tourists, yet these, as a rule, come to the Lake Country in a temper
quite unlike that of the English holiday seekers. We come as pilgrims
to a Holy Land of Song. We depend perhaps too little upon our own
immediate sense of grandeur and beauty, and look perhaps too much to
Wordsworth to interpret for us "Nature's old felicities." The Lake
Country that has loomed so large in poetry may even disappoint us at
the outset. The memory of the Rockies, of our chain of Great Lakes, of
Niagara, may disconcert our first impressions of this clump of hills
with only four, Scafell Pike, Scafell, Helvellyn, and Skiddaw,
exceeding three thousand feet in height; of lakes that range from
Windermere, ten miles long and a mile broad, to the reedy little pond
of Rydal Water, more conventionally termed "a fairy mere"; of
waterfalls that are often chiefly remarkable, even Southey's Lodore,
for their lack of water. Scales Tarn, of which Scott wrote,
"Never sunbeam could discern
The surface of that sable tarn,
In whose black mirror you may spy
The stars, while noontide lights the sky,"
is seventeen feet deep.
[Illustration: ISLAND IN GRASMERE LAKE]
It is all in proportion, all picturesque,--almost in too regular
proportion, almost too conspicuously picturesque, as if it had been
expressly gotten up for the "tripper." There is nothing of primeval
wildness about it. Nature is here the lion tamed, an accredited human
playmate. Indeed, one almost feels that here is Nature sitting for her
portrait, a self-conscious Nature holding her court of tourists and
poets. Yet this is but a fleeting and a shamefaced mood. It takes
intimacy to discover the fact of reticence, and those are aliens
indeed who think that a single coach-drive, even the boasted "circular
tour," has acquainted them with the Lake Country,--yes, though they
trudge over the passes (for it is coach etiquette to put the
passengers down whenever the road gets steep) Wordsworth in hand. In
truth, the great amount of literary association may be to the
conscientious "Laker" something of a burden. Skiddaw thrusts forth his
notched contour with the insistent question: "What was it Wordsworth
said about me?" Ennerdale church and the Pillar Rock tax one's memory
of "The Brothers," and every stone sheep-fold calls for a recitation
from "Michael." That "cradled nursling of the mountain," the river
Duddon, expects one to know by heart the thirty-four sonnets recording
how the pedestrian poet
"accompanied with faithful pace
Cærulean Duddon from its cloud-fed spring."
The footpath you follow, the rock you rest upon, the yew you turn to
admire, Wishing-Gate and Stepping-Stones admonish you to be ready with
your quotation. Even the tiny cascade of Rydal Water--so small as
presumably to be put to bed at six o'clock, for it may not be visited
after that hour--has been sung by the Grasmere laureate. While your
care-free Englishman goes clambering over the golden-mossed rocks and
far within the slippery recesses of Dungeon Ghyll, your serious
American will sit him down amid the bracken and, tranquilly watched
by Lingmoor from across the vale, read "The Idle Shepherd-Boys," and
the exquisite description of the scene in Mrs. Humphry Ward's
"Fenwick's Career." If he can recall Coleridge's lines about the
"sinful sextons' ghosts," so much the better, and if he is of a
"thorough" habit of mind, he will have read through Wordsworth's
"Excursion" in preparation for this expedition to the Langdales and be
annotating the volume on his knee.
There may be something a little naïve in this studious attitude in the
presence of natural beauty, but the devotion is sincere. Many a
tourist, English and American, comes to the Lake Country to render
grateful homage to those starry spirits who have clustered there. Fox
Howe, the home of Dr. Arnold and dear to his poet son; The Knoll, home
of Harriet Martineau; and the Dove's Nest, for a little while the
abode of Mrs. Hemans, are duly pointed out at Ambleside, but not all
who linger in that picture-book village and climb the hill to the
Church of St. Anne, standing serene with its square, grey,
pigeon-peopled tower, know that Faber was a curate there in the
youthful years before he "went over to Rome." He lived hard by in what
is said to be the oldest house in Ambleside, once a manor-house of
distinction,--that long, low stone building with small, deep-set
windows and the cheery touches of colour given by the carefully tended
flowers about the doors. "A good few" people thought he was not "just
bright," our landlady told us, "because he would be walking with his
head down, busy at his thoughts," yet Wordsworth said that Faber was
the only man he knew who saw more things in Nature than he did in a
country ramble. Bowness cherishes recollections of the gay, audacious
doings of Professor Wilson (Christopher North), and Troutbeck plumes
itself on being the birthplace of Hogarth's father. Keswick, where
Shelley once made brief sojourn, holds the poet-dust of Southey and of
Frederic Myers, and in Crosthwaite Vicarage may be found a living poet
of the Lakes, Canon Rawnsley,--a name to conjure with throughout the
district, whose best traditions he fosters and maintains.
Opposite Rydal Mount, at Nab Cottage, dwelt, for the closing years of
his clouded life, the darling of the dalesfolk, "Li'le Hartley,"
first-born son of Coleridge,--that boy "so exquisitely wild" to whom
had descended something of his father's genius crossed by the father's
frailty. Hartley's demon was not the craving for opium, but for
alcohol. After a sore struggle that crippled but did not destroy, he
rests in Grasmere churchyard, his stone bearing the inscription, "By
Thy Cross and Passion." It was from Nab Cottage that another soul of
high endowment, menaced by the opium lust, De Quincey, took a bride,
Margaret, a farmer's daughter, who made him the strong and patient
wife his peril needed. They dwelt in Dove Cottage at Townend,
Grasmere, the hallowed garden-nest where Wordsworth and his wife and
his sister Dorothy--that ardent spirit the thought of whom is still
"like a flash of light"--had dwelt before. Wordsworth's later homes at
Allan Bank, the Grasmere Rectory, and even at Rydal Mount are less
precious to memory than this, where he and Coleridge and Dorothy
dreamed the great dreams of youth together. Thither came guests who
held high converse over frugal fare,--among them Sir Walter Scott,
Charles Lamb, "the frolic and the gentle," and that silent poet, the
beloved brother John. It was a plain and thrifty life that Dove
Cottage knew, with its rustic little rooms and round of household
tasks, but thrift took on magic powers in the Lake Country a century
ago. Amazing tales are told of the "Wonderful Walker," schoolmaster of
Buttermere and curate of Seathwaite, the Pastor of the "Excursion,"
but his feats of economy might be challenged by the old-time curate of
Patterdale, who, on an income of from sixty to ninety dollars a year,
lived comfortably, educated his four children, and left them a tidy
little fortune. Such queer turns of fate were his that he published
his own banns and married his father.
Most of those for whose sake the Lake Country is holy ground lived a
contemplative, sequestered life akin to that of the mediæval monks,
the scholars and visionaries of a fighting world; but Coniston, on the
edge of Lancashire, is the shrine of a warrior saint, Ruskin, whose
last earthly home, Brantwood, looks out over Coniston Water, and whose
grave in the quiet churchyard, for which Westminster Abbey was
refused, is beautifully marked by a symbolically carven cross
quarried from the fine greenstone of Coniston Fells. In the Ruskin
Museum may be seen many heart-moving memorials of that hero life, all
the way from the abstracts of sermons written out for his mother in a
laborious childish hand to the purple pall, worked for him by the
local Linen Industry he so eagerly founded, and embroidered with his
own words: "Unto This Last."
Not in any roll-call of the men of letters who have trodden the
Cumbrian Hills should the poet Gray be forgotten. The first known
tourist in the Lake Country, he was delighted with Grasmere and
Keswick, but Borrowdale, plunged deep amid what the earliest
guide-book, that of West in 1774, was to describe as "the most horrid
romantic mountains," turned him back in terror.
Yet Wordsworth, for all his illustrious compeers, is still the
presiding genius of these opalescent hills and silver meres. It is to
him, that plain-faced man who used to go "booing" his verses along
these very roads, that multitudes of visitants have owed
"Feelings and emanations--things which were
Light to the sun and music to the wind."
It is good for the soul to follow that sane, pure life from its "fair
seedtime" on the garden terrace at Cockermouth, where the murmuring
Derwent gave
"Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind,
A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm
That Nature breathes among the hills and groves,"
through the boyhood at Hawkshead--that all-angled little huddle of
houses near Esthwaite Water--a boyhood whose inner growth is so
marvellously portrayed in "The Prelude," on through the long and
fruitful manhood of a poet vowed,
"Days of sweet leisure, taxed with patient thought
Abstruse, nor wanting punctual service high,
Matins and vespers of harmonious verse,"
to the churchyard beside the Rotha, where Wordsworth and his kin of
flesh and spirit keep their "incommunicable sleep."
"Blessing be with them, and eternal praise!"
THREE RUSH-BEARINGS
_Where is the stranger? Rushes, ladies, rushes,
Rushes as green as summer for this stranger._
FLETCHER'S "Valentinian."
I
We heard about it first in Ambleside. We were in lodgings half-way up
the hill that leads to the serene, forsaken Church of St. Anne. It was
there that Faber, fresh from Oxford, had been curate, silently
thinking the thoughts that were to send him into the Roman communion,
and his young ghost, with the bowed head and the troubled eyes, was
one of the friends we had made in the few rainy days of our sojourn.
Another was Jock, a magnificent old collie, who accepted homage as his
royal due, and would press his great head against the knee of the
alien with confident expectation of a caress, lifting in recognition a
long, comprehending look of amber eyes. Another friend--though our
relations were sometimes strained--was Toby, a piebald pony of
piquant disposition. He allowed us to sit in his pony-cart at
picturesque spots and read the Lake Poets to him, and to tug him up
the hills by his bridle, which he had expert ways of rubbing off, to
the joy of passing coach-loads, when our attention was diverted to the
landscape. Another was our kindly landlady. She came in with hot tea
that Saturday afternoon to cheer up the adventurous member of the
party, who had just returned half drowned from a long drive on
coachtop for the sake of scenery absolutely blotted out by the
downpour. There the "trippers" had sat for hours, huddled under
trickling umbrellas, while the conscientious coachman put them off
every now and then to clamber down wet banks and gaze at waterfalls,
or halted for the due five minutes at a point where nothing was
perceptible but the grey slant of the rain to assure them--and the
spattered red guidebook confirmed his statement--that this was "the
finest view in Westmoreland." So when our landlady began to tell us of
the ancient ceremony which the village was to observe that afternoon,
the bedrenched one, hugging the bright dot of a fire, grimly implied
that the customs and traditions of this sieve-skied island--in five
weeks we had had only two rainless days--were nothing to her; but the
tea, that moral beverage which enables the English to bear with their
climate, wrought its usual reformation.
At half-past five we were standing under our overworked umbrellas on a
muddy street corner, waiting for the procession to come by. And
presently it came, looking very much as if it had been through a pond
to gather the rushes. In front went a brass band, splashing along the
puddles to merry music, and then a long train of draggled children,
with a few young men and maidens to help on the toddlers, two or three
of whom had to be taken up and carried, flowers and all. But soberly
and sturdily, in the main, that line of three hundred bonny bairns
trotted along through the heavy clay, under the soft rain--little lads
in rubber coats and gaiters, some holding their tall bunches of
rushes, or elaborate floral designs, upright before them like
bayonets, some shouldering them like guns; tired little lassies
clasping their "bearings" in their arms like dolls, or dragging them
along like kittens. All down the line the small coats and cloaks were
not only damp, but greened and mossed and petal-strewn from the
resting and rubbing of one another's burdens. These were of divers
sorts. Most effective were the slender bundles of rushes,--long,
straight rushes gathered that morning from the meres by men who went
out in boats for the purpose. These rush-fagots towered up from a
distance like green candles, making the line resemble a procession of
Catholic fairies. The village, however, took chief pride in the
moss-covered standards of various device entwined with rushes and
flowers. There were harps of reeds and waterlilies, crosses of ferns
and harebells, shepherds' crooks wound with heather, sceptres,
shields, anchors, crowns, swords, stars, triangles, hearts, with all
manner of nosegays and garlands. Ling and bracken from the hillsides,
marigolds from the marsh, spikes of oat and spears of wheat from the
harvest-fields, and countless bright-hued blossoms from meadow and
dooryard and garden were woven together, with no little taste and
skill, in a pretty diversity of patterns.
The bells rang out blithe welcome as the procession neared the
steepled Church of St. Mary, where a committee of ladies and gentlemen
received the offerings and disposed them, according to their merit, in
chancel or aisles. The little bearers were all seated in the front
pews, the pews of honour, before we thronging adults, stacking our
dripping umbrellas in the porch, might enter. The air was rich with
mingled fragrances. Along the chancel rail, in the window-seats, on
the pillars, everywhere, were rushes and flowers, the choicest
garden-roses whispering with foxglove and daisy and the feathered
timothy grass. But sweeter than the blossoms were the faces of the
children, glad in their rustic act of worship, well content with their
own weariness, no prouder than the smiling angels would have had them
be. Only here and there a rosy visage was clouded with disappointment,
or twisted ruefully awry in the effort to hold back the tears, for it
must needs be that a few devices, on which the childish artists had
spent such joyful labour, were assigned by the expert committee to
inconspicuous corners. The mere weans behaved surprisingly well,
though evensong, a brief and sympathetic service, was punctuated by
little sobs, gleeful baby murmurs, and crows of excitement. The vicar
told the children, in a few simple words, how, in earlier times, when
the church was unpaved, the earth-floor was strewn with sweet-smelling
rushes, renewed every summer, and that the rushes and flowers of
to-day were brought in memory of the past, and in gratitude for the
beauty of their home among the hills and lakes. Then the fresh child
voices rang out singing praises to Him who made it all:
"The purple-headed mountain,
The river running by,
The sunset, and the morning
That brightens up the sky."
They sang, too, their special hymn written for the Ambleside
rush-bearers seventy years ago, by the well-beloved vicar of Brathay,
the Rev. Owen Lloyd:
"Our fathers to the house of God,
As yet a building rude,
Bore offerings from the flowery sod,
And fragrant rushes strew'd.
* * * * *
"These, of the great Redeemer's grace
Bright emblems, here are seen;
He makes to smile the desert place
With flowers and rushes green."
One highly important ceremony, to the minds of the children, was yet
to come,--the presentation of the gingerbread. As they filed out of
the church, twopenny slabs of a peculiarly black and solid substance
were given into their eager little hands. The rain had ceased, and we
grown-ups all waited in the churchyard, looking down on the issuing
file of red tam-o'-shanters, ribboned straw hats, worn grey caps, and,
wavering along very low in the line, soft, fair-tinted baby hoods,
often cuddled up against some guardian knee. Under the varied headgear
ecstatic feasting had begun even in the church porch, though some of
the children were too entranced with excitement to find their mouths.
One chubby urchin waved his piece of gingerbread in the air, and
another laid his on a gravestone and inadvertently sat down on it. A
bewildered wee damsel in robin's-egg blue had lost hers in the basket
of wild flowers that was slung about her neck. One spud of a boy,
roaring as he came, was wiping his eyes with his. In general, however,
the rush-bearers were munching with such relish that they did not
trouble themselves to remove the tissue paper adhering to the bottom
of each cake, but swallowed that as contentedly as the rest.
Meanwhile their respective adults were swooping down upon them,
dabbing the smear of gingerbread off cheeks and chins, buttoning up
little sacques and jackets, and whisking off the most obtrusive
patches of half-dried mud. Among these parental regulators was a
beaming old woman with a big market-basket on her arm, who brushed and
tidied as impartially as if she were grandmother to the whole parish.
Then, again, rang out those gleeful harmonies of which our Puritan
bells know nothing. The circle of mountains, faintly flushed with an
atoning sunset, looked benignly down on a spectacle familiar to them
for hundreds of Christian summer-tides; and if they remembered it
still longer ago, as a pagan rite in honour of nature gods, they
discreetly kept their knowledge to themselves.
The rushes and flowers brightened the church through the Sunday
services, which were well attended by both dalesfolk and visitors. On
Monday twelve prizes were awarded, and the bearings were taken away by
their respective owners. Then followed "the treat," an afternoon of
frolic, with rain only now and then, on a meadow behind St. Mary's.
The ice-cream cart, the climbing-pole, swings and games, seemed to
hold the full attention of the children, to each of whom was tied a
cup; but when the simple supper was brought on to higher ground close
by the church, who sat like a gentle mother in the very midst of the
merry-make, a jubilant, universal shout, "It's coom! It's coom!" sent
all the small feet scampering toward the goodies. To crown it all, the
weather obligingly gave opportunity, on the edge of the evening, for
fireworks, which even the poor little Wesleyans outside the railing
could enjoy.
[Illustration: THE RUSH-BEARING AT GRASMERE]
II
The Ambleside rush-bearing takes place on the Saturday before the last
Sunday in July. The more famous Grasmere rush-bearing comes on the
Saturday next after St. Oswald's Day, August fifth. This year (1906)
these two festivals fell just one week apart. The London papers were
announcing that it was "brilliant weather in the Lakes," which, in a
sense, it was, for the gleams of sunshine between the showers were
like opening doors of Paradise; yet we arrived at Grasmere so wet
that we paid our sixpences to enter Dove Cottage, a shrine to which we
had already made due pilgrimage, and had a cosey half-hour with Mrs.
Dixon, well known to the tourist world, before the fireplace whose
quiet glow often gladdened the poets and dreamers of its great days
gone by.
Our canny old hostess, in the bonnet and shawl which seem to be her
official wear, was not disposed this afternoon to talk of the
Wordsworths, whom she had served in her girlhood. Her mind was on the
rush-bearing for which she had baked the gingerbread forty-three
years. There were five hundred squares this time, since, in addition
to what would be given to the children, provision must be made for the
Sunday afternoon teas throughout Grasmere. The rolling out of the
dough had not grown easier with the passing of nearly half a century,
and she showed us the swollen muscles of her wrist. Her little
granddaughters, their flower erections borne proudly in their arms,
were dressed all spick and span for the procession, and stood with
her, for their pictures, at the entrance to Dove Cottage.
It was still early, and we strolled over to the tranquil church beside
the Rotha. Under the benediction of that grey, embattled tower, in
the green churchyard with
"Ridge rising gently by the side of ridge,
A heaving surface,"
sleep Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and their kindred, while the
names of Hartley Coleridge and Arthur Hugh Clough may be read on
stones close by. We brought the poets white heather and heart's ease
for our humble share in the rush-bearing.
Grasmere church, with its strange row of rounded arches down the
middle of the nave and its curiously raftered roof, still wears the
features portrayed in _The Excursion_:
"Not raised in nice proportions was the pile,
But large and massy; for duration built;
With pillars crowded, and the roof upheld
By naked rafters intricately crossed,
Like leafless underboughs, in some thick wood,
All withered by the depths of shade above.
Admonitory texts inscribed the walls,
Each in its ornamental scroll enclosed,
Each also crowned with wingèd heads--a pair
Of rudely painted Cherubim. The floor
Of nave and aisle, in unpretending guise,
Was occupied by oaken benches ranged
In seemly rows; the chancel only showed
Some vain distinctions, marks of earthly state,
By immemorial privilege allowed."
There were a number of people in the church, but the reverent hush was
almost unbroken. Strangers in the green churchyard were moving softly
about, reading the inscriptions on stones and brasses, or waiting in
the pews, some in the attitude of devotion. In the south aisle leaned
against the wall the banner of St. Oswald, a crimson-bordered
standard, with the figure of the saint in white and crimson, worked on
a golden ground. A short, stout personage, with grey chin-whiskers and
a pompous air, presumably the sexton, came in a little after three
with a great armful of fresh rushes, and commenced to strew the floor.
Soon afterwards the children, with their bearings, had taken their
positions, ranged in a long row on the broad churchyard wall, fronting
the street, which by this time was crowded with spectators, for the
Grasmere rush-bearing is the most noted among the few survivals of
what was once, in the northern counties of England, a very general
observance. There is an excellent account of it, by an eyewitness, as
early as 1789. James Clarke, in his _Survey of the Lakes_, wrote:
"I happened once to be at Grasmere, at what they call a
Rushbearing.... About the latter end of September a number of
young women and girls (generally the whole parish) go
together to the tops of the hills to gather rushes. These
they carry to the church, headed by one of the smartest girls
in the company. She who leads the procession is styled the
Queen, and carries in her hand a huge garland, and the rest
usually have nosegays. The Queen then goes and places her
garland upon the pulpit, where it remains till after the next
Sunday. The rest then strew their rushes upon the bottom of
the pews, and at the church door they are met by a fiddler,
who plays before them to the public house, where the evening
is spent in all kinds of rustic merriment."
Still more interesting is the record, in Hone's _Year Book_, by "A
Pedestrian." On July 21, 1827, the walking tour of this witness
brought him to Grasmere.