Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

by John Wilson

STROLL TO GRASSMERE.

FIRST SAUNTER.

Companion of the Crutch! hast thou been a loving observer of the weather of our island-clime? We do not mean to ask if you have from youth been in the daily practice of rising from your study-chair at regular intervals, and ascertaining the precise point of Mercury's elevation on the barometrical scale. The idea of trusting, throughout all the fluctuations of the changeful and capricious atmosphere in which we live, to quicksilver, is indeed preposterous; and we have long noticed that meteorologists make an early figure in our obituaries. Seeing the head of the god above the mark "fair," or "settled," out they march in thins, without great-coat or umbrella, when such a thunder-plump falls down in a deluge, that, returning home by water and steam, they take to bed, and on the ninth day fever hurries them off, victims to their confidence in that treacherous tube. But we mean to ask have you an eye, an ear, and a sixth sense, anonymous and instinctive, for all the prognosticating sights and sounds, and motions and shapes, of nature? Have you studied, in silence and solitude, the low, strange, and spirit-like whisperings, that often, when bird and bee are mute, come and go, here and there, now from crag, now from coppice, and now from moor, all over the sultry stillness of the clouded landscape? Have you listened among mountains to the voice of streams, till you heard them prophesying change? Have you so mastered the occult science of mists, as that you can foretell each proud or fair Emergency, and the hour when grove, precipice, or plain, shall in sudden revelation be clothed with the pomp of sunshine? Are all Bewick's birds, and beasts, and fishes visible to your eyes in the woods, wastes, and waves of the clouds? And know ye what aerial condor, dragon, and whale, respectively portend? Are the Fata Morgana as familiar to you as the Aberdeen Almanac? When a mile-square hover of crows darkens air and earth, or settling loads every tree with sable fruitage, are you your own augur, equally as when one raven lifts up his hoary blackness from a stone, and sails sullenly off with a croak, that gets fiercer and more savage in the lofty distance? Does the leaf of the forest twinkle futurity? the lonely lichen brighten or pale its lustre with change? Does not the gift of prophecy dwell with the family of the violets and the lilies? The prescient harebells, do they not let drop their closing blossoms when the heavens are niggard of their dews, or uphold them like cups thirsty for wine, when the blessing, yet unfelt by duller animal life, is beginning to drop balmily down from the rainy cloud embosomed in the blue of a midsummer's meridian day?

Forgive these friendly interrogatories. Perhaps you are weather-wiser than ourselves; yet for not a few years we bore the name of "The Man of the Mountains;" and, though no great linguists, we hope that we know somewhat more than the vocabulary of the languages of calm and storm. Remember that we are now at Ambleside—and one week's residence there may let you into some of the secrets of the unsteady Cabinet of St Cloud.

One advice we give you, and by following it you cannot fail to be happy at Ambleside, and everywhere else. Whatever the weather be, love, admire, and delight in it, and vow that you would not change it for the atmosphere of a dream. If it be close, hot, oppressive, be thankful for the faint air that comes down fitfully from cliff and chasm, or the breeze that ever and anon gushes from stream and lake. If the heavens are filled with sunshine, and you feel the vanity of parasols, how cool the sylvan shade for ever moistened by the murmurs of that fairy waterfall! Should it blow great guns, cannot you take shelter in yonder magnificent fort, whose hanging battlements are warded even from the thunder-bolt by the dense umbrage of unviolated woods? Rain—rain—rain—an even-down pour of rain, that forces upon you visions of Noah and his ark, and the top of Mount Ararat—still, we beseech you, be happy. It cannot last long at that rate; the thing is impossible. Even this very afternoon will the rainbow span the blue entrance into Rydal's woody vale, as if to hail the westering sun on his approach to the mountains—and a hundred hill-born torrents will be seen flashing out of the upfolding mists. What a delightful dazzle on the light-stricken river! Each meadow shames the lustre of the emerald; and the soul wishes not for language to speak the pomp and prodigality of colours that Heaven now rejoices to lavish on the grove-girdled Fairfield, who has just tossed off the clouds from his rocky crest.

You will not imagine, from anything we have ever said, that we are enemies to early rising. Now and then, what purer bliss than to embrace the new-wakened Morn, just as she is rising from her dewy bed! At such hour, we feel as if there were neither physical nor moral evil in the world. The united power of peace, innocence, and beauty subdues everything to itself, and life is love.

Forgive us, loveliest of Mornings! for having overslept the assignation hour, and allowed thee to remain all by thyself in the solitude, wondering why thy worshipper could prefer to thy presence the fairest phantoms that ever visited a dream. And thou hast forgiven us—for not clouds of displeasure these that have settled on thy forehead: the unreproaching light of thy countenance is upon us—a loving murmur steals into our heart from thine—and pure as a child's, daughter of Heaven! is thy breath.

In the spirit of that invocation we look around us, and as the idea of morning dies, sufficient for our happiness is "the light of common day"—the imagery of common earth. There has been rain during the night—enough, and no more, to enliven nature—the mists are ascending composedly with promise of gentle weather—and the sun, so mild that we can look him in the face with unwinking eyes, gives assurance that as he has risen so will he reign, and so will he set in peace.

Yet we cannot help thinking it somewhat remarkable, that, to the best of our memory, never once were we the very first out into the dawn. We say nothing of birds—for they, with their sweet jargoning, anticipate it, and from their bed on the bough feel the forerunning warmth of the sunrise; neither do we allude to hares, for they are "hirpling hame," to sleep away the light hours, open-eyed, in the briery quarry in the centre of the trackless wood. Even cows and horses we can excuse being up before us, for they have bivouacked; and the latter, as they often sleep standing, are naturally somnambulists. Weasels, too, we can pardon for running across the road before us, and as they reach the hole-in-the-wall, showing by their clear eyes that they have been awake for hours, and have probably breakfasted on leveret. We have no spite at chanticleer, nor the hooting owls against whom he is so lustily crowing hours before the orient; nor do we care although we know that is not the first sudden plunge of the tyrant trout into the insect cloud already hovering over the tarn. But we confess that it is a little mortifying to our pride of time and place, to meet an old beggar-woman, who from the dust on her tattered brogues has evidently marched miles from her last night's wayside howf, and who holds out her withered palm for charity, at an hour when a cripple of fourscore might have been supposed sleeping on her pallet of straw. A pedlar, too, who has got through a portion of the Excursion before the sun has illumed the mountain-tops, is mortifying, with his piled pack and ellwand. There, as we are a Christian, is Ned Hurd, landing a pike on the margin of the Reed-pool, on his way from Hayswater, where he has been all night angling, till his creel is as heavy as a sermon; and a little further on, comes issuing like a Dryad's daughter, from the gate in the lane, sweet little Alice Elleray, with a basket dangling beneath her arm, going in her orphan beauty to gather, in their season, wild strawberries or violets in the woods.

Sweet orphan of Wood-edge! what would many a childless pair give for a creature one-half so beautiful as thou, to break the stillness of a home that wants but one blessing to make it perfectly happy! Yet there are few or none to lay a hand on that golden head, or leave a kiss upon its ringlets. The father of Alice Elleray was a wild and reckless youth, and, going to the wars, died in a foreign land. Her mother soon faded away of a broken heart;—and who was to care for the orphan child of the forgotten friendless? An old pauper who lives in that hut, scarcely distinguishable from the shielings of the charcoal-burners, was glad to take her from the parish for a weekly mite that helps to eke out her own subsistence. For two or three years the child was felt a burden by the solitary widow; but ere she had reached her fifth summer, Alice Elleray never left the hut without darkness seeming to overshadow it—never entered the door without bringing the sunshine. Where can the small, lonely creature have heard so many tunes, and airs, and snatches of old songs—as if some fairy bird had taught her melodies of fairyland? She is now in her tenth year, nor an idler in her solitude. Do you wish for a flowery bracelet for the neck of a chosen one, whose perfumes may mingle with the bosom-balm of her virgin beauty? The orphan of Wood-edge will wreath it of blossoms cropt before the sun hath melted the dew on leaf or petal. Will you be for carrying away with you to the far-off city some pretty little sylvan toy, to remind you of Ambleside and Rydal, and other beautiful names of beautiful localities near the lucid waters of Windermere? Then, Lady! purchase, at little cost, from the fair basket-maker, an ornament for your parlour, that will not disgrace its fanciful furniture, and, as you sit at your dreamy needlework, will recall the green forest glades of Brathy or Calgarth. Industrious creature! each day is to thee, in thy simplicity, an entire life. All thoughts, all feelings, arise and die in peace between sunrise and sunset. What carest thou for being an orphan! knowing, as thou well dost, that God is thy father and thy mother, and that a prayer to Him brings health, food, and sleep to the innocent.

Letting drop a curtsy, taught by Nature, the mother of the Graces, Alice Elleray, the orphan of Wood-edge, without waiting to be twice bidden, trills, as if from a silver pipe, a wild, bird-like warble, that in its cheerfulness has now and then a melancholy fall, and, at the close of the song, hers are the only eyes that are not dimmed with the haze of tears. Then away she glides with a thankful smile, and dancing over the greensward, like an uncertain sunbeam, lays the treasure, won by her beauty, her skill, and her industry, on the lap of her old guardian, who blesses her with the uplifting of withered hands.

Meanwhile, we request you to walk away with us up to Stockgill-force. There has been a new series of dry weather, to be sure; but to our liking, a waterfall is best in a rainless summer. After a flood, the noise is beyond all endurance. You get stunned and stupified till your head splits. Then you may open your mouth like a barn-door—we are speaking to you, sir—and roar into a friend's ear all in vain a remark on the cataract. To him you are a dumb man. In two minutes you are as completely drenched in spray as if you had fallen out of a boat—and descend to dinner with a toothache that keeps you in starvation in the presence of provender sufficient for a whole bench of bishops. In dry weather, on the contrary, the waterfall is in moderation; and instead of tumbling over the cliff in a perpetual peal of thunder, why, it slides and slidders merrily and musically away down the green shelving rocks, and sinks into repose in many a dim or lucid pool, amidst whose foam-bells is playing or asleep the fearless Naiad. Deuce a headache have you—speak in a whisper, and not a syllable of your excellent observation is lost; your coat is dry, except that a few dewdrops have been shook over you from the branches stirred by the sudden wing-clap of the cushat—and as for toothache interfering with dinner, you eat as if your tusks had been just sharpened, and would not scruple to discuss nuts, upper-and-lower-jaw-work fashion, against the best crackers in the county. And all this comes of looking at Stockgill-force, or any other waterfall, in dry weather, after a few refreshing and fertilising showers that make the tributary rills to murmur, and set at work a thousand additional feeders to every Lake.

Ha! Matutine Roses!—budding, half-blown, consummate—you are, indeed, in irresistible blush! We shall not say which of you we love best—she knows it; but we see there is no hope to-day for the old man—for you are all paired—and he must trudge it solus, in capacity of Guide-General of the Forces. What! the nymphs are going to pony it? And you intend, you selfish fellows, that we shall hold all the reins whenever the spirit moveth you to deviate from bridle-path, to clamber cliff for a bird's-eye view, or dive into dells for some rare plant? Well, well—there is a tradition, that once we were young ourselves; and so redolent of youth are these hills, that we are more than half inclined to believe it—so blush and titter, and laugh and look down, ye innocent wicked ones, each with her squire by her palfrey's mane, while good old Christopher, like a true guide, keeps hobbling in the rear on his Crutch. Holla there!—to the right of our friend Mr Benson's smithy—and to Rothay-bridge. Turn in at a gate to the right hand, which, twenty to one, you will find open, that the cattle may take an occasional promenade along the turnpike, and cool their palates with a little ditch grass, and saunter along by Millar-bridge and Foxgill on to Pelter-bridge, and, if you please, to Rydal-mere. Thus, and thus only, is seen the vale of Ambleside; and what a vale of grove, and glade, and stream, and cliff, and cottage, and villa, and grassfield, and garden, and orchard, and—But not another word, for you would forthwith compare our description with the reality, and seeing it faint and feeble, would toss it into the Rothay, and laugh as the Vol. plumped over a waterfall!

The sylvan—or say rather the forest scenery—(for there is to us an indescribable difference between these two words)—of Rydal-park, was, in memory of living men, magnificent, and it still contains a treasure of old trees. Lady Diana's white pea-fowl, sitting on the limbs of that huge old tree like creatures newly alighted from the Isles of Paradise! all undisturbed by the waterfalls, which, as you keep gazing on the long-depending plumage illumining the forest gloom, seem indeed to lose their sound, and to partake the peace of that resplendent show—each splendour a wondrous Bird! For they stretch themselves all up, with their graceful crests, o'ercanopied by the umbrage draperied as from a throne. And never surely were seen in this daylight world such unterrestrial creatures—though come from afar, all happy as at home in the Fairies' Oak.

By all means ride away into these woods, and lose yourself for half an hour among the cooing of cushats, and the shrill shriek of startled blackbirds, and the rustle of the harmless slow-worm among the last year's red beech-leaves. No very great harm in a kiss under the shadow of an oak (oh fie!) while the magpie chatters angrily at safe distance, and the more innocent squirrel peeps down upon you from a bough of the canopy, and, hoisting his tail, glides into the obscurity of the loftiest umbrage. You still continue to see and hear; but the sight is a glimmer, and the sound a hum, as if the forest-glade were swarming with bees, from the ground-flowers to the herons' nests. Refreshed by your dream of Dryads, follow a lonesome din that issues from a pile of wooded cliffs, and you are led to a Waterfall. Five minutes are enough for taking an impression, if your mind be of the right material, and you carry it away with you further down the Forest. Such a torrent will not reach the lake without disporting itself into many little cataracts; and saw ye ever such a fairy one as that flowing through below an ivied bridge into a circular basin overshadowed by the uncertain twilight of many checkering branches, and washing the rook-base of a Hermitage, in which a sin-sickened or pleasure-palled man might, before his hairs were grey, forget all the gratifications and all the guilt of the noisy world?

You are now all standing together in a group beside Ivy-cottage, the river gliding below its wooden bridge from Rydal-mere. It is a perfect model of such architecture—breathing the very spirit of Westmoreland. The public road, skirted by its front paling, does not in the least degree injure its character of privacy and retirement; so we think at this dewy hour of prime, when the gossamer meets our faces, extended from the honey-suckled slate-porch to the trees on the other side of the turnpike. And see how the multitude of low-hanging roofs and gable-ends, and dovecot-looking windows, steal away up a green and shrubberied acclivity, and terminating in wooded rocks that seem part of the building, in the uniting richness of ivy, lichens, moss-roses, broom, and sweet-brier, murmuring with birds and bees, busy near hive and nest! It would be extremely pleasant to breakfast in that deep-windowed room on the ground-floor, on cream and barley cakes, eggs, coffee, and dry-toast, with a little mutton-ham not too severely salted, and at the conclusion, a nut-shell of Glenlivet or Cognac. But, Lord preserve ye! it is not yet six o'clock in the morning; and what Christian kettle simmereth before seven? Yes, my sweet Harriet, that sketch does you credit, and it is far from being very unlike the original. Rather too many chimneys by about half-a-dozen; and where did you find that steeple immediately over the window marked "Dairy?" The pigs are somewhat too sumptuously lodged in that elegant sty, and the hen-roost might accommodate a phœnix. But the features of the chief porch are very happily hit off—you have caught the very attic spirit of the roof—and some of the windows may be justly said to be staring likenesses.—Ivy-cottage is slipped into our portfolio, and we shall compare it, on our return to Scotland, with Buchanan Lodge.

Gallantry forbids, but Truth demands to say, that young ladies are but indifferent sketchers. The dear creatures have no notion of perspective. At flower-painting and embroidery, they are pretty fair hands, but they make sad work among waterfalls and ruins. Notwithstanding, it is pleasant to hang over them, seated on stone or stool, drawing from nature; and now and then to help them in with a horse or a hermit. It is a difficult, almost an impossible thing—that foreshortening. The most speculative genius is often at a loss to conjecture the species of a human being foreshortened by a young lady. The hanging Tower at Pisa is, we believe, some thirty feet or so off the perpendicular, and there is one at Caerphilly about seventeen; but these are nothing to the castles in the air we have seen built by the touch of a female magician; nor is it an unusual thing with artists of the fair sex to order their plumed chivalry to gallop down precipices considerably steeper than a house, on animals apparently produced between the tiger and the bonassus. When they have succeeded in getting something like the appearance of water between what may be conjectured banks, they are not very particular about its running occasionally up-hill; and it is interesting to see a stream stealing quietly below trees in gradual ascension, till, disappearing for a few minutes over one summit, it comes thundering down another, in the shape of a waterfall, on the head of an elderly gentleman, unsuspectingly reading Mr Wordsworth's "Excursion," perhaps, in the foreground. Nevertheless, we repeat, that it is delightful to hang over one of the dear creatures, seated on stone or stool, drawing from nature; for whatever may be the pencil's skill, the eye may behold the glimpse of a vision whose beauty shall be remembered when even Windermere herself has for a while faded into oblivion.

On such excursions there are sure to occur a few enviable adventures. First, the girths get wrong, and, without allowing your beloved virgin to alight, you spend more time than is absolutely necessary in arranging them; nor can you help admiring the attitude into which the graceful creature is forced to draw up her delicate limbs, that her fairy feet may not be in the way to impede your services. By-and-by a calf—which you hope will be allowed to grow up into a cow—stretching up her curved red back from behind a wall, startles John Darby, albeit unused to the starting mood, and you leap four yards to the timely assistance of the fair shrieker, tenderly pressing her bridle-hand as you find the rein that has not been lost, and wonder what has become of the whip that never existed. A little further on, a bridgeless stream crosses the road—a dangerous-looking ford indeed—a foot deep at the very least, and scorning wet feet, as they ought to be scorned, you almost carry, serene in danger, your affianced bride (or she is in a fair way of becoming so) in your arms off the saddle, nor relinquish the delightful clasp till all risk is at an end, some hundred yards on, along the velvet herbage. Next stream you come to has indeed a bridge—but then what a bridge! A long, coggly, cracked slate-stone, whose unsteady clatter would make the soberest steed jump over the moon. You beseech the timid girl to sit fast, and she almost leans down to your breast as you press to meet the blessed burden, and to prevent the steady old stager from leaping over the battlements. But now the chasm on each side of the narrow path is so tremendous, that she must dismount, after due disentanglement, from that awkward, old-fashioned crutch and pummel, and from a stirrup, into which a little foot, when it has once crept like a mouse, finds itself caught as in a trap of singular construction, and difficult to open for releasement. You feel that all you love in the world is indeed fully, freshly, and warmly in your arms, nor can you bear to set the treasure down on the rough stony road, but look round, and round, and round, for a soft spot, which you finally prophesy at some distance up the hill, whitherwards, in spite of pouting Yea and Nay, you persist in carrying her whose head is ere long to lie in your tranquil bosom.

Ivy-cottage, you see, is the domicile of gentlemen and lady folk; but look through yonder dispersion, and in a minute or two your eyes will see distinctly, in spite of the trees, a bonâ fide farmhouse, inhabited by a family whose head is at once an agriculturist, a shepherd, and a woodsman. A Westmoreland cottage has scarcely any resemblance to a Scottish one. A Scottish cottage (in the Lowlands) has rarely any picturesque beauty in itself—a narrow oblong, with steep thatched roof, and an ear-like chimney at each of the two gable-ends. Many of the Westmoreland cottages would seem, to an ignorant observer, to have been originally built on a model conceived by the finest poetical genius. In the first place, they are almost always built precisely where they ought to be, had the builder's prime object been to beautify the dale; at least, so we have often felt in moods, when perhaps our emotions were unconsciously soothed into complacency by the spirit of the scene. Where the sedgy brink of the lake or tarn circles into a lone bay, with a low hill of coppice-wood on one side, and a few tall pines on the other, no—it is a grove of sycamores—there, about a hundred yards from the water, and about ten above its ordinary level, peeps out from its cheerful seclusion that prettiest of all hamlets—Braithwaite-fold. The hill behind is scarcely sylvan—yet it has many hazels—a few bushes—here and there a holly—and why or wherefore, who can now tell, a grove of enormous yews. There is sweet pasturage among the rocks, and as you may suppose it a spring-day, mild without much sunshine, there is a bleating of lambs, a twitter of small birds, and the deep coo of the stock-dove. A wreath of smoke is always a feature of such a scene in description; but here there is now none, for probably the whole household are at work in the open air, and the fire, since fuel is not to be wasted, has been wisely suffered to expire on the hearth. No. There is a volume of smoke, as if the chimney were in flame—a tumultuous cloud pours aloft, straggling and broken, through the broad slate stones that defend the mouth of the vomitory from every blast. The matron within is doubtless about to prepare breakfast, and last year's rotten pea-sticks have soon heated the capacious grid-iron. Let the smoke-wreath melt away at its leisure, and do you admire, along with us, the infinite variety of all those little shelving and sloping roofs. To feel the full force of the peculiar beauty of these antique tenements, you must understand their domestic economy. If ignorant of that, you can have no conception of the meaning of any one thing you see—roofs, eaves, chimneys, beams, props, doors, hovels, and sheds, and hanging staircase, being all huddled together, as you think, in unintelligible confusion; whereas they are all precisely what and where they ought to be, and have had their colours painted, forms shaped, and places allotted by wind and weather, and the perpetually but pleasantly felt necessities Of the natural condition of mountaineers.

Dear, dear is the thatch to the eyes of a son of Caledonia, for he may remember the house in which he was born; but what thatch was ever so beautiful as that slate from the quarry of the White-moss? Each one—no—not each one—but almost each one—of these little overhanging roofs seems to have been slated, or repaired at least, in its own separate season, so various is the lustre of lichens that bathes the whole, as richly as ever rock was bathed fronting the sun on the mountain's brow. Here and there is seen some small window, before unobserved, curtained perhaps—for the statesman, and the statesman's wife, and the statesman's daughters, have a taste—a taste inspired by domestic happiness, which, seeking simply comfort, unconsciously creates beauty, and whatever its homely hand touches, that it adorns. There would seem to be many fireplaces in Braithwaite-fold, from such a number of chimney-pillars, each rising up to a different altitude from a different base, round as the bole of a tree—and elegant, as if shaped by Vitruvius. To us, we confess, there is nothing offensive in the most glaring white rough-cast that ever changed a cottage into a patch of sunny snow. Yet here that greyish-tempered unobtrusive hue does certainly blend to perfection with roof, rock, and sky. Every instrument is in tune. Not even in sylvan glade, nor among the mountain rocks, did wanderer's eyes ever behold a porch of meeting tree-stems, or reclining cliffs, more gracefully festooned than the porch from which now issues one of the fairest of Westmeria's daughters. With one arm crossed before her eyes in a sudden burst of sunshine, with the other Ellinor Inman waves to her little brother and sisters among the bark-peelers in the Rydal woods. The graceful signal is repeated till seen, and in a few minutes a boat steals twinkling from the opposite side of the lake, each tug of the youthful rowers distinctly heard through the hollow of the vale. A singing voice rises and ceases—as if the singer were watching the echo—and is not now the picture complete?

After a time old buildings undergo no perceptible change, any more than old trees; and after they have begun to feel the touch of decay, it is long before they look melancholy; for while they continue to be used, they cannot help looking cheerful, and even dilapidation is painful only when felt to be lifeless. The house now in ruins, that we passed a few hundred yards ago without your seeing it—we saw it with a sigh—among some dark firs, just before we began to ascend the hill, was many years ago inhabited by Miles Mackareth, a man of some substance, and universally esteemed for his honest and pious character. His integrity, however, wanted the grace of courteousness, and his religion was somewhat gloomy and austere, while all the habits of his life were sad, secluded, and solitary. His fireside was always decent, but never cheerful—there the passing traveller partook of an ungrudging, but a grave hospitality; and although neighbours dropping in unasked were always treated as neighbours, yet seldom were they invited to pass an evening below his roof, except upon the stated festivals of the seasons, or some domestic event demanding sociality, according to the country custom. Year after year the gloom deepened on his strong-marked intellectual countenance; and his hair, once black as jet, became untimely grey. Indeed, although little more than fifty years old, when you saw his head uncovered, you would have taken him for a man approaching to threescore and ten. His wife and only daughter, both naturally of a cheerful disposition, grew every year more retired, till at last they shunned society altogether, and were seldom seen but at church. And now a vague rumour ran through the hamlets of the neighbouring valleys, that he was scarcely in his right mind—that he had been heard by shepherds on the hills talking to himself wild words, and pacing up and down in a state of distraction. The family ceased to attend divine worship, and as for some time the Sabbath had been the only day they were visible, few or none now knew how they fared, and by many they were nearly forgotten. Meanwhile, during the whole summer, the miserable man haunted the loneliest places; and, to the terror of his wife and daughter, who had lost all power over him, and durst not speak, frequently passed whole days they knew not where, and came home, silent, haggard, and ghastly, about midnight. His widow afterwards told that he seldom slept, and never without dreadful dreams—that often he would sit up all night in his bed, with his eyes fixed and staring on nothing, and uttering ejaculations for mercy for all his sins.

What these sins were he never confessed—nor, as far as man may judge of man, had he ever committed any act that needed to lie heavy on his conscience. But his whole being, he said, was one black sin—and a spirit had been sent to tell him, that his doom was to be with the wicked through all the ages of eternity. That spirit, without form or shadow—only a voice—seldom left his side day or night, go where he would; but its most dreadful haunt was under a steep rock called Blakerigg-scaur; and thither, in whatever direction he turned his face on leaving his own door, he was led by an irresistible impulse, even as a child is led by the hand. Tenderly and truly had he once loved his wife and daughter, nor less because that love had been of few words, and with a shade of sorrow. But now he looked on them almost as if they had been strangers—except at times, when he started up, kissed them, and wept. His whole soul was possessed by horrid fantasies, of which it was itself object and victim; and it is probable that had he seen them both lying dead, he would have left their corpses in the house, and taken his way to the mountains. At last one night passed away and he came not. His wife and daughter, who had not gone to bed, went to the nearest house and told their tale. In an hour a hundred feet were traversing all the loneliest places—till a hat was seen floating on Loughrigg-tarn, and then all knew that the search was near an end. Drags were soon got from the fishermen on Windermere, and a boat crossed and recrossed the tarn on its miserable quest, till in an hour, during which wife and daughter sat without speaking on a stone by the water-edge, the body came floating to the surface, with its long silver hair. One single shriek only, it is said, was heard, and from that shriek till three years afterwards, his widow knew not that her husband was with the dead. On the brink of that small sandy bay the body was laid down and cleansed of the muddy weeds—his daughter's own hands assisting in the rueful work—and she walked among the mourners, the day before the Sabbath, when the funeral entered the little burial-ground of Langdale chapel, and the congregation sung a Christian psalm over the grave of the forgiven suicide.

We cannot patronise the practice of walking in large parties of ten or a score, ram-stam and helter-skelter, on to the front-green or gravel-walk of any private nobleman's or gentleman's house, to enjoy, from a commanding station, an extensive or picturesque view of the circumjacent country. It is too much in the style of the Free and Easy. The family within, sitting perhaps at dinner with the windows open, or sewing and reading in a cool dishabille, cannot like to be stared in upon by so many curious and inquisitive pupils all a-hunt for prospects; nor were these rose-bushes planted there for public use, nor that cherry-tree in vain netted against the blackbirds. Not but that a party may now and then excusably enough pretend to lose their way in a strange country; and looking around them in well-assumed bewilderment, bow hesitatingly and respectfully to maid or matron at door or window, and, with a thousand apologies, lingeringly offer to retire by the avenue gate, on the other side of the spacious lawn, that terrace-like hangs over vale, lake, and river. But to avoid all possible imputation of impertinence, follow you our example, and make all such incursions by break of day. We hold that, for a couple of hours before and after sunrise, all the earth is common property. Nobody surely would think for a moment of looking black on any number of freebooting lakers coming full sail up the avenue, right against the front, at four o'clock in the morning? At that hour, even the poet would grant them the privilege of the arbour where he sits when inspired, and writing for immortality. He feels conscious that he ought to have been in bed; and hastens, on such occasions, to apologise for his intrusion on strangers availing themselves of the rights and privileges of the Dawn.

Leaving Ivy-cottage, then, and its yet unbreathing chimneys, turn in at the first gate to your right (if it be not built up, in which case leap the wall), and find your way the best you can through among old pollarded and ivied ash-trees, intermingled with yews, and over knolly ground, brier-woven, and here and there whitened with the jagged thorn, till you reach, through a slate-stile, a wide gravel walk, shaded by pine-trees, and open on the one side to an orchard. Proceed—and little more than a hundred steps will land you on the front of Rydal-mount, the house of the great Poet of the Lakes. Mr Wordsworth is not at home, but away to cloudland in his little boat so like the crescent moon. But do not by too much eloquence awaken the family, or scare the silence, or frighten "the innocent brightness of the new-born day." We hate all sentimentalism; but we bid you, in his own words,

"With gentle hand
Touch, for there is a spirit in the leaves."

From a quaint platform of evergreens you see a blue gleam of Windermere over the grove-tops—close at hand are Rydal-hall and its ancient woods—right opposite the Loughrigg-fells, ferny, rocky, and sylvan, but the chief breadth of breast pastoral—and to the right Rydal-mere, seen, and scarcely seen, through embowering trees, and mountain-masses bathed in the morning light, and the white-wreathed mists for a little while longer shrouding their summits. A lately erected private chapel lifts its little tower from below, surrounded by a green, on which there are yet no graves—nor do we know if it be intended for a place of burial. A few houses are sleeping beyond the chapel by the river-side; and the people beginning to set them in order, here and there a pillar of smoke ascends into the air, giving cheerfulness and animation to the scene.

The Lake-Poets! ay, their day is come. The lakes are worthy of the poets, and the poets of the lakes. That poets should love and live among lakes, once seemed most absurd to critics whose domiciles were on the Nor-Loch, in which there was not sufficient water for a tolerable quagmire. Edinburgh Castle is a noble rock—so are the Salisbury Craigs noble craigs—and Arthur's seat a noble lion couchant, who, were he to leap down on Auld Reekie, would break her backbone and bury her in the Cowgate. But place them by Pavey-ark, or Red-scaur, or the glamour of Glaramara, and they would look about as magnificent as an upset pack of cards. Who, pray, are the Nor-Loch poets? Not the Minstrel—he holds by the tenure of the Tweed. Not Campbell—"he heard in dreams the music of the Clyde." Not Joanna Baillie—her inspiration was nursed on the Calder's sylvan banks and the moors of Strathaven. Stream-loving Coila nurtured Burns; and the Shepherd's grave is close to the cot in which he was born—within hearing of the Ettrick's mournful voice on its way to meet the Yarrow. Skiddaw overshadows, and Greta freshens the bower of him who framed,

"Of Thalaba, the wild and wondrous song."

Here the woods, mountains, and waters of Rydal imparadise the abode of the wisest of nature's bards, with whom poetry is religion. And where was he ever so happy as in that region, he who created "Christabelle," "beautiful exceedingly;" and sent the "Auncient Mariner" on the wildest of all voyagings, and brought him back with the ghastliest of all crews, and the strangest of all curses that ever haunted crime?

Of all Poets that ever lived Wordsworth has been at once the most truthful and the most idealising; external nature from him has received a soul, and becomes our teacher; while he has so filled our minds with images from her, that every mood finds some fine affinities there, and thus we all hang for sustenance and delight on the bosom of our mighty Mother. We believe that there are many who have an eye for Nature, and even a sense of the beautiful, without any very profound feeling; and to them Wordsworth's finest descriptive passages seem often languid or diffuse, and not to present to their eyes any distinct picture. Perhaps sometimes this objection may be just; but to paint to the eye is easier than to the imagination—and Wordsworth, taking it for granted that people can now see and hear, desires to make them feel and understand; of his pupil it must not be said,

"A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose is to him,
And it is nothing more;"

the poet gives the something more till we start at the disclosure as at a lovely apparition—yet an apparition of beauty not foreign to the flower, but exhaling from its petals, which till that moment seemed to us but an ordinary bunch of leaves. In these lines is a humbler example of how recondite may be the spirit of beauty in any most familiar thing belonging to the kingdom of nature; one higher far—but of the same kind—is couched in two immortal verses—

"To me the humblest flower that blows, can give
Thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears."

In what would the poet differ from the worthy man of prose, if his imagination possessed not a beautifying and transmuting power over the objects of the inanimate world? Nay, even the naked truth itself is seen clearly but by poetic eyes; and were a sumph all at once to become a poet, he would all at once be stark-staring mad. Yonder ass licking his lips at a thistle, sees but water for him to drink in Windermere a-glow with the golden lights of setting suns. The ostler or the boots at Lowood-inn takes a somewhat higher flight, and for a moment, pausing with curry-comb or blacking-brush in his suspended hand, calls on Sally Chambermaid for gracious sake to look at Pull-wyke. The waiter, who has cultivated his taste from conversation with Lakers, learns their phraseology, and declares the sunset to be exceedingly handsome. The Laker, who sometimes has a soul, feels it rise within him as the rim of the orb disappears in the glow of softened fire. The artist compliments Nature, by likening her evening glories to a picture of Claud Lorraine—while the poet feels the sense sublime

"Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

Compare any one page, or any twenty pages, with the character given of Wordsworth's poetry in the obsolete criticism that sought to send it to oblivion. The poet now sits on his throne in the blue serene—and no voice from below dares deny his supremacy in his own calm dominions. And was it of him, whom devout imagination, dreaming of ages to come, now sees, placed in his immortality between Milton and Spenser, that the whole land once rang with ridicule, while her wise men wiped their eyes "of tears that sacred pity had engendered," and then relieved their hearts by joining in the laughter "of the universal British nation?" All the ineffable absurdities of the bard are now embodied in Seven Volumes—the sense of the ridiculous still survives among us—our men of wit and power are not all dead—we have yet our satirists, great and small—editors in thousands, and contributors in tens of thousands—yet not a whisper is heard to breathe detraction from the genius of the high-priest of nature; while the voice of the awakened and enlightened land declares it to be divine—using towards him not the language merely of admiration but of reverence—of love and gratitude due to the benefactor of humanity, who has purified its passions by loftiest thoughts and noblest sentiments, stilling their turbulence by the same processes that magnify their power, and showing how the soul, in ebb and flow, and when its tide is at full, may be at once as strong and as serene as the sea.

There are few pictures painted by him merely for the pleasure of the eye, or even the imagination, though all the pictures he ever painted are beautiful to both; they have all a moral meaning—many a meaning more than moral—and his poetry can be comprehended, in its full scope and spirit, but by those who feel the sublimity of these four lines in his "Ode to Duty,"—

"Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong."

Is thy life disturbed by guilty or sinful passions? Have they gained a mastery of thee—and art thou indeed their slave? Then the poetry of Wordsworth must be to thee

"As is a picture to a blind man's eye;"

or if thine eyes yet see the light in which it is enveloped, and thy heart yet feels the beauty it reveals, in spite of the clouds that overhang and the storms that trouble them, that beauty will be unbearable, till regret become remorse, and remorse penitence, and penitence restore thee to those intuitions of the truth that illumine his sacred pages, and thou knowest and feelest once more that

"The primal duties shine aloft—like stars,"

that life's best pleasures grow like flowers all around and beneath thy feet.

Nor are we not privileged to cherish a better feeling than pride in the belief, or rather knowledge, that We have helped to diffuse Wordsworth's poetry not only over this Island, but the furthest dependencies of the British empire, and throughout the United States of America. Many thousands have owed to us their emancipation from the prejudices against it, under which they had wilfully remained ignorant of it during many years; and we have instructed as many more, whose hearts were free, how to look on it with those eyes of love which alone can discover the Beautiful. Communications have been made to us from across the Atlantic, and from the heart of India—from the Occident and the Orient—thanking us for having vindicated and extended the fame of the best of our living bards, till the name of Wordsworth has become a household word on the banks of the Mississippi and the Ganges. It would have been so had we never lived, but not so soon; and many a noble nature has worshipped his genius, as displayed in our pages, not in fragments but in perfect poems, accompanied with our comments, who had no means in those distant regions of possessing his volumes, whereas Maga flies on wings to the uttermost parts of the earth.

As for our own dear Scotland—for whose sake, with all her faults, the light of day is sweet to our eyes—twenty years ago there were not twenty copies—we question if there were ten—of the "Lyrical Ballads" in all the land of the mountain and the flood. Now Wordsworth is studied all Scotland over—and Scotland is proud and happy to know, from his Memorials of the Tours he has made through her brown heaths and shaggy woods, that the Bard's heart overflows with kindness towards her children—that his songs have celebrated the simple and heroic character of her olden times, nor left unhonoured the virtues that yet survive in her national character. All her generous youth regard him now as a great Poet; and we have been more affected than we should choose to confess, by the grateful acknowledgment of many a gifted spirit, that to us it was owing that they had opened their eyes and their hearts to the ineffable beauty of that poetry in which they had, under our instructions, found not a vain visionary delight, but a strength and succour and consolation, breathed as from a shrine in the silence and solitude of nature, in which stood their father's hut, sanctifying their humble birthplace with pious thoughts that made the very weekdays to them like Sabbaths—nor on the evening of the Sabbath might they not blamelessly be blended with those breathed from the Bible, enlarging their souls to religion by those meditative moods which such pure poetry inspires, and by those habits of reflection which its study forms, when pursued under the influence of thoughtful peace.

Why, if it were not for that everlasting—we beg pardon—immortal Wordsworth—the Lakes, and all that belong to them, would be our own—jure divino—for we are the heir-apparent to the

"Sole King of rocky Cumberland."

But Wordsworth never will—never can die; and so we are in danger of being cheated out of our due dominion. We cannot think this fatherly treatment of such a son—and yet in our loftiest moods of filial reverence we have heard ourselves exclaiming, while

"The Cataract of Lodore
Peal'd to our orisons,"

O King! live for ever!

Therefore, with the fear of "The Excursion" before our eyes, we took to prose—to numerous prose—ay, though we say it that should not say it, to prose as numerous as any verse—and showed such scenes

"As savage Rosa dash'd, or learned Poussin drew."

Here an English Lake—there a Scottish loch—till Turner grew jealous, and Thomson flung his brush at one of his own unfinished mountains—when lo! a miracle! Creative of grandeur in his very despair, he stood astonished at the cliff that came prerupt from his canvass, and christened itself "the Eagle's Eyrie," as it frowned serenely upon the sea, maddening in a foamy circle at its inaccessible feet.

Only in such prose as ours can the heart pour forth its effusions like a strong spring discharging ever so many gallons in a minute, either into pipes that conduct it through some great Metropolitan city, or into a water-course that soon becomes a rivulet, then a stream, then a river, then a lake, and then a sea. Would Fancy luxuriate? Then let her expand wings of prose. In verse, however irregular, her flight is lime-twigged, and she soon takes to hopping on the ground. Would Imagination dive? Let the bell in which she sinks be constructed on the prose principle, and deeper than ever plummet sunk, it will startle monsters at the roots of the coral caves, yet be impervious to the strokes of the most tremendous of tails. Would she soar? In a prose balloon she seeks the stars. There is room and power of ascension for any quantity of ballast—fling it out, and up she goes! Let some gas escape, and she descends far more gingerly than Mrs Graham and his Serene Highness; the grapnel catches a stile, and she steps "like a dreadless angel unpursued" once more upon terra firma, and may then celebrate her aerial voyage, if she choose, in an Ode which will be sure near the end to rise—into prose.

Prose, we believe, is destined to drive what is called Poetry out of the world. Here is a fair challenge. Let any Poet send us a poem of five hundred lines—blanks or not—on any subject; and we shall write on that subject a passage of the same number of words in prose; and the Editors of the Quarterly, Edinburgh, and Westminster, shall decide which deserves the prize. Milton was woefully wrong in speaking of "prose or numerous verse." Prose is a million times more numerous than verse. Then prose improves the more poetical it becomes; but verse, the moment it becomes prosaic, goes to the dogs. Then, the connecting links between two fine passages in verse, it is enjoined, shall be as little like verse as possible; nay, whole passages, critics say, should be of that sort; and why, pray, not prose at once? Why clip the King's English, or the Emperor's German, or the Sublime Porte's Turkish, into bits of dull jingle—pretending to be verses merely because of the proper number of syllables—some of them imprisoned perhaps in parentheses, where they sit helplessly protruding the bare soles of their feet, like folks that have got muzzy, in the stocks?

Wordsworth says well, that the language of common people, when giving utterance to passionate emotions, is highly figurative; and hence he concludes not so well fit for a lyrical ballad. Their volubility is great, nor few their flowers of speech. But who ever heard them, but by the merest accident, spout verses? Rhyme do they never—the utmost they reach is occasional blanks. But their prose! Ye gods! how they do talk! The washerwoman absolutely froths like her own tub; and you never dream of asking her "how she is off for soap?" Paradise Lost! The Excursion! The Task indeed! No man of woman born, no woman by man begotten, ever yet in his or her senses spoke like the authors of those poems. Hamlet, in his sublimest moods, speaks in prose—Lady Macbeth talks prose in her sleep—and so it should be printed. "Out damned spot!" are three words of prose; and who that beheld Siddons wringing her hands to wash them of murder, did not feel that they were the most dreadful ever extorted by remorse from guilt?

A green old age is the most loving season of life, for almost all the other passions are then dead or dying—or the mind, no more at the mercy of a troubled heart, compares the little pleasure their gratification can ever yield now with what it could at any time long ago, and lets them rest. Envy is the worst disturber or embitterer of man's declining years; but it does not deserve the name of a passion—and is a disease, not of the poor in spirit—for they are blessed—but of the mean, and then they indeed are cursed. For our own parts, we know Envy but as we have studied it in others—and never felt it except towards the wise and good; and then 'twas a longing desire to be like them—painful only when we thought that might never be, and that all our loftiest aspirations might be in vain. Our envy of Genius is of a nature so noble, that it knows no happiness like that of guarding from mildew the laurels on the brows of the Muses' Sons. What a dear kind soul of a critic is old Christopher North! Watering the flowers of poetry, and removing the weeds that might choke them—letting in the sunshine upon them, and fencing them from the blast—proclaiming where the gardens grow, and leading boys and virgins into the pleasant alleys—teaching hearts to love and eyes to see their beauty, and classifying, by the attributes it has pleased nature to bestow on the various orders, the plants of Paradise—This is our occupation—and the happiness of witnessing them all growing in the light of admiration is our reward.

Finding our way back as we choose to Ivy-cottage, we cross the wooden bridge, and away along the western shore of Rydal-mere. Hence you see the mountains in magnificent composition, and craggy coppices with intervening green fields shelving down to the lake margin. It is a small lake, not much more than a mile round, and of a very peculiar character. One memorable cottage only, as far as we remember, peeps on its shore from a grove of sycamores, a statesman's pleasant dwelling; and there are the ruins of another on a slope near the upper end, the circle of the garden still visible. Everything has a quiet but wildish pastoral and sylvan look, and the bleating of sheep fills the hollow of the hills. The lake has a reedy inlet and outlet, and the angler thinks of pike when he looks upon such harbours. There is a single boat-house, where the Lady of the Hall has a padlocked and painted barge for pleasure parties; and the heronry on the high pine-trees of the only island connects the scene with the ancient park of Rydal, whose oak woods, though thinned and decayed, still preserve the majestic and venerable character of antiquity and baronial state.

Having taken a lingering farewell of Rydal-mere, and of the new Chapel-tower, that seems among the groves already to be an antique, we may either sink down to the stream that flows out of Grassmere and connects the two lakes, crossing a wooden bridge, and then joining the new road that sweeps along to the Village, or we may keep up on the face of the hill, and by a terrace-path reach the Loughrigg-road, a few hundred yards above Tail-end, a pretty cottage-ornée which you will observe crowning a wooded eminence, and looking cheerfully abroad over all the vale. There is one Mount in particular, whence we see to advantage the delightful panorama—encircling mountains—Grassmere Lake far down below your feet, with its one green pastoral isle, sylvan shores, and emerald meadows—huts and houses sprinkled up and down in all directions—the village partly embowered in groves, and partly open below the shadow of large single trees—and the Church-tower, almost always a fine feature in the scenery of the north of England, standing in stately simplicity among the clustering tenements, nor dwindled even by the great height of the hills.

It is pleasant to lose sight entirely of a beautiful scene, and to plod along for a few hundred yards in almost objectless shadow. Our conceptions and feelings are bright and strong from the nearness of their objects, yet the dream is somewhat different from the reality. All at once, at a turning of the road, the splendour reappears like an unfurled banner, and the heart leaps in the joy of the senses. This sort of enjoyment comes upon you before you reach the Village of Grassmere from the point of vision above described, and a stranger sometimes is apt to doubt if it be really the same Lake—that one island, and those few promontories, shifting into such varied combinations with the varying mountain-ridges and ranges, that show top over top in bewildering succession, and give hints of other valleys beyond, and of Tarns rarely visited, among the moorland wastes. A single long dim shadow, falling across the water, alters the whole physiognomy of the scene—nor less a single bright streak of sunshine, brightening up some feature formerly hidden, and giving animation and expression to the whole face of the Lake.

About a short mile from the Village Inn, you will pass by without seeing it—unless warned not to do so—one of the most singularly beautiful habitations in the world. It belongs to a gentleman of the name of Barber, and, we believe, has been almost entirely built by him—the original hut on which his taste has worked having been a mere shell. The spirit of the place seems to us to be that of Shadowy Silence. Its bounds are small; but it is an indivisible part of a hill-side so secret and sylvan, that it might be the haunt of the roe. You hear the tinkle of a rill, invisible among the hazels—a bird sings or flutters—a bee hums his way through the bewildering wood—but no louder sound. Some fine old forest-trees extend widely their cool and glimmering shade; and a few stumps or armless trunks, whose bulk is increased by a load of ivy that hides the hollow wherein the owls have their domicile, give an air of antiquity to the spot, that, but for other accompaniments, would almost be melancholy. As it is, the scene has a pensive character. As yet you have seen no house, and wonder whither the gravel-walks are to conduct you, winding fancifully and fantastically through the smooth-shaven lawn, bestrewed by a few large leaves of the horse-chestnut or sycamore. But there are clustered verandas where the nightingale might woo the rose, and lattice-windows reaching from eaves to ground-sill, so sheltered that they might stand open in storm and rain, and tall circular chimneys, shaped almost like the stems of the trees that overshadow the roof irregular, and over all a gleam of blue sky and a few motionless clouds. The noisy world ceases to be, and the tranquil heart, delighted with the sweet seclusion, breathes, "Oh! that this were my cell, and that I were a hermit!"

But you soon see that the proprietor is not a hermit; for everywhere you discern unostentatious traces of that elegance and refinement that belong to social and cultivated life; nothing rude and rough-hewn, yet nothing prim and precise. Snails and spiders are taught to keep their own places; and among the flowers of that hanging garden on a sunny slope, not a weed is to be seen, for weeds are beautiful only by the wayside, in the matting of hedge-roots, by the mossy stone, and the brink of the well in the brae—and are offensive only when they intrude into society above their own rank, and where they have the air and accent of aliens. By pretty pebbled steps of stairs you mount up from platform to platform of the sloping woodland banks—the prospect widening as you ascend, till from a bridge that spans a leaping rivulet, you behold in full blow all Grassmere Vale, Village, Church-tower, and Lake, the whole of the mountains, and a noble arch of sky, the circumference of that little world of peace.

Circumscribed as are the boundaries of this place, yet the grounds are so artfully, while one thinks so artlessly, laid out, that, wandering through their labyrinthine recesses, you might believe yourself in an extensive wilderness. Here you come out upon a green open glade (you see by the sun-dial it is past seven o'clock)—there the arms of an immense tree overshadow what is in itself a scene—yonder you have an alley that serpentises into gloom and obscurity—and from that cliff you doubtless would see over the tree-tops into the outer and airy world. With all its natural beauties is intermingled an agreeable quaintness, that shows the owner has occasionally been working in the spirit of fancy, almost caprice; the tool-house in the garden is not without its ornaments—the barn seems habitable, and the byre has somewhat the appearance of a chapel. You see at once that the man who lives here, instead of being sick of the world, is attached to all elegant socialities and amities; that he uses silver cups instead of maple bowls, shows his scallop-shell among other curiosities in his cabinet, and will treat the passing pilgrim with pure water from the spring, if he insists upon that beverage, but will first offer him a glass of the yellow cowslip-wine, the cooling claret, or the sparkling champagne.

Perhaps we are all beginning to get a little hungry, but it is too soon to breakfast; so, leaving the village of Grassmere on the right, keep your eye on Helm-crag, while we are finding, without seeking, our way up Easdale. Easdale is an arm of Grassmere, and in the words of Mr Green the artist, "it is in places profusely wooded, and charmingly sequestered among the mountains." Here you may hunt the waterfalls, in rainy weather easily run down, but difficult of detection in a drought. Several pretty rustic bridges cross and recross the main stream and its tributaries; the cottages, in nook and on hill-side, are among the most picturesque and engaging in the whole country; the vale widens into spacious and noble meadow-grounds, on which might suitably stand the mansion of any nobleman in England—as you near its head, everything gets wild and broken, with a slight touch of dreariness, and by no very difficult ascent we might reach Easdale-tarn in less than an hour's walking from Grassmere—a lonely and impressive scene, and the haunt of the angler almost as frequently as of the shepherd.

How far can we enjoy the beauty of external nature under a sharp appetite for breakfast or dinner? On our imagination the effect of hunger is somewhat singular. We no longer regard sheep, for instance, as the fleecy or the bleating flock. Their wool or their baaing is nothing to us—we think of necks, and jigots, and saddles of mutton; and even the lamb frisking on the sunny bank is eaten by us in the shape of steaks and fry. If it is in the morning, we see no part of the cow but her udder, distilling richest milkiness. Instead of ascending to heaven on the smoke of a cottage chimney, we put our arms round the column, and descend on the lid of the great pan preparing the family breakfast. Every interesting object in the landscape seems edible—our mouth waters all over the vale—as the village clock tolls eight, we involuntarily say grace, and Price on the Picturesque gives way to Meg Dods's Cookery.

Mrs Bell of the Red Lion Inn, Grassmere, can give a breakfast with any woman in England. She bakes incomparable bread—firm, close, compact, and white, thin-crusted, and admirably raised. Her yeast always works well. What butter! Before it a primrose must hide its unyellowed head. Then jam of the finest quality, goose, rasp, and strawberry! and as the jam is, so are her jellies. Hens cackle that the eggs are fresh—and these shrimps were scraping the sand last night in the Whitehaven sea. What glorious bannocks of barley-meal! Crisp wheaten cakes, too, no thicker than a wafer. Do not, our good sir, appropriate that cut of pickled salmon; it is heavier than it looks, and will weigh about four pounds. One might live a thousand years, yet never weary of such mutton-ham. Virgin honey, indeed! Let us hope that the bees were not smothered, but by some gracious disciple of Bonar or Huber decoyed from a full hive into an empty one, with half the summer and all the autumn before them to build and saturate their new Comb-Palace. No bad thing is a cold pigeon-pie, especially of cushats. To hear them cooing in the centre of a wood is one thing, and to see them lying at the bottom of a pie is another—which is the better, depends entirely on time, place, and circumstance. Well, a beef-steak at breakfast is rather startling—but let us try a bit with these fine ingenuous youthful potatoes, from a light sandy soil on a warm slope. Next to the country clergy, smugglers are the most spiritual of characters; and we verily believe that to be "sma' still." Our dear sir—you are in orders, we believe—will you have the goodness to return thanks? Yes, now you may ring the bell for the bill. Moderate indeed! With a day's work before one, there is nothing like the deep broad basis of breakfast.

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