And held the kintra side in fear.”
And again, an old song commences—
“There'll be nae shearing here the year,
For the craws hae eaten the bear the year.”
But the day advances, and you’d better advance along with it, for “you've many a mile to go” before you get back to your comfortable quarters at Conistone. Push on then, along the bye road through the fields, and you again reach the high road. You follow it through the farm-yard—take the gate to the right, and pursue a rough way meandering pleasantly for about a mile through an irregularly-wooded vale. The enormous heaps of loose blue stone on every side of you are from the slate quarries, of which I shall perhaps tell you more when I have more time.
RIVER AND BRIDGE.
The stream you now approach is a branch of the Brathay, which rises on Wrynose and other hills round the head of Little Langdale, down which valley it flows, forming a fine fall at Colwith and at Skelwith, after joining the Great Langdale branch in Elterwater, and become a principal feeder of the “Regal Windermere;” you stand upon the verge of Lancashire, for this brook here divides it from Westmorland. Don’t cross it as yet, but follow its course upwards on the Lancashire side, and you will soon fall in with a primitive stone bridge—one of the very few remaining of those whose rapid disappearance Mr Wordsworth deplores, whilst he expresses admiration of “the daring and graceful contempt of danger and accommodation with which so many of them are constructed, the rudeness of form of some, and their endless variety.” If neglect of danger and accommodation, and rudeness of form, be the distinguishing and essential attributes of the class, this, connecting Tilberthwaite with Little Langdale, and called Slater’s Bridge, ought certainly to be preserved as an exquisite and unique specimen of a style of bridge all but extinct; for the sturdy Dalesmen perversely prefer bridges that are safe and commodious, though they may sacrifice the picturesque and rudeness of form to obtain these vulgar requisites.
DOCTRINES OF MR. WORDSWORTH.
Pass by, not over, the bridge—a horse passing over it might remind one of the famous asinine performer on the tight-rope—and you come to the hamlet of Hallgarth, which has little to distinguish it from a thousand others, save the rather uncomfortable peculiarity of not being touched upon by the “blessed sun” for about three months in the year. As you leave it by a steep acclivity, you had better take a survey of Little Langdale which lies spread out at your feet. Rather farther than midway between you and the abruptly rising range of hill called Lingmoor, which divides this vale from its larger namesake, lies Langdale Tarn, which bears out the Poet Laureate's assertion, that “Tarns are often surrounded by an unsightly tract of boggy ground.” The chief beauty of Little Langdale consists in the irregular hillocky nature of its ground and the sites of its dwellings, many of which nestle so cozily in little dells, behind rocky knolls, and beneath umbrageous trees, as to convey a notion of the most attractive snugness; but here I am heretic enough to dispute the infallibility of the Poet Laureate’s taste. He has declared war against whitewash in something like the following terms:—“The objections to white, as a colour, in large spots or masses in landscapes, especially in a mountainous country, are insurmountable”—and, quoting somebody who says “that white destroys the gradations A WORD FOR WHITE HOUSES.of distance,” he holds on thus—“Five or six white houses, scattered over a valley, by their obtrusiveness, dot the surface, and divide it into triangles, or other mathematical figures, haunting the eye, and disturbing that repose which might otherwise be perfect.” By the bye, a fair lady, whose opinion, in most matters of taste, I hold in the deepest reverence, recently became a convert to this doctrine of Mr Wordsworth, because she noticed the effect just instanced, not when gazing upon a landscape, but when compiling patch work in which fragments of white intruded amongst the blues, yellows, greens, reds, and neutrals, woefully disturbed the harmony and repose of the cushion cover or quilt. Mr Wordsworth says also, in support of his anti-whitewashing theory, that “in nature, pure white is scarcely ever found but in small objects, such as flowers; or in those which are transitory, as the clouds, foam on rivers, and snow.” But I must remind those who take for gospel every word that Mr Wordsworth preaches, that the “White Cliffs of England,” the snows upon a thousand hills, and the foam of a thousand cataracts are neither minute nor transitory; and that large masses of white in nature, such as these, as well as white clouds, and the terrible white of a stormy sea upon a rocky coast are all calculated to excite sensations of the sublime and beautiful in any bosom, whether the possessor be very much of a man of feeling and imagination or the reverse. But coming back to cottages, with all due deference to the Poet Laureate’s argument, and with more to that of his fair and talented supporter, I do maintain that no objects can give such a gratifying air of life and cheerfulness to a valley surrounded, or not, by high mountains, or so strikingly enhance the bright green of herbage and foliage, or the more sombre, but warmer, tints of near or distant hills, as a liberal sprinkling over the landscape of pure white cottages, embosomed, as these are, each in its own OUT-DOORS AND IN-DOORS CONTRASTED.nest of sheltering trees; and I do wish that the farmers of Langdale, and all our other fell-dales, would expend a shilling or two annually on lime, and bestow upon their romantically situated homesteads, “the cleanly, pleasant appearance derivable from a plentiful periodical application of white-wash.” Their present grim, dingy, almost squalid exteriors, are strongly suggestive to the mind of a stranger of internal poverty, desolation and dirt, than which nothing can be more distant from their real in-door condition; for, in all these scattered houses, miserable as they look externally, there is abundance for the wants of the inmates and for the requirements of hospitality, and their cleanliness is such that, as I have partaken of many meals spread upon their unclothed tables, so, in the absence of a table, would I not scruple to eat my dinner if laid upon any of their blue flagged floors,[A] for those are cleaner than many table-cloths I have seen in the course of my peregrinations through other countries.
[A] It is said that “great wits jump together,” and it would appear that, under certain circumstances, the same saltatory exploit may be performed by a great and a small wit; for instance, Miss Martineau in her capital essay on the Lake District, treating of the inside cleanliness of the houses, makes nearly the same remark as I have made above. I am sorry that I cannot conscientiously adopt the complaint of the very modern literary gentleman who accused Shakspeare of forestalling all his best ideas, because the above passage, or at least the same idea, if it be one, occurred in the first edition of these papers, and was printed above three years before the appearance of Miss Martineau’s work.