THE LAKE DISTRICT.
The lake and mountain district of England, which has now become so
famous, was happily chosen by these children of Nature as their
residence. Born as they both were on its outskirts, they had long been
familiar with its beauties, and the only matter for surprise is that
they had not earlier turned their faces to their native hills instead of
spending some intervening years elsewhere.
No region could have been more in harmony with their sympathies and
pursuits. The hardy inhabitants of these dales, and the simplicity of
their lives and manners, formed fitting objects of study and reflection
for the single-minded poet of Nature, who came to live and die amongst
them. It is quite unnecessary, in these days of travel and of
guide-books, which have done so much to make the district familiar
ground, to give any description of it. It may not, however, be out of
place to quote an extract or two from Wordsworth's own Description of
the lakes. Referring to the aspect of the district at different seasons
of the year, he says:--"It has been said that in human life there are
moments worth ages. In a more subdued tone of sympathy may we affirm
that in the climate of England there are, for the lover of Nature, days
which are worth whole months--I might say even years. One of these
favoured days sometimes occurs in spring-time, when that soft air is
breathing over the blossoms and new-born verdure which inspired Buchanan
with his beautiful 'Ode to the First of May'; the air which, in the
luxuriance of his fancy, he likens to that of the golden age--to that
which gives motion to the funereal cypresses on the banks of Lethe; to
the air which is to salute beatified spirits when expiatory fires shall
have consumed the earth, with all her habitations. But it is in autumn
that days of such affecting influence most frequently intervene. The
atmosphere becomes refined, and the sky rendered more crystalline, as
the vivifying heat of the year abates; the lights and shadows are more
delicate; the colouring is richer and more finely harmonised; and, in
this season of stillness, the ear being unoccupied, or only gently
excited, the sense of vision becomes more susceptible of its appropriate
enjoyments. A resident in a country like this we are treating of will
agree with me that the presence of a lake is indispensable to exhibit in
perfection the beauty of one of these days; and he must have
experienced, while looking on the unruffled waters, that the imagination
by their aid is carried into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.
The reason of this is that the heavens are not only brought down into
the bosom of the earth, but that the earth is mainly looked at, and
thought of, through the medium of a purer element. The happiest time is
when the equinoctial gales are departed; but their fury may probably be
called to mind by the sight of a few shattered boughs, whose leaves do
not differ in colour from the faded foliage of the stately oaks from
which these relics of the storm depend; all else speaks of tranquillity;
not a breath of air, no restlessness of insects, and not a moving object
perceptible, except the clouds gliding in the depth of the lake, or the
traveller passing along, an inverted image, whose motion seems governed
by the quiet of a time to which its archetype, the living person, is
perhaps insensible; or it may happen that the figure of one of the
larger birds--a raven or a heron--is crossing silently among the
reflected clouds, while the voice of the real bird, from the element
aloft, gently awakens in the spectator the recollection of appetites and
instincts, pursuits and occupations, that deform and agitate the world,
yet have no power to prevent Nature from putting on an aspect capable of
satisfying the most intense cravings for the tranquil, the lovely, and
the perfect, to which man, the noblest of her creatures, is subject."
His description of the Cumbrian cottages--
"Clustered like stars some few, but single most,
And lurking dimly in their shy retreats,
Or glancing on each other cheerful looks,
Like separated stars with clouds between--"
is exceedingly happy.
"The dwelling-houses and contiguous outhouses are, in many instances, of
the colour of the native rock, out of which they have been built; but
frequently the dwelling or fire-house, as it is ordinarily called, has
been distinguished from the barn or byre by rough-cast and whitewash,
which, as the inhabitants are not hasty in renewing it, in a few years
acquires, by the influence of weather, a tint at once sober and
variegated. As these houses have been, from father to son, inhabited by
persons engaged in the same occupations, yet necessarily with changes in
their circumstances, they have received without incongruity additions
and accommodations adapted to the needs of each successive occupant,
who, being for the most part proprietor, was at liberty to follow his
own fancy; so that these humble dwellings remind the contemplative
spectator of a production of Nature, and may (using a strong expression)
rather be said to have grown than to have been erected--to have risen,
by an instinct of their own, out of the native rock--so little is there
of formality, such is their wildness and beauty. Among the numerous
recesses and projections in the walls, and in the different stages of
their roofs, are seen bold and harmonious effects of contrasted sunshine
and shadow. It is a favourable circumstance that the strong winds which
sweep down the valleys induced the inhabitants, at a time when the
materials for building were easily procured, to furnish many of these
dwellings with substantial porches; and such as have not this defence
are seldom unprovided with a projection of two large slates over their
thresholds. Nor will the singular beauty of the chimneys escape the eye
of the attentive traveller. Sometimes a low chimney, almost upon a level
with the roof, is overlaid with a slate, supported upon four slender
pillars, to prevent the wind from driving the smoke down the chimney.
Others are of a quadrangular shape, rising one or two feet above the
roof; which low square is often surmounted by a tall cylinder, giving
to the cottage chimney the most beautiful shape in which it is ever
seen. Nor will it be too fanciful or refined to remark that there is a
pleasing harmony between a tall chimney of this circular form, and the
living column of smoke, ascending from it through the still air. These
dwellings, mostly built, as has been said, of rough unhewn stone, are
roofed with slates, which were rudely taken from the quarry before the
present art of splitting them was understood; and are, therefore, rough
and uneven in their surface, so that both the coverings and sides of the
houses have furnished places of rest for the seeds of lichens, mosses,
ferns, and flowers. Hence buildings, which in their very form call to
mind the processes of Nature, do thus, clothed in part with a vegetable
garb, appear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of
things, as it acts and exists among the woods and fields; and, by their
colour and their shape, affectingly direct the thoughts to that tranquil
course of Nature and simplicity, along which the humble-minded
inhabitants have, through so many generations been led. Add the little
garden with its shed for beehives, its small bed of pot-herbs, and its
borders and patches of flowers for Sunday posies, with sometimes a
choice few too much prized to be plucked; an orchard of proportioned
size; a cheese-press, often supported by some tree near the door; a
cluster of embowering sycamores for summer shade; with a tall fir
through which the winds sing when other trees are leafless; the little
rill, or household spout, murmuring in all seasons; combine these
incidents and images together, and you have the representative idea of
a mountain cottage in this country so beautifully formed in itself, and
so richly adorned by the hand of Nature.
"Till within the last sixty years[1] there was no communication between
any of these vales by carriage-roads; all bulky articles were
transported on pack-horses. Owing, however, to the population not being
concentrated in villages, but scattered, the valleys themselves were
intersected, as now, by innumerable lanes and pathways leading from
house to house and from field to field. These lanes, where they are
fenced by stone walls, are mostly bordered with ashes, hazels, wild
roses, and beds of tall fern, at their base; while the walls themselves,
if old, are overspread with mosses, small ferns, wild strawberries, the
geranium, and lichens; and if the wall happen to rest against a bank of
earth, it is sometimes almost wholly concealed by a rich facing of
stone-fern. It is a great advantage to a traveller or resident, that
these numerous lanes and paths, if he be a zealous admirer of Nature,
will lead him on into all the recesses of the country, so that the
hidden treasures of its landscapes may, by an ever-ready guide, be laid
open to his eyes."
A much more recent writer, Mrs. E. Lynn Linton, in her charming work,
full of graceful description and exquisite poetry, thus writes of the
scenery of one of the lakes after a storm:--
"The woods glittered and sparkled in the sun, each dripping branch a
spray of golden light, and the light was married to the loud music of
the birds flowing out in rivulets of song. Countless flies shot through
the air, and vibrated on the water; and the fish leaped up to catch
them, dimpling the shining surface with concentric ripples, and throwing
up small jets of light in the smooth black bays. Every crag and stone,
and line of wall, and tuft of gorse, was visible on the nearer hills,
where the colouring was intense and untranslatable; and on the more
distant mountains, we could see, as through a telescope, the scars on
the steeps, the slaty shingles, and the straight cleavings down the
sides, the old grey watercourses, threaded now like a silver line--those
silver lines, after the storm, over all the craggy faces everywhere; we
could see each green knoll set like an island among the grey boulders,
each belt of mountain wood, each purple rift, each shadowed pass, slope
and gully, and ghyll and scaur--we could count them all glistening in
the sun, or clear and tender in the shade; while the sky was of a deep,
pure blue above, and the cumulus clouds were gathered into masses white
and dazzling as marble, and almost as solid-looking.
"And over all, and on all, and lying in the heart of everything,
warming, creating, fashioning the dead matter into all lovely forms, and
driving the sweet juices like blood through the veins of the whole of
earth, shone the glad sun, free, boundless, loving--life of the world's
life, glory of its glory, shaper and creator of its brightest beauty.
Silver on the lake, gold in the wood, purple over the hills, white and
lazuli in the heavens--what infinite splendour hanging through this
narrow valley! What a wealth of love and beauty pouring out for the
heart of all Nature, and for the diviner soul of man!"
Of the mountain tarns, which in their solitary grandeur gleam like
diamonds, she writes:--
"It is very lovely to watch the ripple of a tarn: a wonderful lesson in
wave curvature, if small in scale, yet as true as the wildest ocean
storm could give. Ever changing in line, and yet so uniform in law, the
artist and the hydrographer might learn some valuable truths from half a
day's study of one of these small mountain sheets of water. Now the
broad, smooth, silky curves flow steadily across; now a fine network
spreads over these, and again another network, smaller and finer still,
breaks up the rest into a thousand fragments; then the tarn bursts out
into tiny silver spangles, like a girl's causeless laughter; and then
comes a grey sweep across the water, as if it shivered in the wind; and
then again all subsides, and the long, silky flow sets in again, with
quiet shadows and play of green and grey in the transparent shallows. It
is like a large diamond set in emerald; for the light of the water is
radiance simply, not colour; and the grass, with the sun striking
through, is as bright as an emerald."
If one more extract from Mrs. Linton may be culled, it is to the
following reflections that a day spent on Helvellyn gives rise:--
"Ah! what a world lies below! But grand as it is on the earth, it is
mated by the grandeur of the sky. For the cloud scenery is of such
surpassing nobleness while it lasts, and before it is drawn up into one
volume of intensest blue, that no kind or manner of discord mars the
day's power and loveliness. Of all forms and of all colours are those
gracious summer clouds, ranging from roseate flakes of dazzling white
masses and torn black remnants, like the last fragments of a widow's
weeds thrust aside for her maturer bridal; from solid substances, firm
and marble-like, to light baby curls set like pleasant smiles about the
graver faces: words and pictures, in all their changes, unspeakably
precious to soul and sense. And when, finally, they all gather
themselves away, and leave the sky a vault of undimmed blue, and leave
the earth a gorgeous picture of human industry and dwelling--when field
and plain, and mountain and lake, and tarn and river are fashioned into
the beauty of a primeval earth by the purity of the air and the
governing strength of the sun and the fragrant sweetness of the summer,
and when the very gates of heaven seem opening for our entering where
the southern sun stands at gaze in his golden majesty--is it wonder if
there are tears more glad than many smiles, and a thrill of love more
prayerful than many a litany chanted in the church service? In the very
passion of delight that pours like wine through the veins is a solemn
outfall--in the very deliciousness of joy an intensity that is almost
pain. It is all so solemn and so grand, so noble and so loving, surely
we cannot be less than what we live in!
"Let any one haunted by small cares, by fears worse than cares, and by
passions worse than either, go up on a mountain height on such a
summer's day as this, and there confront his soul with the living soul
of Nature. Will the stately solitude not calm him? Can the nobleness of
beauty not raise him to like nobleness? Is there no Divine voice for him
in the absolute stillness? No loving hand guiding through the pathless
wilds? No tenderness for man in the lavishness of Nature? Have the
clouds no lesson of strength in their softness? the sun no cheering in
its glory? Has the earth no hymn in all its living murmur? the air no
shaping in its clearness? the wind no healing in its power? Can he stand
in the midst of that great majesty the sole small thing, and shall his
spirit, which should be the noblest thing of all, let itself be crippled
by self and fear, till it lies crawling on the earth when its place is
lifting to the heavens? Oh! better than written sermon or spoken
exhortation is one hour on the lonely mountain tops, when the world
seems so far off, and God and His angels so near. Into the Temple of
Nature flows the light of the Shekinah, pure and strong and holy, and
they are wisest who pass into it oftenest, and rest within its glory
longest. There was never a church more consecrated to all good ends than
the stone waste on Helvellyn top, where you sit beneath the sun and
watch the bright world lying in radiant peace below, and the quiet and
sacred heavens above."
Probably there is no spot of English ground to which more pilgrimages
have, during the last half-century, been made than the vale of Grasmere,
which has for all time been rendered classic by the residence therein of
Wordsworth and those sons of genius who loved to gather around him; and
almost every prominent object and scene in which has been immortalised
by his pen.
To lovers of his poetry the spirit of Wordsworth yet casts a spell over
the landscape; and mountain and vale and lake are almost as articulate
to the hearing ear as are the storied stones of Rome. But Life's
grandest music is audible only to the ready ear. It is to the "inward
eye" of love, gathering its treasured harvest, that the brightest halo
is revealed. Earth may be
"Crammed with heaven,"--
"But only he who sees takes off his shoes."
As Nature whispers her secrets to her true lovers; so it is to the
searching eye that the historic pile presents a vision of years, and the
decaying cottage or hoary mountain speak of those who consecrated its
stones or roamed beneath its shade.
Apart, however, from the interest which attaches to this locality from
its many cherished associations, it is of unsurpassed beauty and
loveliness. The scenery of this favoured district, so pleasingly varied
as to inspire at once with gladness and awe, to thrill with rapture or
to charm into repose, culminates in the transcendent loveliness of the
mountain-guarded vale of Grasmere. It takes captive the affections like
the features of a familiar friend.
The poet Gray, writing concerning it more than a century ago, says:
"Passed by the little chapel of Wiborn [Wythburn], out of which the
Sunday congregation were then issuing. Passed by a beck near Dunmail
Raise, and entered Westmoreland a second time; now began to see Helm
crag, distinguished from its rugged neighbours, not so much by its
height, as by the strange, broken outline of its top, like some
gigantic building demolished, and the stones that composed it flung
across each other in wild confusion. Just beyond it opens one of the
sweetest landscapes that Art ever attempted to imitate. The bosom of the
mountains here spreading into a broad basin, discovers in the midst
Grasmere Water; its margin is hollowed into small bays, with eminences,
some of rock, some of soft turf, that half conceal and half vary the
figure of the little lake they command. From the shore a low promontory
pushes itself into the water, and on it stands a white village, with a
parish church rising in the midst of it, having enclosures, cornfields,
and meadows, green as an emerald, which, with trees, and hedges, and
cattle, fill up the whole space from the edge of the water, and just
opposite to you is a large farmhouse at the bottom of a steep, smooth
lawn, embosomed in old woods, which climb half way up the mountain
sides, and discover above a broken line of crags that crown the scene.
Not a single red tile, no staring gentleman's house breaks in upon the
repose of this unsuspected paradise; but all is peace, rusticity, and
happy poverty, in its sweetest, most becoming attire."
This description must, of course, at the present day be somewhat
modified. The scene upon which the eyes of the author of the Elegy
rested is now varied by many residences and signs of human contact then
absent.
In an account of a visit to Grasmere at a much later period, the late
Nathaniel Hawthorne says: "This little town seems to me as pretty a
place as ever I met with in my life. It is quite shut in by hills that
rise up immediately around it, like a neighbourhood of kindly giants.
These hills descend steeply to the verge of the level on which the
village stands, and there they terminate at once, the whole site of the
little town being as even as a floor. I call it a village, but it is no
village at all; all the dwellings stand apart, each in its own little
domain, and each, I believe, with its own little lane leading to it,
independently of the rest. Many of these are old cottages, plastered
white, with antique porches, and roses, and other vines, trained against
them, and shrubbery growing about them, and some are covered with ivy.
There are a few edifices of more pretension and of modern build, but not
so strikingly as to put the rest out of countenance. The Post Office,
when we found it, proved to be an ivied cottage, with a good deal of
shrubbery round it, having its own pathway, like the other cottages. The
whole looks like a real seclusion, shut out from the great world by
those encircling hills, on the sides of which, whenever they are not too
steep, you see the division lines of property and tokens of
cultivation--taking from them their pretensions of savage majesty, but
bringing them nearer to the heart of man."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This was written in 1810.
"Only a sister's part--yes, that was all;
And yet her life was bright, and full, and free.
She did not feel, 'I give up all for him;'
She only knew, ''Tis mine his friend to be.'
"So what she saw and felt the poet sang--
She did not seek the world should know her share;
Her one great hunger was for 'William's' fame,
To give his thoughts a voice her life-long prayer.
"And when with wife and child his days were crowned
She did not feel that she was left alone,
Glad in their joy, she shared their every care,
And only thought of baby as 'our own.'
"His 'dear, dear sister,' that was all she asked,
Her gentle ministry, her only fame;
But when we read his page with grateful heart,
Between the lines we'll spell out Dora's name."
--ANON. IN _The Spectator_.