sanatorium hard by was necessary for the cohort of old time, if there
was as much water in the ground as there is {107} to-day within and
without the ramparts. Thence we drive by way of Bewaldeth and the
inn by the Bassenthwaite cross-roads, to the shores of what Southey
called 'westernmost Wythop.' Hardly are we able to get forward, for
the cries of those who are with us in the carriage to draw up, that
we may gaze at this or that wild-rose bush in all its tender
fluttering beauty. But at last we win our goal--Castle How Inn, near
Peelwyke; then scrambling up the hill we inspect the four trenches on
the side of the hill looking towards Peelwyke, whence of old time
gazed out the hardy Britons upon the Roman camp fires blazing at
Caermote.
As we gaze we think not only of Roman times, but of the Viking times
also; for down below us lies the wyke or harbour where the first
Norsemen who ever came up Derwent from the sea ran their boats ashore.
Who, or whence the Norse ancestor of John Peel, who hewed the trees
of the woodland at our feet into planks and built his 'Pride of the
lake,' we cannot know, but he probably had friends, Ketel and Ormr,
and Sweyn, and Honig and Walla, who would from time to time come
across the Crosthwaite Vale and step aboard his galley, and sweep
with flying sail or gleaming oar along by the woods of Mirehouse
{108} or the shadowy cliffs of Barf to his 'steading' here at
Bassenthwaite; and it is more than probable that he and his family
'died into the ground' at Castle How, and there await the glory of
the gods and the coming of Odin.
We, as we gaze out south from the How of the Viking, can see plainly
to-day the burial ground of other Viking chieftains of the dale on
the grey green Latrigg's height; and sadly enough, we think, must
they have passed into the dark, if so fair a sun as this shone upon
so fair a scene, and the roses and elders were as sweet for them as
they are for us to-day.
On now through fragrant briar wood and odorous larch to Keswick, and
the ghosts of Britain and Rome and Norway keep pace with our hearts
as we go.
{109}
ARCTIC SPLENDOURS AT THE ENGLISH LAKES.
The blizzard brought a greater gift of snow to the hills of the
English Lake District than had been remembered since 1859. The storm
left behind it a bewitching splendour, and Skiddaw and Helvellyn and
Glaramara and Grassmoor never shone more fair. Into clear air above
the Yorkshire fells the great sun rose. The heavens flushed above
Helvellyn, and presently the steep, angular cleft on Grisedale was
filled with blue shadow. Then the light splintered upon Causey Pike
and Hindscarth, and Scafell shone like a jewel of flame above the sea
of deathly white. Five minutes later the blank white snowfield of
Derwentwater was changed into a gleaming floor of dazzling light, and
all the encircling hills seemed ivory washed with gold. A lilac veil
of haze rose from the {110} Crosthwaite Valley and drifted up the
snow slopes, growing more gossamer-like as it touched the ridges of
the hills, and soon the mountains stood as clear as at the dawn
against a cloudless sky.
Such blue of heaven touched the cones of Skiddaw as one sees on a
clear May morning above the Oberland peaks, and one wondered why it
was that people who have no chance of seeing Switzerland did not take
the opportunity of realising a Switzerland in miniature when it was
close beside their doors. One reads of excursions to the Palace of
Varieties at Manchester and Blackpool. How comes it about that no
excursions are planned to such a world of varieties, such ivory
palaces of winter's garnishing and nature's building, as, after heavy
snowfall, may be found in Cumberland?
The frost was still in the shade within 10 degrees of zero; on
Chestnut Hill it had been registered in the early morning as being
within 4 degrees. People as they went about the roads felt their
feet almost ring upon the snow, and children who tumbled into the
powder rose and shook the fine dust from their hair and laughed to
find they were as dry as a bone. The rooks above were silent {111}
and grave as they sat in solemn conclave on the ash tree at the
stable-end and waited for such happy chances as the cook or
chicken-man might give them. They were frozen out. Their tools were
useless. But the tits were merry enough--blue tit, great tit, and
cole tit; how they clung and spun and scooped at the cocoanuts and
bones upon their Christmas tree! How the thrush pecked at the suet;
how the starling and blackbird gobbled at the softened scraps upon
the ground; and how the chaffinch and the robin partook of the crumbs
that fell from the rich bird's table, as those crumbs came floating
down from suet-lump or cocoanut above!
But we are off for a walk up to that old burial ground of the Viking
chieftains from the land of the Frost Giants, which we still call the
Ridge of Death--Latrigg of to-day. There, beside the path that leads
from the main road, is the golf ground, but golf has been
dispossessed by a fitter game for this season, and down the long
slide shoot the tobogganers, and up the hill, with glowing faces and
in silver clouds of their own breath, the happy people move. As one
gazes into the valley another group of people in the {112}
neighbouring hollow may be seen hard at work with brush and curling
stones, for the Keswick folk are some of them devotees to the rink,
and the noise of the curlers fills the air to-day.
We climb Latrigg, noting how the blizzard has swept some of the snow
from Skiddaw's western flank, and let the long yellow grasses and
umber-coloured heather once more give their beauty of pencilling to
the otherwise snow-white damask of their winter cloak. Thence, after
far sight of the snow upon the Scotch hills sacred to the name of
Cuthbert and the memory of his mission in Strathclyde, and near sight
of the island hermitage, like a black jewel in the snow-field of the
lake, which keeps the memory of St. Cuthbert's friend Herebert safe
in mind, we descend to the vale.
[Illustration: ARCTIC SPLENDOURS AT THE LAKES.]
As we descend we have a friendly crack with a shepherd from the high
fells, whose dog has cleverly found and 'crowned' a handful of the
Herdwick sheep prisoned by a snowdrift against a wall. How did he do
this? 'Naay, I cannot tell tha, but I suppose t' dog nosed 'em, ye
kna; dogs is wonderful keen scented.' And had the sheep taken hurt?
'Naay, naay; they were {113} safe and warm as could be; they hedn't
even begun to woo' yan anudder.' Wool one another, what's that?
'Oh, sheep, poor things, when they git snowbound and hev nowt to eat,
teks to eatin' woo' off t' backs, to prevent pinin', ye kna.' So
saying, the shepherd goes off, to quest for more, up to the land of
loneliness and wintry wild, and I go down into the cheery vale.
How blue the snow is; you might have supposed the fields out 'Wythop'
way had been washed with ultramarine; but one's eyes are caught back
by the beauty of the snowdrifts by the roadside. These snowdrifts
are for all the world as if great waves of milk had curled over to
breaking, and at the moment had been fixed or changed into
crystalline marble. And now the sun is gathering its glory back into
itself, and hangs a globe of flame above 'Whinlatter' Pass. Suddenly
the light goes out from all the valley meadows. The day star has
sunk behind the hills. But still old Skiddaw flashes back the flame,
and shepherds, out Newlands way, can see the bastions of Blencathra
glow like molten gold.
For us, as we gaze out south, the range of Helvellyn is the miracle
of beauty that {114} holds our eyes. Far off and ghostly for the
haze, it lies upon a background of rosy flushing afterglow, and seems
to faint into a kind of impalpable phantom of its former
strength--becomes no longer solid mountain, but spectral cloud. A
light wind blows, and the oak leaves in the hedge tinkle like iron;
the farmer calls the horse to get his hay, the wren chirrups or
scolds from the wayside bank, and a partridge cries from the near
field. Then all is silent and hushed for the coming of the queen.
Over the dark pines upon Skiddaw, and above the silver shoulder of
the hill, clear-faced and full, the February moon swims up to rule
the night. And such a reign of splendour was then begun as I have no
words to chronicle. For the heaven above Helvellyn was rosy pink,
melting into blue, and the sky above Skiddaw was, or seemed to be,
steel azure, and the west beyond the Wythop range was gleaming amber.
There, in the midst of that golden sea, shone Venus like a point of
silver fire. Sirius rose and scintillated above Helvellyn's ridge,
Jupiter looked clear from near the zenith, and Orion girt his starry
sword about him in mid-heaven; but it was the Moon who was the queen
of all our hearts. It was she who {115} laid her mystery upon the
lakes, the hills, the valleys, white with snow; she who made one feel
that if sunrise and sunsetting had been fair to-day, the moon-rising
in a land of Arctic splendour had been fairer still.
{116}
WILLIAM PEARSON OF BORDERSIDE.
It is a pleasant thing for a Cumberland Crosthwaite man to have to
speak of a man of the Westmoreland Crosthwaite. It is a special
pleasure when one realises how Cumberland helped Westmoreland to give
us the gentle mind and life of enthusiasm for Truth and Nature which
closed here at Borderside, with 'unbroken trust in God,' and 'in hope
of immortal life,' on the 16th December, 1856.
I have read no life that seems to have been so genuinely the fruit of
enthusiasm for the poet Wordsworth as was the life of William
Pearson. He was ten years the junior of the poet, and survived him
six years. We may nevertheless look upon him as a contemporary. He
was of the same kind of North yeoman stock, and with greater
opportunities might have made himself a name {117} in the annals of
literature. As it is, like Elihu Robinson of Egglesfield, like
Wilkinson of Yanwath, like the late Wilson Robinson of Winfell,
Lorton, Pearson's name was not known far beyond his native valley,
but of him, as of the others named, it is truth to say that he was a
living monument of what 'the soul of Nature,' if it be received into
the heart of man, can do to elevate, to strengthen and refine. Of
none other in his simple estatesman rank that I have read of can it
be more truly said, that from:
'... Nature and her overflowing soul
He had received so much, that all his thoughts
Were steeped in feeling.'
Wordsworth once wrote that 'Nature never did betray the heart that
loved her'; William Pearson proved by all he said and did that
Wordsworth spoke the truth. Wordsworth spoke felicitously of the
'Harvest of a quiet eye
That sleeps and broods on its own heart.'
William Pearson gathered that harvest to the full, ere he too, like a
shock of corn, was in a full time garnered. Wordsworth declared that
'Who feels contempt for any living thing
Hath faculties that he hath never used,'
{118} and William Pearson put that assertion to good proof. Few men
in his day and station in this country went down to the grave with
larger heart, of wider sympathy and more love for all created things.
William Pearson was born at the Yews in the Winster Vale on the 9th
of October, 1780. His father, who died at the age of 81 in the year
1840, was long remembered as a quiet, studious farmer, who would ever
read a book at his meals, and made a practice of going afield at
nights to gaze upon the heavens. The stars in their courses helped
him to reverence and to thought. William's mother--a Little from the
Borderland--survived her husband and died at the age of 88 in 1842.
While she span at her flax-wheel she used to delight her little son
William with folklore stories and fairy tales, but she was chiefly
remembered in the village for her bright activity and energy to the
last. Many a time, when she was between seventy and eighty years
old, on market day morning, though the horse stood saddled at the
door, the old lady would say, 'Nay, hang it, I'll never fash wid it,'
and would set off on foot to Kendal, with her butter basket
containing twenty to thirty pounds of butter, a distance {119} of six
miles and a half, and after 'standing the market' and shopping, would
walk home again with her purchases.
As a youngster, William's education was left to the wild beauty of
his native vale. If ever there was a boy of whom Nature might have
said:
'Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The _Boy_, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain,'
it was the boy who went afield with his father as soon as he could
toddle, and who in Nature's kindly school got to know by heart and
eye the hills and scars of the neighbourhood, the tarns and
moorlands, the trotting brooks, the rivers running to the sea, the
great estuary and marsh, with all their bird and beast and flower
life. He never forgot his first sight of Windermere and Morecambe
Bay, nor his first journey up Troutbeck over the Kirkstone Pass; and
no sooner had he left home for work elsewhere than he felt that there
was only one place on this earth where life was worth living and that
was the Winster Vale.
{120}
It is true that he went to the Crosthwaite school and proved himself
early to be a master of figures. The author who fascinated him then
was Defoe. _The Memoirs of a Cavalier_ and _Robinson Crusoe_ were
his teachers. From Crosthwaite school he went to Underbarrow and
distinguished himself there chiefly for having the pluck to stand up
to the big bully and thrash him in defence of the oppressed
youngster. He became out of school times an expert and ardent
follower of Isaac Walton. Years after, he wrote an appreciative
paper which is extant on Walton and Cotton's _Complete Angler_, which
he begins with the sentence, 'Among our most favourite books is The
Complete Angler of Isaac Walton.' The boys of Underbarrow noticed
that he hugged his garret where the owls built, and was often deep in
old romances of _Amadis de Gaul_ and _Roncesvalles_ when others were
out and away up the fells. But in the holidays he followed
bark-peeling, not so much as that thus he might earn something that
would pay for his schooling, as because in the months of May and June
when the bark-peelers went to their fragrant task in the woods, there
was a fine chance of becoming acquainted with the life-history {121}
of many of our feathered visitors that were nesting at that time. In
autumn his delight was to be after the woodcocks, and great was his
joy,
'With store of springes o'er his shoulder hung,
To range the open heights where woodcocks run
Along the smooth green turf. Through half the night,
Scudding away from snare to snare, he plied
That anxious visitation.'
In his copy of Wordsworth's _Prelude_, the marker, at his death, was
found placed at this passage, and he never tired of telling the story
of his woodcock adventures.
His first work in life was to act as teacher in the Winster village
school; he went thence to be tutor to the four children of a widow
body at Cartmel Fell, but at the end of the year gave up teaching to
take the place of a grocer's assistant at Kendal.
He was only there a year, but it was an eventful one in William
Pearson's life. He made the acquaintance of Benjamin Gough, the
blind botanist, and it is possible that he was led by him into
enquiry not only into the wonders of plant life, but of the life of
that most delicate of all plants, the religious faith of the human
soul. It is certain that during this year William Pearson's chief
{122} study was the study of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Church
Doctrine, and the end of it was that he reasoned and read himself out
of Episcopalianism into Unitarianism, as his father had in the past
done before him. He found rest to his young soul in the thought of
the great Fatherhood of God, and worshipped in the old Presbyterian
Meeting House, where sometimes in after years Wordsworth also
worshipped, and near by which lie the ashes of the James Patrick of
Kendal, who was the original of the Wanderer in _The Prelude_. It
may be fancy, but I like to think that it was in that chapel that the
young lad first saw the man whose writings did more for him all
through life than any other--I mean William Wordsworth.
From Kendal, William went, as was the wont of many a Kendal
apprentice, to a grocer's shop in London, and at the end of three
months he returned to the Winster Vale, broken in health from the
stifle of London air, and the fact that he had no better resting
place after long days of work in a city store than a shake-down
underneath the counter. He was now in his twenty-third year. The
'poddish' and fresh air of the {123} Yews set him 'agate' again, and
he determined to try Manchester life, and on the 16th March, 1803, he
set out for that metropolis of the North. He obtained a situation on
the next day after his arrival as clerk in the bank of James Fox &
Company, in King Street, and for the next seventeen years he endured
'The fierce confederate storm
Of sorrow barricadoed evermore
Within the walls of cities.'
How simple and frugal his life was there, we may gather from the fact
that out of his first year's stipend of £75 he sent back a deposit to
one of the Kendal banks. He was not very happy. He wanted friends
of his age 'who united,' as he tells us, 'those first of blessings,
virtue and knowledge,' and they were not. 'Indeed, sir,' he writes
to James Watson of Kendal, 'I think Manchester, in proportion to its
population, very deficient in men of cultivated understanding.
Immersed in business, or carried down the stream of dissipation,
slaves to "Mammon" and to "Bacchus," they have seldom time for the
rational amusement of reading or for the calm pleasure of reflection.'
{124}
This seems somewhat priggish, but it was the real and earnest William
Pearson who spoke. Sociable as he was, fond of seeing a good play,
his chief delight, if he was not out in the fields, was a book that
would set him thinking or a poem that would touch his imagination,
and Pearson was old beyond his years. He joined the Didactical
Society, the Mosley Street Library, subscribed to the News Room and
made one or two friends for life.
There in most uncongenial surroundings for seventeen years he stuck
to 'the drudgery at the desk's dead wood' with one thought, that a
time would arrive when he could come back to his native vale, and
live a student's and a naturalist's life in simple competence. As a
matter of fact his health broke down after five years of Manchester
smoke, and he had to come back in 1808 to the Yews in his native vale
for country air and restoration.
He was at this time nothing if not a keen sportsman, and he was, if
one may judge from a letter he sent at this time to a Kendal paper,
vexed at heart by the vigorous application of the game laws as
enforced by the worthies of the local bench. Three young men, who,
with nothing but a knob-stick, could run down {125} a hare, had been
caught hunting on Cartmel Fell. 'We must pity the Robinsons,' he
says, 'young men who can run down a hare, an animal that often
escapes the fleetest greyhound, who pursued their sport without fear
in the open day, and so generously, that they left a hare with the
farmer on whose ground they happened to take it. These fine young
men have been made to pay £3 13s. 6d. for their sport. The age of
chivalry is indeed gone. The ancient Greeks would have crowned them
with laurel, but this is the age of taxation and little men. We are
fallen on evil days; we only wish the surveyor and commissioner had
heard them at their joyous sport, and had heard their shouts, as we
did, which made the old mountains ring again even to Gummershow, to
be echoed back from the far-off Coniston Fells.'
It was during his Manchester residence that he became a student of
William Wordsworth. It was not fashionable then to care for
Wordsworth's poetry, but William Pearson was never without the
Lyrical Ballads of 1805, or his copy of _Poems by William
Wordsworth_, of 1807. The young bank clerk, who was often heard
muttering, 'I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh aid,'
felt in these {126} poems 'all the beauty of a common dawn.' He knew
that Wordsworth walked on the shining uplands of a noble aspiration,
and was the apostle, in a time 'that touched monied worldlings with
dismay,' of the simpler life of honest poverty and high endeavour.
He felt that in Wordsworth he could find that sympathy with all
things, that
'Look to the Uncreated with a countenance
Of admiration and an eye of love.'
He knew that Wordsworth had realised the power of Nature to chasten
and subdue
'and intertwine
The passions that build up our human soul
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man
But with high objects and enduring things.'
He also knew how Wordsworth taught men the secret of the gentle heart,
'Never to blend its pleasure or its pride,
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.'
It was this knowledge that soon made him love rather to watch a wild
bird than shoot it. One is not surprised therefore to find him
constantly referring to Wordsworth's writings, and yet to feel him so
eminent as a man that years after, though communing in spirit with
{127} him day by day, he could not summon courage to go up the path
to Rydal Mount, and abashed at his own boldness for venturing to
call, came away from the door of the Rydal poet, without seeing his
hero, like a thing ashamed.
It was owing to mutual love and admiration for Wordsworth's poetry
that he found in a poor Gorton silk-weaver, Thomas Smith by name, so
congenial a companion. The last six years of Pearson's life at
Manchester can chiefly be known from the letters that passed between
these two friends, which towards the end seem almost to degenerate
into a series of begging letters from a poor weaver out of work and
'thrice dispirited.' But this at any rate is seen in their
correspondence, that even in abject poverty high thinking is
possible, and Wordsworth's poems seem to be medicine for the mind;
while on the other hand there is always the ready and generous
response of the yeoman of Winster Vale, and such delicacy in act of
gift as makes one feel how finely strung, how nobly sensitive was the
mind of the benefactor.
Pearson sends Thomas Smith a copy of _The Excursion_. 'Your tidings
about Wordsworth,' says the poor weaver, under date of April 15,
{128} 1821, 'I will not call him Mr., he is too great for that, were
good tidings indeed; his _Excursion_ I have been longing for ever
since it was first published, but the price has been an
unsurmountable obstacle to a weaver.'
The two friends unbosom their hearts to one another in these letters,
and there is seen something of the deep religious side of Pearson's
character in some of them. 'I cannot,' he writes to Smith in 1831,
'conclude without a word about what you write of your being unhappy.
Read your Bible. Trust in that Good Being who gave you your
existence. Consider the many in your situation who from ignorance
and want of education have not the arguments of hope that you have;
... only the wicked need be unhappy; at anyrate do not despair.' And
again in 1838, 'I wish I could console you under your troubles. Be
thankful you have not a guilty conscience--the greatest of evils.
Read your Bible, read Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Milton. Do you go
to worship, public, I mean? You have a chapel at the foot of your
hill, join yourself to them.'
When Smith lay dying, Pearson wrote a letter full of tender sympathy.
'So long as reason and memory remain, I shall never forget {129} the
many delightful hours we have passed together, whether in reading
some favourite poet or rambling among the beautiful scenes of
Nature.' 'I believe,' he added, 'that seldom have two persons come
together more in sympathy than we two, and I have often felt that my
separation from you was one of my greatest losses in leaving your
part of the country.'
Those rambles he mentions were walking-tours he took in 1817 through
Derbyshire, and in 1818 in the Craven country of Yorkshire. He kept
journals, and full of delightful observation of men and things they
are, redolent of real joy in sunshine and cloud. He writes, 'We
walked forward on this delightful morning with vigorous steps. The
lark was our constant companion, cheering us overhead with her song,
the fresh air of the mountains bathed our cheeks, there was freedom
from care and the feeling of liberty
'When the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world
Hung not upon the beatings of our hearts.'
'We felt something,' he adds, 'of