“‘Bill,’ said coachee to I, very down like, ‘who de think that is?’
“‘Well, who be ’t, Jem?’ sez I.
“‘Why, who but the powit Wadswuth.’”
Then he would add, “If you goes to Keswick, just by the bridge you’ll see the place where we spilt the powit! Ay, often and often since that, when I’ve a-seen the grand fowks draw up to the Mount, I’ve a-said sly like to myself, ‘Ah, gentlemen, you be going to see the powit, but you never had him to call upon you, unexpected like, on a flying visit over a wall.’”
Windermere at Bowness is like what the Thames is at Richmond. Bowness is the pleasure-village of the lake country. There yachtsmen flourish and beauties linger. The band makes music in the grounds of the Royal Hotel, and the crowds promenade or float gracefully past in the dreamy waltz. Every window is open, the balconies are full of life and color, lovely faces peep out from among the clustering clematis, twinkling lights and soft strains are on the lake until midnight, and flowers, flowers, flowers touch you everywhere.
Two men, as dissimilar as possible, I can always see in the streets of Bowness—the handsome Professor Wilson, poet and athlete, whom the Westmoreland people so aptly described as “strang as a lion, lish as a trout, wi’ sich antics as niver,” and the little, plain-faced, serious Wilberforce,—Wilson joyous and strong, and settling all things “wi’ the waff o’ his hand,” Wilberforce sauntering along, as he tells us in his diary, comforting himself by repeating the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm. Wilson lived at Elleray, now close to Windermere railway-station, and Wilberforce had a residence among the stately woods of Rayrigg, just outside Bowness.
The next morning we started for Ambleside, taking on the way the village of Troutbeck. Troutbeck is a funny misnomer for the rivulet so named, for not a trout has ever been found in it. But for a typically exquisite village, no dream of painter or poet can rival it. The cottages, with their numerous gables, seem to have been built on some model conceived by the rarest poetical genius. They are of the stone and slate of the country; age has given them “a green radiance” and bathed them in the lustre of lichens. The porches are of meeting tree-stems or reclining cliffs, and are dripping with roses and matted with virgin bower. Nowhere else in the world is there “a mile-long congregation of such rural dwellings, dropped down just where a painter or poet would wish them, and bound together by old groves of ash, oak, and sycamores, by flower-gardens and fruit-orchards rich as those of the Hesperides.”...
There are places we visit and forget, but this is never the case with Ambleside; walk through its streets, and they become forever a part of the spirit’s still domains. John Ruskin, in his “Characteristics of Nature,” has referred to the peculiar influence which is exerted upon people who live in a neighborhood where granite is abundant; and Wordsworth tells us that
“One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach us more of man,
Of moral evil, and of good,
Than all the sages can.”