"Ah! what a world lies below! But grand as it is on the earth, it is mated by the grandeur of the sky. For the cloud scenery is of such surpassing nobleness while it lasts, and before it is drawn up into one volume of intensest blue, that no kind or manner of discord mars the day's power and loveliness. Of all forms and of all colours are those gracious summer clouds, ranging from roseate flakes of dazzling white masses and torn black remnants, like the last fragments of a widow's weeds thrust aside for her maturer bridal; from solid substances, firm and marble-like, to light baby curls set like pleasant smiles about the graver faces: words and pictures, in all their changes, unspeakably precious to soul and sense. And when, finally, they all gather themselves away, and leave the sky a vault of undimmed blue, and leave the earth a gorgeous picture of human industry and dwelling—when field and plain, and mountain and lake, and tarn and river are fashioned into the beauty of a primeval earth by the purity of the air and the governing strength of the sun and the fragrant sweetness of the summer, and when the very gates of heaven seem opening for our entering where the southern sun stands at gaze in his golden majesty—is it wonder if there are tears more glad than many smiles, and a thrill of love more prayerful than many a litany chanted in the church service? In the very passion of delight that pours like wine through the veins is a solemn outfall—in the very deliciousness of joy an intensity that is almost pain. It is all so solemn and so grand, so noble and so loving, surely we cannot be less than what we live in!
"Let any one haunted by small cares, by fears worse than cares, and by passions worse than either, go up on a mountain height on such a summer's day as this, and there confront his soul with the living soul of Nature. Will the stately solitude not calm him? Can the nobleness of beauty not raise him to like nobleness? Is there no Divine voice for him in the absolute stillness? No loving hand guiding through the pathless wilds? No tenderness for man in the lavishness of Nature? Have the clouds no lesson of strength in their softness? the sun no cheering in its glory? Has the earth no hymn in all its living murmur? the air no shaping in its clearness? the wind no healing in its power? Can he stand in the midst of that great majesty the sole small thing, and shall his spirit, which should be the noblest thing of all, let itself be crippled by self and fear, till it lies crawling on the earth when its place is lifting to the heavens? Oh! better than written sermon or spoken exhortation is one hour on the lonely mountain tops, when the world seems so far off, and God and His angels so near. Into the Temple of Nature flows the light of the Shekinah, pure and strong and holy, and they are wisest who pass into it oftenest, and rest within its glory longest. There was never a church more consecrated to all good ends than the stone waste on Helvellyn top, where you sit beneath the sun and watch the bright world lying in radiant peace below, and the quiet and sacred heavens above."
Probably there is no spot of English ground to which more pilgrimages have, during the last half-century, been made than the vale of Grasmere, which has for all time been rendered classic by the residence therein of Wordsworth and those sons of genius who loved to gather around him; and almost every prominent object and scene in which has been immortalised by his pen.
To lovers of his poetry the spirit of Wordsworth yet casts a spell over the landscape; and mountain and vale and lake are almost as articulate to the hearing ear as are the storied stones of Rome. But Life's grandest music is audible only to the ready ear. It is to the "inward eye" of love, gathering its treasured harvest, that the brightest halo is revealed. Earth may be
"Crammed with heaven,"—
"But only he who sees takes off his shoes."
As Nature whispers her secrets to her true lovers; so it is to the searching eye that the historic pile presents a vision of years, and the decaying cottage or hoary mountain speak of those who consecrated its stones or roamed beneath its shade.
Apart, however, from the interest which attaches to this locality from its many cherished associations, it is of unsurpassed beauty and loveliness. The scenery of this favoured district, so pleasingly varied as to inspire at once with gladness and awe, to thrill with rapture or to charm into repose, culminates in the transcendent loveliness of the mountain-guarded vale of Grasmere. It takes captive the affections like the features of a familiar friend.
The poet Gray, writing concerning it more than a century ago, says: "Passed by the little chapel of Wiborn [Wythburn], out of which the Sunday congregation were then issuing. Passed by a beck near Dunmail Raise, and entered Westmoreland a second time; now began to see Helm crag, distinguished from its rugged neighbours, not so much by its height, as by the strange, broken outline of its top, like some gigantic building demolished, and the stones that composed it flung across each other in wild confusion. Just beyond it opens one of the sweetest landscapes that Art ever attempted to imitate. The bosom of the mountains here spreading into a broad basin, discovers in the midst Grasmere Water; its margin is hollowed into small bays, with eminences, some of rock, some of soft turf, that half conceal and half vary the figure of the little lake they command. From the shore a low promontory pushes itself into the water, and on it stands a white village, with a parish church rising in the midst of it, having enclosures, cornfields, and meadows, green as an emerald, which, with trees, and hedges, and cattle, fill up the whole space from the edge of the water, and just opposite to you is a large farmhouse at the bottom of a steep, smooth lawn, embosomed in old woods, which climb half way up the mountain sides, and discover above a broken line of crags that crown the scene. Not a single red tile, no staring gentleman's house breaks in upon the repose of this unsuspected paradise; but all is peace, rusticity, and happy poverty, in its sweetest, most becoming attire."