the Lakes; so busy, modern, respectable, that I felt a little chilled after coming out of the dreamy land of Grasmere. It is the very place one would associate with Southey, its most famous resident, who came to reside at Greta Hall after he had buried the dreams of his youth. For that matter it might be said that Wordsworth had buried his too; but no, his were slain in the streets of Paris at the Revolution, and when he came back he revived them all in an interior world, where violence could no Leader" was an idealized portrait Wordsworth, and it reports accurately the general feeling about him at the time it was written. But Wordsworth felt that this impression was not true. I have heard that he never was Samuel Taylor Coleridge preceded Southknown to be in a rage, except when near- ey at Greta Hall, and was the man who ing that some one (not Browning) had de- induced him to come. "Our house," scribed him as reactionary. "Tell him he wrote Coleridge (1801), "stands on a low lies," thundered Wordsworth. This in- hill, the whole front of which is one field ward conviction that he was himself mis- and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of judged led him to defend Southey jealous- which is a nursery garden. Behind the ly from similar charges. Thomas Cooper, house is an orchard, and a small wood on author of The Purgatory of Suicides, who a steep slope, at the foot of which flows was imprisoned as a Chartist, and from be- the river Greta, which winds round, and ing a radical is now an orthodox preacher, catches the evening lights in front of the visited Wordsworth in 1846. The laureate house. In front we have a giants' camp received him kindly at Rydal Mount, and an encamped army of tent-like mountsaid: "You were quite right; there is nothing unreasonable in your Charter. It is the foolish attempt at physical force for which many of you have been blamable." He warmly defended Southey from the charge of having been influenced by corrupt motives in changing his political opinions. Poor Southey had then recently died. ains, which, by an inverted arch, gives a Be you have not seen in all your wander- | ter and Lodore under his guidance. It ings." Coleridge mentions that he has was a charming afternoon when we rowed access to "the princely library of Sir in the path of Dr. Syntax on the same Guilfred Lawson," a baronet now suc- lake. ceeded by Sir Wilfrid Lawson, M.P. for Carlisle, famous as the champion who "With curious eye and active scent I on the picturesque was bent." gives King Alcohol so much trouble. Sir Wilfrid is the man who reflects most honor upon Cumberland: wealth and rank have not in the least brought any reaction to that natural nobleman, whose presence, when he rises in the House of Commons, commands admiration from even those who wince under his sharp thrusts, and whose wit makes even the legislative brewers and victuallers laugh, while the fine-fledged arrows make them look like piteous Sebastians. The other member of Parliament from this region is Robert Ferguson, of Carlisle, a gentleman who has written the best works on Cumberland, its antiquities and dialect. I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of Derwentwa There is an island in Derwentwater which appears occasionally-some say periodically- -on the water, varying in different years from an acre to a few perches. It emerges near Lodore, floats about, and some fine day retires under water. It vindicates Munchausen. There is a floating island in Esthwaite Water also, but it never disappears. It is only twenty-four yards by five, covered with alders and willows, and when the wind is high moves about like a fairy barge. The regular islands in Derwentwater are beautiful, and of legendary interest. Lord's Island had an old building, from which was taken a clock bell, now that of Keswick town-hall; it bears the inscription, "H. D. R. O. 1001." The pleasantest gentle, harp-like; nearer, and its tone becomes solemn, organ-like; on shore, approaching, the tone rises through all the scale to a roar; and looking up the ravine one sees that the fall has hewn its own mighty instrument of sound. It is rare that one finds a fall where the phenomena of natural rhythm are so charmingly recognized, and they find fair interpretation in Southey's famous lyric on Lodore. One morning the Abbé and I drove around by the east of Derwentwater, on a road carpeted with leaf-shadows and sunbeams, and passed down deep vales and over gentle hills, finding so much and such varied beauty that we felt as if one could never reach an end of it. At the Borrowdale Hotel they keep that wellknown book in which tourists write their impressions. On one of the pages I read the following satirical verses: "Strange Book, you prove a man may be "When he meets nature face to face, In verse he needs must greet her; "And if the beds be duly aired, The tourist world shall know it; And if posterity should care To know if it be-" Alas! just here an incoming "Brown" requires the register, and my reader must supply the rest. But I have some sympathy for Brown. I can understand how he should aspire to sing his emotions as once a year he meanders, wanders, glides, at his own sweet will, amid these scenes. I have just met Brown sitting on the Bowder Stone, thirty-six feet high; he peeped over the Abbé's shoulder while he was sketching the Grange, then winked at Mary Anne, who was with him; and although I can not say as much for him as for those fine Oxonians and Cantabs we met at Grasmere and Coniston, yet Brown has the right stuff in him when he appends doggerel to his name in the register. A mole might become enthusiastic in sight of these ever-varying hills, their manytinted sides and summits mirrored in their lakes-wonderful! wonderful! My pen falters, and must throw upon the faithful pencil of the Abbé the task of celebrating the Castle Crag, the wild Honiston Crag, and the majestic sweep of Buttermere. |