A Week In Wordsworth's Haunts.
We had only a week to spare, but we were not long in choosing where to spend our holiday. At that time the Lake Country was accessible, but not yet crossed through and through, by railroads. The cars took us from London almost through to Windermere, but, that being the gate of the sanctuary, they went no further. We had to cross the “Black Country,” a weird region of coal-mines and furnaces, where scarcely a blade of grass meets the eye; interminable plains, strewn with gaunt machinery and bristling with tall brick chimneys or low, wide, oven-like buildings, stretch from the track of the railroad as far as the horizon; a muffled noise, rumbling and crackling, is the only sound besides the shrill whistle of the engine; the sky is black as with the promise of ten thousand thunder-storms, the murky air hangs like a pall over the earth, and tongues of flame shoot up now and then from the mouths of the furnaces. At night the scene is gloomily splendid; everywhere lurid flashes leap up from these openings, for the work is incessant here; half-naked forms stalk from chimney to pit, wheeling giant barrows or pushing forward heavy trucks on tramways; no sound but the never-ceasing rumble of wheels and crackle of flames—apparently a silent Pandemonium or Dantesque city of Dis; at any rate, a sight that one does not easily forget.
Windermere is the largest, the most fashionable, and the best known of the English lakes. It was Saturday night when we reached it and went to an inn overlooking the calm sheet of water. The moon was up, and streaked the shadows of the great mountains that lay across the lake with her shimmering silver pathway; the little boats moored by the various landings rocked to and fro in the gentle breeze, and the wavelets came with a “swish” against the pebbly shore. Next morning, on inquiring for the Catholic church, we were told that there was a private chapel in the house of a Catholic gentleman who lived on an island in the lake, and allowed any respectable tourist to come on Sunday. We rowed over to the island, and found it all a garden: smooth lawns to the water's edge, broad gravel-paths through groves of elm and chestnut, a glowing parterre, rustic seats, fountains and marble balustrades, and by the boat-house a little group of gay skiffs dancing up and down on the blue water. The chapel was up-stairs, and there was an outside stair-case leading to it, down which we saw a familiar figure coming slowly towards us. It was that of a London priest whom we knew, and who, like us, was spending a brief holiday among the lakes. He had come over to say an early Mass; the master of the house was not at home, he said, but the chaplain would be glad to welcome all Catholics, many of whom came during the touring season. After Mass we strolled for an hour about the garden, admiring the vistas contrived [pg 796] between the trees, at the end of which glimpses of the blue sky and sparkling water, with some gray or purple peak cleaving the line of the horizon, could be seen. From every point of the lake itself these mountains strike the eye; for the most part bare of trees, their lower ledges covered with green pasture-land, and seamed here and there with the foamy streak of a beck or stream; their summits sheer rock. Their names all have a grand, free sound that suits their craggy, majestic beauty—Helm Crag, Hammar Scar, Silver How, Skiddaw. This one is the monarch of the lake country. Great How is a single, conspicuous peak rising at the foot of Lake Thirlmere, to the west of the lovely vale of Legberthwaite, near the high-road between Ambleside and Keswick. Ambleside is a favorite resort of students; young men from the two universities often come to spend the long vacation here, where reading, walking, and boating can be combined. The scenery is very beautiful; the valleys are broken up into a thousand nooks where fern and heather grow, and some tiny rivulet trickles beneath the broad-arched fronds of the bracken; every old wall wears a golden crown of celandine, or, in native dialect, pilewort; the “ghyll”—i.e., a short, steep, narrow gorge, a miniature cañon—is traversed by the foamy brook, leaping to the waterfall called in Cumberland a “force”; the birch, the rowan, the oak, cling to the rocky ledges that jut out over the little cataract, and everywhere above the greenery lies the shadow of the great lonely hills. Black Comb in Cumberland Wordsworth calls a spot fit for a “ministering angel” to choose, for from its summit, on a tolerably clear day, England, Scotland, and Ireland are all three visible. Many of the mountains, both in Cumberland and Westmoreland, have traces of inscriptions on the native rock which have by some learned men been supposed to be Runic, but which it is now generally agreed to call Roman. They are very rude, and much effaced by time and the action of the weather; hence the uncertainty.
It was by the shores of Windermere that a party of young men, all enthusiastic Tractarians, spent a vacation in one of the first years of that movement now called Puseyite and ritualistic, but then known as the Young England movement. In those days ladies washed and ironed the church linen, and wore their dainty fingers to the bone sewing surplices and embroidering altar-cloths; while others would take it by turn to sweep the churches and dust the pews; and others again, intent on doing penance, would kneel for hours on stone floors, and even use the discipline unsparingly, until the doctor's verdict put an end to their misguided zeal. Blindly they were beating about for the truth, and thought they had found it in practices of self-denial. It was a touching blindness—one that God often and often enlightened during those fruitful years. Young men made a point of exercising bodily mortification, even in vacation time, and, when thrown by circumstances amid unsympathizing companions, would carry their zeal into the commonest actions, and make a silent boast of their new-found faith. One Friday, for instance, a few young members of Parliament, assembled in the lobby of the House of Commons, called for “tea and toast” instead of the unfailing mutton-chop [pg 797] of tradition, and the mild protest created quite a sensation. On going home they were received by their several households as champions of a holy cause who, from humble beginnings, were going to bring about a mighty revolution, a national awakening. It was very beautiful, this child-like faith in their own ideal—so beautiful that God rewarded many of those who held it by leading them into the everlasting reality of the great universal, apostolic church. The athletic young hermits of Ambleside were not left out of the reckoning. One day one of them strayed out alone over the hills, with some old volume of the fathers under his arm, and his questioning young soul eager for the knowledge which the wonderful serenity of this mountain region seemed at the time to typify so well. He was out a long time, and, when he came home to his companions, he seemed to them transfigured. A new peace and yet a more ardent enthusiasm had come to him, and he spoke in words almost incomprehensible to them:
“I have found the man who has the idea!”
What had happened to him was this: In his walk he had met a young stranger, and spoken to him. Kindred thoughts and aspirations had led them into a long and eager conversation, wherein it soon appeared that the stranger, with his fair, girlish face and dreamy blue eyes, was the master, and his new friend only the humble disciple. They had talked on into the twilight, and the latter, entranced, at last asked the name of him who in a few short hours had taught him to see things in a clearer, diviner light than all the patristic reading had been able to do during his college course. The young man opened the book he had with him, and showed him his name written on the fly-leaf. It was Frederick William Faber.
From Windermere we started on our real tour. The native conveyances are called “cars,” and hold four people sitting opposite each other, but sideways and parallel with the horses. From a rough, square box, painted dark blue or green, up to a real town-made carriage in the same shape, this conveyance is universally in use over the north. Everywhere the same beautiful scenery—moist nooks, a natural fernery, tumbling waterfalls, walls covered with wild flowers; here and there an old-fashioned inn with an old-fashioned landlord, waiting himself on his customers, and sitting down to tell them at his ease all the gossip and the guide-book lore of the neighborhood, the best time to go up the mountain, when it was safe to take a boat out on the mere, the accident in the lead-mine last year, etc., etc. At such an inn, “The Swan,” we passed one night, and had an excellent and abundant rustic supper, not a hundred yards from the brand-new tourist hotel, “The Prince of Wales,” gas-lighted and high-priced, with saucy waiters and London upholstery, and each floor exactly the counterpart of the other, like a penitentiary.
Ullswater is a stormy lake, a sort of caldron enclosed in steep, forbidding rocks rising perpendicularly from the water. Above them is a wooded table-land, with old houses hidden up the slopes beyond, one a ruined monastery, with a modern home fashioned out of a few available fragments of strong mediæval masonry, and a sort of museum or armory [pg 798] contrived among the standing arches of a less useful portion of the building. It was a steep climb to get to it, and for miles on either side of the pathway, that was half a natural staircase, there was no other road to it. The view over the dark lake was impressive; the waters, calm enough now, lay beneath us like a floor of black marble, with a fringe of heavy shadows along the edge where the cliffs overhung it.
Now and then we would pass detached hamlets with their sturdy, grave population all astir, the women fine specimens of their sex, with that frank expression and grand physical development which are bred of mountain training and open-air life. Together with all the people of the north, they have many peculiar customs, and altogether form a race apart from the inhabitants of other English counties. The accents of their nervous, expressive dialect, the names of their mountains and lakes, the flavor of quaintness and individuality that hangs about their life, somehow suggest the old times of early Christianity when S. Wilfrid ruled in York, or struggled inch by inch for his invaded territory and ignored rights. Stopping to water your horses in one of these hamlets, you may see a knot of men standing silently and expectantly round the door of a clean, home-like cottage, and just outside, laid on the porch seat, a basin filled with sprigs of box-wood. The men are waiting for a coffin to be borne out, and, when it comes, they will all fall into line behind it, and each, taking a sprig from the basin, will throw it into the grave after the prayers have been said. Of course this is a Catholic reminiscence of the days when the box sprigs were used to sprinkle the coffin with holy water, as they are now in most countries on the Continent; but, besides this, box-wood is an evergreen, and therefore a symbol of the immortality of the soul.
Sometimes we would come to a little mountain tarn, across which we were ferried, car, horses, and all. The regular travelling in these regions is done by stage-coaches, of which we availed ourselves for sending forward our slender baggage, so as to be quite independent and unencumbered in our movements. The mountain lakelets, that are never mentioned in guide-books, are very beautiful with their fringe of rushes and boggy earth starred with white and golden flowers, and their flocks of teal and wild duck dwelling in peace in these undisturbed wildernesses.