The deaths of Buttermere tell each their peculiar story. Of the seven who have passed away since the year 1840, one was an old man who had seen the snow for eighty winters lie upon Red Pike; another was little Mary Clarke, who for eight years only had frolicked in the sunshine of the happy valley. Two were brothers, working at the slate-quarries high up on Honister Craig: one had fallen from a ladder down the precipice side—the other, a tall and stalwart man, had, in the presence of his two boys, been carried up bodily into the air by a whirlwind, and dashed to death on the craigs below. Of the rest, one died of typhus fever, and another, stricken by the same disease, was brought, at his special request, from a distance of twenty-one miles, to end his days in his mountain home. The last, a young girl of twenty, perished by her own hand—the romance of village life! Mary Lightfoot, wooed by her young master, the farmer’s son, of Gatesgarth, sat till morning awaiting his return from Keswick, whither he had gone to court another. Through the long, lone night, the misgivings of her heart had grown by daylight into certainty. The false youth came back with other kisses on his lip, and angry words for her. Life lost its charms for Mary, and she could see no peace but in the grave.[[1]]
[1]. The custom of night courtship is peculiar to the county of Cumberland and some of the districts of South Wales. The following note, explanatory of the circumstance, is taken from the last edition of “The Cumberland Ballads of Robert Anderson,” a work to be found, well thumbed, in the pocket of every Cumbrian peasant-girl and mountain shepherd:—“A Cumbrian peasant pays his addresses to his sweetheart during the silence and solemnity of midnight. Anticipating her kindness, he will travel ten or twelve miles, over hills, bogs, moors, and morasses, undiscouraged by the length of the road, the darkness of the night, or the intemperance of the weather; on reaching her habitation, he gives a gentle tap at the window of her chamber, at which signal she immediately rises, dresses herself, and proceeds with all possible silence to the door, which she gently opens, lest a creaking hinge, or a barking dog should awaken the family. On his entrance into the kitchen, the luxuries of a Cumbrian cottage—cream and sugared curds—are placed before him; next the courtship commences, previously to which, the fire is darkened and extinguished, lest its light should guide to the window some idle or licentious eye; in this dark and uncomfortable situation (at least uncomfortable to all but lovers), they remain till the advance of day, depositing in each other’s bosoms the secrets of love, and making vows of unalterable affection.”
Nor are the other social facts of Buttermere less interesting.
According to a return obtained by two gentlemen, who represented themselves as members of the London Statistical Society, and who, after a week’s enthusiasm and hearty feeding at the Fish Inn, suddenly disappeared, leaving behind them the Occupation Abstract of the inhabitants and a geological hammer,—according to these gentlemen, we repeat, the seventy-two Buttermerians may be distributed as follows: two innkeepers, four farmers (including one statesman and one sinecure constable), nine labourers (one of them a miner, one a quarrier, and one the parish-clerk), twelve farm-servants, seventeen sons, nine daughters, fourteen wives, three widows, one ’squire, and one pauper of eighty-six years of age.
“But,” says the Pudding-lane reader, “if this be the entire community, how do the people live? where are the shops? where that glorious interchange of commodities, without which society cannot exist! Where do they get their bread—their meat—their tea—their sugar—their clothing—their shoes? If ill, what becomes of them? Their children, where are they taught? Their money, where is it deposited? Their letters?—for surely they cannot be cut off from all civilization by the utter absence of post-office and postman! Are they beyond the realms of justice, that no attorney is numbered amongst their population? They have a constable—where, then, the magistrate? They have a parish-clerk—then where the clergyman?”
Alas! reader, the picturesque is seldom associated with the conveniences or luxuries of life. Wash the peasant-girl’s face and bandoline her hair, she proves but a bad vignette for that most unpicturesque of books—the Book of Beauty. Whitewash the ruins and make them comfortable; what artist would waste his pencils upon them? So is it with Buttermere: there the traveller will find no butcher, no baker, no grocer, no draper, no bookseller, no pawnbroker, no street-musicians, no confectioners, and no criminals. Burst your pantaloons—oh, mountain tourist!—and it is five miles to the nearest tailor. Wear the sole of your shoe to the bone on the sharp craigs of Robinson or of the Goat-gills, and you must walk to Lowes Water for a shoemaker. Be mad with the toothache, caught from continued exposure to the mountain breeze, and, go which way you will—to Keswick or to Cockermouth—it is ten miles to the nearest chemist. Be seized with the pangs of death, and you must send twenty miles, there and back, for Dr. Johnson to ease your last moments. To apprise your friends by letter of your danger, a messenger must go six miles before the letter can be posted. If you desire to do your duty to those you may leave behind, you must send three leagues to Messrs. Brag and Steal to make your will, and they must travel the same distance before either can perform the office for you. You wish to avail yourself of the last consolations of the Church; the clergyman, who oscillates in his duties between Withorp and Buttermere (an interval of twelve miles), has, perhaps, just been sent for to visit the opposite parish, and is now going, at a hard gallop, in the contrary direction, to another parishioner. Die! and you must be taken five miles in a cart to be buried; for though Buttermere boasts a church, it stands upon a rock, from which no sexton has yet been found hardy enough to quarry out a grave!
But these are the mere dull, dry matters of fact of Buttermere—the prose of its poetry. The ciphers tell us nothing of the men or their mountains. We might as well be walking in the Valley of Dry Bones, with Maculloch, Porter, Macgregor, or the Editor of the Economist, for our guides. Such teachers strip all life of its emotions, and dress the earth in one quaker’s suit of drab. All they know of beauty is, that it does not belong to the utilities of life—feeling with them is merely the source of prejudice—and everything that refines or dignifies humanity, is by such men regarded as sentimentalism or rodomontade.
And yet, the man who could visit Buttermere without a sense of the sublimity and the beauty which encompass him on every side, must be indeed dead to the higher enjoyments of life. Here, the mountains heave like the billows of the land, telling of the storm that swept across the earth before man was on it. Here, deep in their huge bowl of hills, lie the grey-green waters of Crummock and of Buttermere, tinted with the hues of the sloping fells around them, as if the mountain dyes had trickled into their streams. Look which way you will, the view is blocked up by giant cliffs. Far at the end stands a mighty mound of rocks, umber with the shadows of the masses of cloud that seem to rest upon its jagged tops, while the haze of the distance hangs about it like a bloom. On the one side and in front of this rise the peaks of High Craig, High Stile, and Red Pike, far up into the air, breaking the clouds as they pass, and the white mists circling and wreathing round their warted tops, save where the blue sky peeps brightly between them and the sun behind streams between the peaks, gilding every craig. The rays go slanting down towards the lake, leaving the steep mountain sides bathed in a rich dark shadow—while the waters below, here dance in the light, sparkling and shimmering, like scales of a fish, and there, swept by the sudden gust, the spray of their tiny waves is borne along the surface in a powdery shower. Here the steep sloping sides are yellow-green with the stinted verdure, spotted red, like rust, with the withered fern, or tufted over with the dark green furze. High up, the bare, ash-grey rocks thrust themselves through the sides, like the bones of the meagre Earth. The brown slopes of the more barren craigs are scored and gashed across with black furrows, showing the course of dried up torrents; while in another place, the mountain stream comes leaping down from craig to craig, whitening the hill-side as with wreaths of snow, and telling of the “tarn” which lies silent and dark above it, deep buried in the bosom of the mountain. Beside this, climbs a Wood, feathering the mountain sides, and yet so lost in the immensity that every tree seems but a blade of fern. Then, as you turn round to gaze upon the hills behind you, and bend your head far back to catch the Moss’s highest craigs, you see blocks and blocks of stone tumbled one over the other, in a disorder that fills and confounds the mind, with trees jutting from their fissures, and twisting their bare roots under the huge stones, like cords to lash them to their places; while the mountain sheep, red with ruddle, stands perched on some overhanging craig, nipping the scanty herbage. And here, as you look over the tops of Hassness Wood, you see the blue smoke of the unseen cottage curling lightly up into the air, and blending itself with the bloom of the distant mountains. Then, as you journey on, you hear the mountain streams, now trickling softly down the sides, now hoarsely rushing down a rocky bed, and now, in gentle and harmonious hum, vying with the breeze as it comes sighing down the valley.
Central between the Waters, and nestling in its mountains, lies the little village of Buttermere, like a babe in its mother’s lap. Scarce half-a-dozen houses, huddled together like sheep for mutual shelter from the storm, make up the humble mountain home. On each side, in straggling order, perched up in the hill-side nooks, the other dwellings group themselves about it. In the centre stands the unpretending village inn. Behind it stretched the rich, smooth, and velvety meadows, spotted with red cattle, and looking doubly green and soft and level, from the rugged, brown, and barren mountains, that rise abrupt upon them. To stand in these fields, separating as they do the twin waters, is, as it were, to plant the foot upon the solid lake, and seem to float upon some verdant raft. High on the rock, fronting the humble inn, stands sideways the little church, smaller than the smallest cottage, with its two bells in tiny belfry crowning its gable end, and backed by the distant mountain that shows through the opening pass made by the hill on whose foot it rests. Round and about it circles the road, in its descent towards the homesteads that are grey with the stone, and their roofs green with the slate of their native hills, harmonious in every tint and shade with all around them. Beside the bridge spanning the angry nook which hurries brawling round the blocks of stone that intercept its course, stands the other and still more humble inn, half clad in ivy, and hiding the black arch through which the mountain “beck,” white with foam, comes dashing round the turn.
In the village road, for street there is none, not a creature is to be seen, save where a few brown or mottled “short-horns” straggle up from the meadows,—now stopping to stare vacantly about them, now capering purposeless with uplifted tails, or butting frolicsome at each other; then marching to the brook, and standing knee-deep in the scurrying waters, with their brown heads bent down to drink, and the rapid current curling white around their legs, while others go leaping through the stream, splashing the waters in transparent sheets about them. Not a fowl is to be seen scratching at the soil, nor duck waddling pompously toward the stream. Not even a stray dog crosses the roadway, unless it be on the Sunday, and then every peasant or farmer who ascends the road has his sharp-nosed, shaggy sheep-dog following at his heels, and vying with his master in the enjoyment of their mutual holiday. Here, too, ofttimes may be seen some aged dame, with large white cap, and bright red kerchief pinned across her bosom, stooping to dip her pail into the brook; while over the bridge, just showing above the coping-stone, appears the grey-coated farmer, with drab hat, and mounted on his shaggy brown pony, on his way to the neighbouring market. Here, too, the visitor may sometimes see the farmers’ wives grouped outside one of the homestead gates—watching their little lasses set forth on their five-mile pilgrimage to school, their baskets filled with their week’s provisions hanging on their arms, and the hoods of their blue-grey cloaks dancing as they skip playfully along, thoughtless of the six days’ absence, or mountain road before them. At other times, some good-wife or ruddy servant girl, sallies briskly from the neighbouring farm, and dodges across the road the truant pig that has dashed boldly from the midden. Anon, climbing the mountain side, saunters some low-built empty cart, with white horse, and grey-coated carter, now, as it winds up the road, hidden by the church, now disappearing in the circling of the path behind the slope, then seen high above the little belfry, and hanging, as it were, by the hill side, as the carter pauses to talk with the pedlar, who, half buried in his pack, descends the mountain on his way to the village. Then, again ascending, goes the cart, higher and higher, till it reach the highest platform, to vanish behind the mountain altogether from the sight.