Mercifully it is not our province here to pass a pious opinion on the comparative beauties of Ullswater and Derwentwater. It is tolerably certain that the one which held you the longer and the most often in its welcome toils would have your verdict. The lake of Ulpho is a thought wilder and grander and withal less accessible. Save on occasions, it wears generally a more isolated and aloof demeanour. The other, too, is much smaller and quite differently formed; its length, three miles and odd, being little more than twice its breadth, but picturesquely indented, and virtually surrounded by mountainous heights. Keswick town almost adjoins, though nowhere trenching, on its lower end, and behind Keswick the great cone of Skiddaw fills the north. Though of no distinction in itself, not a country town in all England is so felicitously placed. Within five minutes' walk of its extremity its fortunate burghers can pace the shores of Derwentwater, or, better still, the fir-clad promontory of Friars Crag, and look straight up the mountain-bordered lake to the yet sterner heights looming at its farther end, known as the Jaws of Borrowdale. Behind and to the north Skiddaw, as related, joining hands to the eastward with more precipitous Blencathara, otherwise Saddleback, lifts its shapely bulk. Through a fair green vale between, the Derwent, joined by Keswick's own bewitching stream, the Greta, urges a bold and rapid course to Bassenthwaite, which completes the picture two miles below. Though not geographically central, Keswick is nevertheless an admirable base from whence to adventure the Lake country for such as trust to wheels of any kind, and have no great length of time at their disposal. The genius loci of Keswick is of course Southey, and the plain red house where that kind-hearted and industrious poet and brilliant essayist lived for most of his life still stands above the Greta. Different in every personal characteristic, as De Quincey their mutual friend so lucidly sets forth, was Southey from Wordsworth, his successor in the Laureateship. The one, elegant, reserved, modest, fastidious, business-like, a methodical and indefatigable worker, but essentially a man of books; the other, sprawly, almost uncouth in minor habits, self-centred to the verge of arrogancy in social intercourse. Southey at Keswick earned by the Quarterly and other sources a quite substantial income, out of which he maintained not merely his own family, but for long that of poor S. T. Coleridge, whose haphazard existence consisted very largely of a succession of extended visits to generous and admiring friends. Wordsworth, on the other hand, ridiculed by most of the critics, made very little out of his poems till quite late in life. But for once in a way Providence, as represented by pounds sterling, seemed to recognize a dreamy genius, with no capacity for earning bread and butter, and showered upon him from all sides legacies, annuities, and sinecures that made him probably a richer man than Southey, even apart from his belated earnings.
BASSENTHWAITE LAKE AND SKIDDAW
A striking picture, too, is this ancient church of St. Kentigern planted in the level vale—the Derwent chanting in its rocky bed upon the one hand, and Skiddaw lifting its three thousand feet upon the other, with Bassenthwaite opening not far below its broad and shining breast. Fate has laid the bones of many a man and woman of some modest fame in their day beneath the heaving turf of this picturesque crowded graveyard, caught unawares, some of them, while temporary sojourners in a country, whose beauty drew hither two or three generations of pilgrims, before facilities of transport made the achievement the simple one it is for us. Within the church, however, a monument to John Radcliffe, the second Earl of Derwentwater, father of that ill-fated young man who lost his head and the vast estates of the family in the 'Fifteen, husband, too, of Charles the Second's daughter by the Duchess of Cleveland, strikes an earlier and more genuinely local note. The original nest of the Radcliffes was on Lord's Island, one of those near the foot of the lake, and its foundations may still be traced; but they acquired their chief consequence through wealthy Northumbrian heiresses. The Keswick property remained with them till the confiscation; but it is with the ruined towers of Dilston, near Hexham, rather than the land of their origin and their title that the memory of the Radcliffes will be chiefly associated. So one must not linger here over the story, rather a pathetic one, in fact, how the young peer of 1715, admirable in every relation of life, with youth, a happy marriage, and an immense property all to his credit, was drawn into the rising against his better judgment, to become its chief victim. Forced by a train of circumstances and by an almost morbid sense of honour, as a near relative of the exiled house, to join the ill-concerted scheme, in which he had not even been consulted, since his name only was wanted, his fate was a hard one, and he was duly mourned on both the Western and the Eastern march.
"O Derwentwater's a bonny lord,
Fu' yellow is his hair,
And glinting is his hawky 'ee
Wi' kind love dwalling there."
Another historical character intimately associated with the Keswick country was that "Shepherd Lord" celebrated by Wordsworth. This was the only surviving son of the Black Clifford, whom, in the ruthless feuds of The Roses, his mother, dreading the vengeance which might pursue the son of such a father, sent to be reared as a shepherd's son on the slopes of Saddleback. Nor till he was thirty did he emerge from this humble role to take his place as a peer of the realm, to marry twice, and to acquit himself reasonably well when called to public duties from the seclusion of Borden Tower, still standing on the Yorkshire moors above the Wharfe, where he lived a studious life. Indeed he marched to Flodden Field, which must have irked such a peaceful soul, one might fancy, not a little.
It is at the head of Derwentwater that the Lodore beck makes that sonorous descent into the vale, which, by a famous poet's frolic, as it were, achieved a notoriety it only merits in a wet season. The mouth of Borrowdale, however, down which the Derwent hurls its beautiful limpid streams through resounding gorges to an ultimately peaceful journey to the lake, is a place to linger in, not merely to admire in passing, and two well-known hotels of old standing are evidence that the public are of that opinion. If the heights of Borrowdale make an inspiring background for the lake, as viewed from the Keswick end, Skiddaw, as seen from Borrowdale, serves as noble a purpose. Then there is that long array of heights right across the lake, and those behind them, spreading away to Buttermere.
The view from Skiddaw is well worth the long but easy climb. Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite, linked by the silver coil of the river in the green vale, make a perfect foreground to a prospect which, like that of Helvellyn, covers not only the whole of Lakeland, but the sea coast and much more beyond. Skiddaw, however, stands sentinel, as it were, at this northern gateway into the Lake country, and looks right over Cumberland, with Carlisle in the centre of the picture, the Solway gleaming beyond, and behind that again the dim rolling forms of the Scottish hills. We have nothing to do with Carlisle, or the Eden, or Solway Moss, with Eskdale or Liddesdale, or any of this classic Borderland here laid open to the view. But one may be pardoned, when perched thus in fancy upon Skiddaw's aerial cone, for a brief reflection of how different was the past and how strangely different the associations of this rugged romantic Lake country with its simple, uneventful peasant story, quite obscured what there is of it by its more recent literary associations, from that classic soil of Border story spreading to the northward. "Happy is the land", says the old saw, "that has no history"; and no part of England has so little, in the ordinary sense of the word, as that which one looks back upon from the top of Skiddaw. None, upon the other hand, has more than that once blood-stained region, now spreading so fair and green and fertile to the dim hills of Scotland, which share its stirring tale.
