Passages from the English Notebooks, Complete

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

We arrived at the Lowwood Hotel, which is very near the head of the lake, not long after two o'clock. It stands almost on the shore of Windermere, with only a green lawn between,—an extensive hotel, covering a good deal of ground; but low, and rather village-inn-like than lofty. We found the house so crowded as to afford us no very comfortable accommodations, either as to parlor or sleeping-rooms, and we find nothing like the home-feeling into which we at once settled down at Newby Bridge. There is a very pretty vicinity, and a fine view of mountains to the northwest, sitting together in a family group, sometimes in full sunshine, sometimes with only a golden gleam on one or two of them, sometimes all in a veil of cloud, from which here and there a great, dusky head raises itself, while you are looking at a dim obscurity. Nearer, there are high, green slopes, well wooded, but with such decent and well-behaved wood as you perceive has grown up under the care of man; still no wildness, no ruggedness,—as how should there be, when, every half-mile or so, a porter's lodge or a gentleman's gateway indicates that the whole region is used up for villas. On the opposite shore of the lake there is a mimic castle, which I suppose I might have mistaken for a real one two years ago. It is a great, foolish toy of gray stone.

A steamboat comes to the pier as many as six times a day, and stage-coaches and omnibuses stop at the door still oftener, communicating with Ambleside and the town of Windermere, and with the railway, which opens London and all the world to us. We get no knowledge of our fellow-guests, all of whom, like ourselves, live in their own circles, and are just as remote from us as if the lake lay between. The only words I have spoken since arriving here have been to my own family or to a waiter, save to one or two young pedestrians who met me on a walk, and asked me the distance to Lowwood Hotel. "Just beyond here," said I, and I might stay for months without occasion to speak again.

Yesterday forenoon J——- and I walked to Ambleside,—distant barely two miles. It is a little town, chiefly of modern aspect, built on a very uneven hillside, and with very irregular streets and lanes, which bewilder the stranger as much as those of a larger city. Many of the houses look old, and are probably the cottages and farm-houses which composed the rude village a century ago; but there are stuccoed shops and dwellings, such as may have been built within a year or two; and three hotels, one of which has the look of a good old village inn; and the others are fashionable or commercial establishments. Through the midst of the village comes tumbling and rumbling a mountain streamlet, rushing through a deep, rocky dell, gliding under an old stone inch, and turning, when occasion calls, the great block of a water-mill. This is the only very striking feature of the village,—the stream taking its rough pathway to the lake as it used to do before the poets had made this region fashionable.

In the evening, just before eight o'clock, I took a walk alone, by a road which goes up the hill, back of our hotel, and which I supposed might be the road to the town of Windermere. But it went up higher and higher, and for the mile or two that it led me along, winding up, I saw no traces of a town; but at last it turned into a valley between two high ridges, leading quite away from the lake, within view of which the town of Windermere is situated. It was a very lonely road, though as smooth, hard, and well kept as any thoroughfare in the suburbs of a city; hardly a dwelling on either side, except one, half barn, half farm-house, and one gentleman's gateway, near the beginning of the road, and another more than a mile above. At, two or three points there were stone barns, which are here built with great solidity. At one place there was a painted board, announcing that a field of five acres was to be sold, and referring those desirous of purchasing to a solicitor in London. The lake country is but a London suburb. Nevertheless, the walk was lonely and lovely; the copses and the broad hillside, the glimpses of the lake, the great misty company of pikes and fells, beguiled me into a sense of something like solitude; and the bleating of the sheep, remote and near, had a like tendency. Gaining the summit of the hill, I had the best view of Windermere which I have yet attained,—the best, I should think, that can be had, though, being towards the south, it brings the softer instead of the more striking features of the landscape into view. But it shows nearly the whole extent of the lake, all the way from Lowwood, beyond Newby Bridge, and I think there can hardly be anything more beautiful in the world. The water was like a strip and gleam of sky, fitly set among lovely slopes of earth. It was no broader than many a river, and yet you saw at once that it could be no river, its outline being so different from that of a running stream, not straight nor winding, but stretching to one side or the other, as the shores made room for it.

This morning it is raining, and we are not very comfortable nor contented, being all confined to our little parlor, which has a broken window, against which I have pinned The Times to keep out the chill damp air. U—— has been ill, in consequence of having been overheated at Newby Bridge. We have no books, except guide-books, no means of amusement, nothing to do. There are no newspapers, and I shall remember Lowwood not very agreeably. As far as we are concerned, it is a scrambling, ill-ordered hotel, with insufficient attendance, wretched sleeping-accommodations, a pretty fair table, but German-silver forks and spoons; our food does not taste very good, and yet there is really no definite fault to be found with it.

Since writing the above, I have found the first volume of Sir Charles Grandison, and two of G. P. R. James's works, in the coffee-room. The days pass heavily here, and leave behind them a sense of having answered no very good purpose. They are long enough, at all events, for the sun does not set till after eight o'clock, and rises I know not when. One of the most remarkable distinctions between England and the United States is the ignorance into which we fall of whatever is going on in the world the moment we get away from the great thoroughfares and centres of life. In Leamington we heard no news from week's end to week's end, and knew not where to find a newspaper; and here the case is neither better nor worse. The rural people really seem to take no interest in public affairs; at all events, they have no intelligence on such subjects. It is possible that the cheap newspapers may, in time, find their way into the cottages, or, at least, into the country taverns; but it is not at all so now. If they generally know that Sebastopol is besieged, it is the extent of their knowledge. The public life of America is lived through the mind and heart of every man in it; here the people feel that they have nothing to do with what is going forward, and, I suspect, care little or nothing about it. Such things they permit to be the exclusive concern of the higher classes.

In front of our hotel, on the lawn between us and the lake, there are two trees, which we have hitherto taken to be yews; but on examining them more closely, I find that they are pine-trees, and quite dead and dry, although they have the aspect of dark rich life. But this is caused by the verdure of two great ivy-vines, which have twisted round them like gigantic snakes, and, clambering up and throttling the life out of them, have put out branches, and made crowns of thick green leaves, so that, at a little distance, it is quite impossible not to take them for genuine trees. The trunks of the ivy-vines must be more than a foot in circumference, and one feels they have stolen the life that belonged to the pines. The dead branches of one of the pines stick out horizontally through the ivy-boughs. The other shows nothing but the ivy, and in shape a good deal resembles a poplar. When the pine trunks shall have quite crumbled away, the ivy-stems will doubtless have gained sufficient strength to sustain themselves independently.

July 19th.—Yesterday S——- went down the lake in the steamboat to take U——, baby, and nurse to Newby Bridge, while the three rest of us should make a tour through the lake region. After mamma's departure, and when I had finished some letters, J——- and I set out on a walk, which finally brought us to Bowness, through much delightful shade of woods, and past beautiful rivulets or brooklets, and up and down many hills. This chief harbor of the lakes seemed alive and bustling with tourists, it being a sunny and pleasant day, so that they were all abroad, like summer insects. The town is a confused and irregular little place, of very uneven surface. There is an old church in it, and two or three large hotels. We stayed there perhaps half an hour, and then went to the pier, where shortly a steamer arrived, with music sounding,—on the deck of which, with her back to us, sat a lady in a gray travelling-dress. J——- cried out, "Mamma! mamma!" to which the lady deigned no notice, but, he repeating it, she turned round, and was as much surprised, no doubt, to see her husband and son, as if this little lake had been the great ocean, and we meeting each other from opposite shores of it. We soon steamed back to Lowwood, and took a car thence for Rydal and Grasmere, after a cold luncheon. At Bowness I met Miss Charlotte Cushman, who has been staying at the Lowwood Hotel with us since Monday, without either party being aware of it.

Our road to Rydal lay through Ambleside, which is certainly a very pretty town, and looks cheerfully in a sunny day. We saw Miss Martineau's residence, called "The Knoll," standing high up on a hillock, and having at its foot a Methodist chapel, for which, or whatever place of Christian worship, this good lady can have no occasion. We stopped a moment in the street below her house, and deliberated a little whether to call on her; but concluded we would not.

After leaving Ambleside, the road winds in and out among the hills, and soon brings us to a sheet (or napkin, rather than a sheet) of water, which the driver tells us is Rydal Lake! We had already heard that it was but three quarters of a mile long, and one quarter broad; still, it being an idea of considerable size in our minds, we had inevitably drawn its ideal, physical proportions on a somewhat corresponding scale. It certainly did look very small; and I said, in my American scorn, that I could carry it away easily in a porringer; for it is nothing more than a grass-bordered pool among the surrounding hills which ascend directly from its margin; so that one might fancy it, not, a permanent body of water, but a rather extensive accumulation of recent rain. Moreover, it was rippled with a breeze, and so, as I remember it, though the sun shone, it looked dull and sulky, like a child out of humor. Now, the best thing these small ponds can do is to keep perfectly calm and smooth, and not attempt to show off any airs of their own, but content themselves with serving as a mirror for whatever of beautiful or picturesque there may be in the scenery around them. The hills about Rydal Water are not very lofty, but are sufficiently so as objects of every-day view,— objects to live with; and they are craggier than those we have hitherto seen, and bare of wood, which indeed would hardly grow on some of their precipitous sides.