Daylight versus Moonlight—Possible Results of Moonlight Laking or Love-Making—Conistone Hall—“The Hall Clipping”—Vale of Yewdale—Yewdale Crags—Old Yew Tree—Raven Crag—Hunting Incident.
Some harmless individuals who desiderate the reputation of a taste for the romantic, and fancy that such reputation is to be attained by affecting to think differently from the ordinary race of observers, maintain that this lake and the circumjacent landscape, like the ruins of Melrose, as described (unseen, except by daylight) by Sir Walter Scott, are seen to most advantage by moonlight. I don't agree with them! The beauties around you are so numerous, so diversified, such perfect realities, and the deformities or defects in the scenery are so few and so minute, that no softening or shadowing is required to enhance a reasonable man’s enjoyment of the loveliness of Conistone. The more extensively, and the more distinctly its features are developed, the more must it be admired. As with some rare specimens of human nature, “the more you see of it, the better you like it.” Therefore, be it mine to gaze upon, to exhibit and to dilate upon the attractions of this “our own fair vale,” just when the “sun of the morning” has mopped up the mists of the night,—when mountains and mere, crags and cottages, woods and waterfalls, fields and fell-sides, are fairly lighted up, and fully brought into view in all their proud proportions, and in all their contrasted colours. And, moreover, as Conistone is best seen under
MONITION.
“One unclouded blaze of living light,”
so will any susceptible young gentleman like yourself best consult his well-being by forswearing all loitering by moonlight, whether for laking or love-making purposes. I myself, in those days “when hope was high and life was young,” grievously deteriorated my mental quiet, as well as my physical comfort, by indulging in these too natural propensities, as may be evidenced by the following rhymes which, under the retrospect of wounded feelings and aching bones, I felt constrained to indite, and now offer to you by way of caution against yielding to the promptings of an excitable imagination; and, first, what say you to this?
Matter of Moonshine.
Where the hazels droop o'er a lake-laved slope,
Sat a sweet little maid and I,
And a chastened light lay softly bright
On water, wood, and sky;