on where pain and death have passed, and versing on philosophy, the hymns and that whatever be the agonies, our little life, prayers of these humble worshippers must like this full day, is rounded with a sleep. have floated in through the windows, and As we pass out of Ambleside we pause mingled with the fragrance of the roses to observe a group of children stationary climbing over them. Harriet never wrote around some absorbing scene. A nearer a word against or about this chapel, which approach reveals at the centre of this ad- almost touches "The Knoll." The only miring circle an artist with his easel set thing that troubled her was the ugly out on a small grassy triangle between church steeple, which obtruded itself upon converging streets. Indefatigable artist, her every outlook, and one can hardly sketching, no doubt, the long sweep of help sympathizing with her offended Windermere, and the crags of Coniston! taste. The biography of Harriet MarBut no; our artist's eyes are bent earth- tineau is too fresh in the mind of the ward: six yards before him, prostrate on reading world for me to write much about the grass, with small bundle near him, is her here. I was pleased to find that, notan ancient wayfarer, who has there ap- withstanding her heresies, the common parently passed the night, and has not people in Ambleside held her in gentle yet awakened to his fame. His long hair and kindly remembrance. She was a is dishevelled on his shoulders; his long good neighbor, charitable to all, considtangled beard falls on his breast; his knee-erate toward the unlettered, never cynbreeches fall short of his gray stockings by several inches, leaving his knees bare and blue with the cold of the night; his coat is antediluvian with its quaint cut and brass buttons; his coarse striped shirt lies open about his neck and breast. He is indeed a picture. Such figures still haunt these weird ravines and hills, and they used to be characteristic. They are "survivals;" ancient folk of Westmoreland and Cumberland who have fallen on new and strange scenes and times, and can not keep abreast with civilization. 'Hermits," as such were called, have nearly disappeared now before the presence of irreverent tourists; but Ambleside still cherishes the memory of one who bore the reputation of a saint until he was taken to a lunatic asylum, where he died not long ago. He dwelt in a hut somewhere amid the hills near Ullswater, and was long regarded with some awe as a man of preternatural knowledge. He loved these hills and vales in his own way as devotedly as Wordsworth himself. Who knows but he was a mute, inglorious Wordsworth, a poet in the rough, whom the mere fact of his never having seen the inside of a college consigned to an asylum instead of Parnassus? 66 A little way from where the artist and his slumbering model are surrounded by their village admirers is "The Knoll," a charming villa completely covered with ivy, the garden gay with flowers, where Harriet Martineau passed so many happy years. Adjacent is a pleasant Wesleyan chapel, and many a time, while she and Mr. Atkinson and their friends were con ical or ill-tempered, always cheerful and happy as the roses and ivy of "The Knoll" she so much loved. No one ever pondered more profoundly and lovingly the mystery of nature than she, and she often saw much in scenes least regarded by ordinary eyes. For instance, she admired the small tarns, which are so apt to be eclipsed by the great lakes, and rejoiced in the good work they are doing. "After rain, if the waters came down all at once, the vales would be flooded-as we see, very inconveniently, by the consequences of improved agricultural drainage. The tarns are a security, as far as they go, and at present the only one. The lower brooks swell after the rain, and pour themselves into the rivers, while the mountain brooks are busy in the same way, emptying themselves into the tarns. By the time the streams'in the valley are subsiding the upper tarns are full, and begin to overflow; and now the overflow can be received in the valley without injury." Her sympathy with human excellence never fails because of her general dissent from the beliefs with which it may be associated. Whether it be the charity of tarns or of faithful ministers, she recognizes its greatness. Writing of little Newfield church, where the Rev. Robert Walker served so nobly a poor population for sixty long years, Miss Martineau wrote: "The church is little loftier or larger than the houses near. If it were not for the bell, the traveller would hardly distinguish it as a church on approaching; but when he has reached it he will see the porch, and the little grave-yard with a few tombs, and the spreading yew, encircled by a seat of stones and turf, on which the early comers sit and rest till the bell calls them in. A little dial on a whitened post in the middle of the inclosure tells the time to the neighbors who have no clocks. Just outside the wall is a white cottage, so humble that the stranger thinks it can not be a parsonage, though the climbing roses and glittering evergreens, and clear lattices and pure uncracked walls, make it look as if it might be. He walks slowly past the porch, and sees some one who tells him that it is indeed Robert Walker's dwelling, and who courteously invites him to see the scene of those life-long charities. Here it was that the distant parishioners were fed on Sundays with broth, for which the whole week's supply of meat was freely bestowed. Hither it was that in winter he sent the benumbed children in companies from the school in the church to warm themselves at the single house hold fire, while he himself sat by the altar | Coniston the very seams of the rocks on during the whole of the school hours, keeping warmth in him by the exercise of the spinning-wheel." Standing in front of "The Knoll," where the old lady used to sit in the sunshine, as she passed down the gentle flower-wreathed path that led from a life of toil to a peaceful grave, fair Nature appeared to me a more bountiful mother than her children have yet recognized. Here on her great breast she has nourished and soothed with impartial love the pious Felicia and the heretical Harriet, devout Wordsworth and skeptical Shelley, men of the world seeking respite from commercial cares, and mystics moving in worlds unrealized. distant mountains are seen, the snowy torrents are visible even to the beads of their foam, and we can see their furze so plainly that we almost listen to hear the droning of the bees amid it. When we arrived at those tarns about which Miss Martineau wrote so earnestly, and stopped for the Abbé to sketch the chief of them and the hills rising beyond, I watched the surface of these liquid mirrors, and they sometimes were strange as magic mirrors. Once in particular the wind swept rather strongly over the large one near us, and it seemed to darken with reflections of frowning faces in the airvague indefinable shapes not in the clear sky nor on the hills. The wind drew its own weird pictures on the water. I had As never before seen such an effect. A little toward later and the same wind which had sud When days are clear in the Lake dis trict they are wondrously clear. drive on this radiant morning we Some denly sprung up summoned from an un- | lected fairy-land for the purpose. seen cloud-land a number of clouds of of these young people are readers of various shades, which all seemed swiftly Wordsworth too. At least I judge so from sailing southward, as if definitely guided having heard one of these youths, who to some common point. There must have came in hungry, call for trout with the re been a congress of aerial genii somewhere | mark to his bride, "To me the humblest that afternoon. How they frescoed the hills and vales with their shadows! The great Langdale Pikes even seemed to nod in the distance. The vast landscape seemed astir; the mighty hills once more melted and waved under the ebb and flow of cloud-shadows. In no two looks could one see the same landscape, or the same mountain or lake, so often were they transformed by this revolutionary movement of light clouds. Arrived at the fine hotel at Coniston Water-the Waterhead Hotel-we found ourselves in land where the honey-moon blooms with notable resplendence. It was beaming on two young faces in the dining-room (though slightly clouded so long as our luncheon lasted), and out on the lawn, wherever we ventured to seek a good point of view, we had the misfortune to startle young people rehearsing their honey-moonlight sonatas. We could not but acknowledge that Coniston was a well-se trout that swims could give thoughts too deep for tears!" The bride, being poetical, was properly shocked. It is generally young university men whom one meets in this neighborhood. One never meets with any roughs (always excepting holidays), rarely with any vulgar people. It has been of old the favorite place for reading parties of university under-graduates to come and enjoy walking, boating, bathing, talking, while they are completing their studies for examination. They are genial, affable, hearty, and there is no other place where Young England may be seen to such advantage. Mr. John Ruskin's villa, Brantwood, is visible just across the head of Coniston Water. Since his severe illness, and his leaving the State Professorship of Art at Oxford, which sorely taxed a man so conscientious in the fulfillment of his duties, Mr. Ruskin has much improved in health. And if Manchester would only turn Thirl mere Lake into its reservoir, or else abandon the notion, this brilliant author might be expected to live long and peacefully in his charming abode. But he is now haunted by the phantasm of moiling Manchester swallowing up his favorite lake, as the giant Thor tried to swallow up the sea. The god of the Hammer failed then, and the city of the Hammer may fail now. But one might think so benevolent a gentleman might find something picturesque in Thirlmere going to refresh and wash the million toilers in the mills. The founder of the new Society of St. George might now be represented as an armed saint contending with a dragon (whose horns will be factory chimneys), to prevent its devouring a fair Lady of the Lake. But why should he not be equally chivalrous for the Manchester ladies actually in the dragon's mouth? It has occurred to me, when listening to this unique man, whose talk is equally charming in public and private, to speculate what might have been the result had he possessed a little more humor. His satire sometimes almost amounts to it, but never quite reaches it. Had he the power of Carlyle to laugh heartily, he would have been a happier man; but would the world have had its great art-critic? Laughter and humor depend on incon gruities, and anything incongruous, grotesque, out of proportion, gives Ruskin as much pain as a cut from a knife. Mr. Ruskin appears to me to have been for some time a living illustration of the development of the artistic nature which Goethe has mystically dramatized in the second part of Faust. As Faust finds in Art (symbolized by Helena) merely the raiment of the real Art, the art of Life, and floats away on her garment to be set before his task, in accomplishing which he finds repose, so has this fine artist of England become impatient of mere pictorial beauty, and to demand fiercely the reality it seemed to promise him. He has sold most of his beautiful pictures, and come to sit down in full view of Coniston Old Man-a great, rugged mountain (it is 2633 feet), a perfect symbol of wild strength in repose. Here he is scheming and planning that ideal village community on which he can look, and then lie down amid the roses, and say, with dying Faust, "Remain-thou art fair." He has some cultured and sympathetic neighbors, among these Mr. and Mrs. Marshall, of Monk Coniston-a mansion possessing pleasant and picturesque grounds. We were indebted to Mrs. Marshall for advice as to our further wanderings which we found very useful. As for the man sion, although something has been done to improve the original structure, the Abbé found the ancient farm-house occupied by one of their tenants more to his purpose. The next point made for was Hawkeshead. This village presents more of the signs of antiquity than any other in the Lakes; there are probably few in England that can show such quaint old houses, with so much well-carved wood-work about them. Here is an ancient Baptist chapel, and I can well believe in the justice of its reputation as among the oldest of the Dissenting places of worship in this kingdom. There is also an old meetinghouse of the Quakers, standing apart, snow-white, in its peaceful grove. Yet these buildings are mere things of yesterday compared with a farm-house near the road, whose mullioned window arrested our attention. In this house several of the monks of Furness Abbey resided, and the abbots held their manor courts in the room lighted by that mullioned window. It was in this ancient town that Wordsworth was sent to school, and by far the | best of his poetry is connected with it, and the development of his mind in boyhood under the influence of nature. We carried some introduction to the master of the famous school, Mr. H. T. Baines, whom we found thoroughly informed about all we desired to know in that neighborhood. The ancient schoolroom is kept so clean and ventilated that one could not imagine its great age were it not for the desks and benches. These have been so notched, dated, autographed, by many generations of boys, that an urchin now could hardly find space for the smallest initial. Perhaps the care with which the masters have for a long time guarded with pride the signatures of the brothers Wordsworth may have given rise to a notion among the lads that to cut one's name there is the first step toward becoming a poet or a bishop. There can have been few Hawkeshead boys, judging by the wood-cuts they have left, who have not shown something of the Wordsworthian aspiration to make a name in the world, and date it. |