Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 703 / June 16, 1877

Let those who have not as yet made up their minds how or where to spend their summer holiday, turn their steps towards Lakeland. There, beauty ever changing and ever charming in all her multiform varieties, lies in wait for them at every turn. Life too among the hills has a free hearty zest, born of the invigorating mountain breezes, which you search for in vain elsewhere. The wind, as it sweeps along the hill-side, recalls, as it fans the weary brow, the quick glad feeling of existence, the exuberance of gay animal spirits, which were natural and unprized in careless boyhood, but which are too often extinguished by the cares assumed with advancing years.
The steep roads, the green hill-slopes, the peaceful mossy boulders, the picturesque nooks, in which nestle quaint little homesteads, and the broad calm lake stretching out like a great embossed silver shield at your feet, with the deep shadows of the hills shading into purple gloom in its shining ripples—who that has once seen such a picture, particularly in sunshine, can ever forget it?
In winter evenings, when the curtains are snugly drawn, and the howling storm shut out, and the firelight tinges all around with its warm ruddy glow, pleasant visions of the breezy fells, and the great hills with their changeful lights and shadows, and the leafy copses running down to the edge of the water, recur to the memory. You are again in the swiftly gliding boat; you lean over to gather the water-lilies, or to gaze into the clear pebbly-bottomed abysses of that softly yielding flood. Again you see mirrored in its crystal depths the straggling rifts of vapour, or the long rippling beaches of cloud. The sweet do-nothingness of the hour, its gay insouciance, or its vanished romance, are with you once more, and charm you as of old. It is with a feeling of half-sad tenderness that you turn away from the mental photograph, and leaving it safe in memory's keeping, go back to your busy commonplace world.
Mr Payn, in his beautiful volume entitled The Lakes in Sunshine (Windermere: J. Garnett), gives us a sparkling description of Lakeland. He begins with Windermere, because, as he says, 'the scenery of the northern lakes is unquestionably grander and wilder, and they should therefore be seen after their southern sisters.' Almost every one has seen Windermere, the queen of English lakes. Many have seen it as Mr Payn says it is best seen—by a