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise,” he bade us think on these things. (p. 8)

And yet when one considers the very heart of hearts of his message, it seems to have consisted in his bidding us to first believe that we have a Father in heaven, whose love can be seen in all the wonder of the common things on earth, and then to arise from our sins and selfishness and go unto Him. (p. 9)….

His love of Nature, his constant recall to a simple, peaceful work of joyous labour in close touch with the loveliness of the natural world, was really based upon his experience that Nature never did betray the heart that trusts her, but can lead us straight to the All-Father.  “With respect to two individuals,” he once wrote, “the one who loves Nature most will be always found to have more capacity for faith in God than the other; Nature-worship will be found to bring with it such a sense of the presence and power of the great Spirit as mere reasoning can neither induce nor controvert.  I believe,” he added, “that out of this healthy element of love of Nature, cultivated in earnestness and as a duty, results will spring of an importance at present inconceivable, and lights arise which for the first time in man’s history will reveal to him the true nature of his life, the true field of his energies, and the true relations between him and his Maker.” (pp. 12-13)….

John Ruskin knew that the love of Nature and the love of God and man were complements one of the other.  Ever as he taught us to be Christ-like and to go unto the Father, ever as he strove to shew us the way on earth by which He went to Him, he bade us, as Christ bade His disciples, consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, because he knew that we should love the Heavenly Father, their Father and our Father, the better for such considering. (p. 15)

He once wrote, “He who loves not God nor his brother cannot love the grass beneath his feet nor the creatures round about him; while, on the other hand, none can love God nor his human brother without loving all things which his Father loves, nor without looking upon them every one as in that respect his brother also.” (pp. 15-16)….

Ruskin came then as a prophet, with an angel-call to our generation to arise and go humbly to the Father; and, as he preached and taught, he realised how the earth around him, with all its changing phenomena, was filled with the same angel message and good-spell for the souls of men.  He heard it in the storm, he felt it in the cloud and wind, he found it declared by shower-time and flower-time, seed-time and harvest, he saw it revealed in sunset and sweet dawn. (pp. 16-17)

“All this passing to and fro of fruitful shower and grateful shade,” he once wrote, “and all these visions of silver palaces built above the horizon, and voices of moaning winds and threatening thunders, and glories of coloured robe and cloven ray, are but to deepen in our hearts the acceptance and distinctness and clearness of the simple words, ‘Our Father which art in heaven.’” (p. 17)

(Sermon at St. Kentigern’s Church, Crosthwaite, January 18th 1900)

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God has called many following the sheep,
    Some to be kings and princes among men,
And you He called; and Skiddaw’s hollow glen
Mourns for its bravest shepherd fallen asleep;
But we who knew you still your memory keep,
    And at the shearing-time, beside the pen,
    Though gone for ever from our mortal ken,
Your cheery voice will call us up the steep.

For you have climbed the road that leads to heaven,
    The simple road of toil and self-denied,
        Of duty done to the far wandering flocks
In dewy cold, hot noons, and stormy even;
        And somewhere He, Whose feet among the rocks
    For us were red, shall lead us to your side.

(English Lakes Visitor and Keswick Guardian, 28 March 1891, p. 5)

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Now close beside us on our left, a gateway opens to a woodland retreat honoured throughout the world, for this is Brantwood;—Brantwood, where Gerald Massey, the son of a canal boatman, a labourer in a silk mill, and afterwards an errand boy in London, came as a poet and thinker in later years, for quiet and meditation.  Poems and Chansons, The Ballad of Babe Christabel, with other Lyric Poems, War Waits, Craigcrook Castle,—these are the works which make us class Gerald Massey amongst the literati of Lakeland.  After him came hither a sonnet writer, whose verse has a Miltonic ring about it—W. J. Linton, poet, printer, wood-engraver, chartist and republican. (p. 187)

It was in one of the out-buildings of Brantwood, that the press was set to work, which gave to the world the short-lived yellow-coloured periodical, called The Republic.  It was at Brantwood that Linton pursued the art of wood-engraving in which he has rarely if ever been excelled. (pp. 187-188)

No account of the literary associations of our English Lakes could be justified for its completeness, were we to forget that there at Brantwood rested from his labours for England and the world a true poet of the English Lakes, one who had gathered up and given forth with passionate appeal, the best teaching of that school of lake poets and philosophers which we associate with the name of Wordsworth.  Preacher, poet, painter, political economist, philosopher, patriot in one, he had drunk deep not only from wells of English undefiled, but from the well-springs of purest aspiration,—the fountain-head of God.  He had told us of the blessings that lie about our feet like flowers; he had shown us of joy “in widest commonalty spread”; he had filled us with a desire for “a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness”; he had bade us know assuredly, that “nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”  As long as any grateful heart turns lovingly to our Lakeland hills they will remember, that from our mountains and our streams, our flowers and our woody places, our lakes and lawns, our clouds and sunshine, Ruskin’s heart drew courage, drew strength and power to inspire, yea, and to be patient and endure.  To his sure retreat above the tranquil lake, in Coniston’s quiet vale, the greatest gladiator of his time, Carlyle hardly excepted, the most self-sacrificing teacher, the purest-minded thinker, the most far-sighted prophet of his day, worn-out and weary, returned for rest. (p. 188)

And here too in the valley by the side of the beck that comes rippling down from Coniston Old Man, beneath the shade of the deodars, and by the side of his three friends, the ‘ladies of the Thwaite,’ he now lies at rest for ever.  A quiet failing of power and peaceful expectation of death, a little cold, a day or two in bed, and then a painless going forth of the soul at eventide when the heavens above the Coniston hills were filled with glory.  Such was the end of him who had done more than most men to show us how the Heavens are continually telling the glory of God, and how the firmament showeth His handiwork.  He passed away on Saturday, January 19th, and was laid to rest with all the tender simplicity of a country-side funeral on Thursday, Jan, 25, 1900. (p. 189) 

(Literary Associations of the English Lakes, Vol. II, pp. 187-9)

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