CONISTON LAKE
Precisely parallel to Windermere, a little more than half its length and half its breadth, and four miles to the westward, lies Coniston, its head in the mountains, its foot almost trenching on another, and virtually lowland, country. There can be no doubt whatever about the presiding genii of Coniston, the "Old Man" in the substance and Ruskin in the shadow, if one may put it that way, having no rivals. The hills crowd finely around their leader, the "Allt-maen" (lofty rock), at the lake-head, as our artist well shows. As the lake shoots southward, however, in a straight line, without any conspicuous curves or headlands, and no heights comparable to those it leaves behind, one feels upon thus looking down it that Coniston lacks something of the fascination which never flags at any part of the other lakes. If Windermere, too, trails away from the mountains, it does so in glorious bends and headlands, curves and islands, and has an opulence of detail and colouring all its own. But if Coniston, with its straight unbroken stretch all fully displayed, and framed in a fashion less winsome than Windermere, and less imposing than Ullswater, "lets you down" a little on arriving at its head, looking upward from its centre it assuredly lacks nothing, while the view from Ruskin's old home of Brantwood, perched high among woods upon the eastern shore, commands all that is best of it. After thirty years of intermittent residence here, Ruskin was buried in the churchyard at Coniston, exactly half a century after Wordsworth had been laid to rest at Grasmere. A generation later than his great predecessor he has Coniston to himself. And if the points of divergence between the two seers have been more than sufficiently insisted upon, it is from the very fact, perhaps, that in intellect and temperament they had so much in common.
[THE HEART OF LAKELAND
RYDAL AND GRASMERE]
Those delectable little sister lakes of Rydal and Grasmere probably suggest themselves to most of us as the heart of Lakeland. If we took a map and measuring rule we might possibly be surprised to find, as we should do, this vague intuition geometrically verified. How singularly felicitous, then, one may surely deem it, that Wordsworth lived and died here, and that the shrine of the sage and all thereby implied should be thus planted in the very innermost sanctuary of the hills.
The intrinsic charm of these two little lakes and all that pertains to them lies in the delightful variety exhibited within a small compass of wood and water, of rugged crag and fern-clad slope, of velvety park-like meadow and stately timber. The blithesome Rothay unites the upper and larger lake of Grasmere with Rydal Water by a short half-mile display in meadow and ravine of every winsome mood that a mountain stream has at command. The broken, straggling heights and skirts of Loughrigg Fell fill most of the western side of either lake, and on a minor scale, like the stream below, show every type of form and colouring, of drapery primeval or man-made, from naked crag to bowery lawn, all within the compass of three miles and the modest altitude of a thousand feet.
Rydal Water has almost the air of being designed for the embellishment of man's immediate haunts. With its occasionally reedy fringe, it breathes the spirit of quiet, almost domestic beauty, and of the spirit of solitude scarcely anything. Of Grasmere as much and as little might be said. The atmosphere of seclusion that wraps at normal times so many of the lakes seems here frankly absent. Nothing, indeed, is lost by this sense of human propinquity; for all is exquisite. But the sign of appreciative humanity, residential or transient, is more than commonly strong. Yet Grasmere is a favourite haunt, too, of the serious pedestrian, not merely because it is beautiful, but because it is central. The lake tourist might be reasonably classified under four heads: the crag climbers, the strenuous walkers, the saunterers, and the roadsters. The first are a mere handful, for obvious reasons, and greatly affect Wastdale Head. The second are not very numerous, and seem on the decline. The third include a substantial number, whose limitations are dictated either by lack of physical strength or an indifference to the strenuous life; by a preference for the tennis court, or croquet lawn, or a pair of sculls, with a further company, always numerous among Britons, who have an unconquerable aversion to missing a single one of the four conventional meals. Of the roadsters, the cyclist may get a great deal out of the Lake country, and is nowadays quite innocuous to others. As for the motor, it has proved for all true lovers of this region an unmitigated curse. It is truly pitiable to see these green vales half buried at times under dense volumes of driving dust, or the same noisome clouds falling in heavy masses on the fair surface and flowery banks of Rydal or Ullswater. The roads, too, are often tortuous and narrow. There was a talk at one time of prohibition within Lakeland, and there would seem in equity no justification in this glorious holiday preserve for unlimited vehicles roaring through it at twenty to thirty miles an hour. It lies on no main highway. And for touring use within the district the motor has no single point of sanity. One might almost as well thrash up and down Grasmere in a steam yacht. Their exclusion, with a few exceptions for local purposes or for genuine residents, would be an enormous gain, and any counter plea ridiculously inadequate. I have here pictured Rydal Water as a winsome summer lake, for this I am sure, before most of us who know it, its image rises.
RYDALMERE
But upon a spring day some years ago I watched it raging with abnormal frenzy under the influence of a helm wind, cleaving diligently myself in the meantime to a stone wall, lest peradventure I should be blown into its seething waters. These hurricanes are idiosyncrasies of the Lake country, and are formed by the contact of winds from the North Sea with the warmer temperature they meet as they leap over the Pennine range, like a wave breaking over a sea wall. The disturbance thus created drives them down in narrow tornadoes upon Lakeland. I have never experienced anything else like it in these islands. The waters of Rydal on this occasion, now here and now there, were lifted high into the air in the fashion of successive waterspouts and hurled in hissing volumes of sleet at a great elevation against the woody foot of Loughrigg Fell. The sun, too, was shining brilliantly, and every hurtling cloud of spray glittered in prismatic colours. But above all are these two lakes bound up with the name and fame of Wordsworth. From one or other of the banks of them for nearly half a century the great nature poet—the prophet, sage, and interpreter of Lakeland—of whose fruits the world will pluck as long as these hills endure, set forth on his almost daily ramble. Whether this or that generation decide that Wordsworth is among the elect of their fleeting day is an altogether trumpery question. Didactic and complaisant youth have tilted against many a classic and passed into oblivion while the subject of their convincing satire remains immovable as a granite rock. Wordsworth has struck roots so deep into this glorious country, has so identified it with his own personality, that even if he were a much lesser poet, immortal fame would be as surely his as the endurance of Skiddaw or Helvellyn. But Wordsworth has a firmer grip than that of mere atmosphere on unborn generations, though this almost alone would endear him to all those with any sense of feeling who love the Lake country, and of such it is inconceivable that future generations will not each supply their ample store. It is pedantry to hector every man or woman who feels the spirit of our British Highlands so perfectly expressed as they are in this Lake country into Wordsworthian enthusiasm. But let them alone, and as the Lakeland fever begins to develop more strongly with each visitation, and as spring and summer come round, if they have the sense of song at all within them they will put their Wordsworth at any rate within reach, and the process thenceforward to some measure of intimacy and delight is merely an affair of time.