setting sun. And another isle seems to shoot across our path, separated
suddenly, as if by magic, from the mainland. How beautiful, with its
many crescents, the low-lying shores, carrying here and there a single
tree quite into the water, and with verdant shallows guarding the lonely
seclusion even from the keel of canoe! Round and round we row, but not a
single landing-place. Shall we take each of us a fair burthen in his
arms, and bear it to that knoll, whispering and quivering through the
twilight with a few birches whose stems glitter like silver pillars in
the shade? No--let us not disturb the silent people, now donning their
green array for nightly revelries. It is the "Isle of Fairies," and on
that knoll hath the fishermen often seen their Queen sitting on a
throne, surrounded by myriads of creatures no taller than harebells; one
splash of the oar--and all is vanished. There, it is said, lives among
the Folk of Peace, the fair child, who, many years ago, disappeared from
her parents' shieling at Inversnayde, and whom they vainly wept over as
dead. One evening she had floated away by herself in a small boat--while
her parents heard, without fear, the clank--duller and duller--of the
oars, no longer visible in the distant moonshine. In an hour the
returning vessel touched the beech--but no child was to be seen--and
they listened in vain for the music of the happy creature's songs. For
weeks the loch rolled and roared like the sea--nor was the body found
anywhere lying on the shore. Long, long afterwards, some little white
bones were interred in Christian burial, for the parents believed them
to be the remains of their child--all that had been left by the bill of
the raven. But not so thought many dwellers along the mountain-shores--for
had not her very voice been often heard by the shepherds, when the
unseen flight of Fairies sailed singing along up the solitary
Glenfalloch, away over the moors of Tynedrum, and down to the sweet
Dalmally, where the shadow of Cruachan darkens the old ruins of
melancholy Kilchurn. The lost child's parents died in their old age--but
she, 'tis said, is unchanged in shape and features--the same fair thing
she was the evening that she disappeared, only a shade of sadness is on
her pale face, as if she were pining for the sound of human voices, and
the gleam of the peat-fire of the shieling. Ever, when the Fairy-court
is seen for a moment beneath the glimpses of the moon, she is sitting by
the side of the gracious Queen. Words of might there are, that if
whispered at right season, would yet recall her from the shadowy world,
to which she has been spirited away; but small sentinels stand at their
stations all round the isle, and at nearing of human breath, a shrill
warning is given from sedge and water-lily, and like dewdrops melt away
the phantoms, while, mixed with peals of little laughter, overhead is
heard the winnowing of wings. For the hollow of the earth, and the
hollow of the air, is their Invisible Kingdom; and when they touch the
herbage or flowers of this earth of ours, whose lonely places they love,
then only are they revealed to human eyes--at all times else to our
senses unexistent as dreams!
A DAY AT WINDERMERE.
Old and gouty, we are confined to our chair; and occasionally, during an
hour of rainless sunshine, are wheeled by female hands along the
gravel-walks of our Policy, an unrepining and philosophical
valetudinarian. Even the Crutch is laid up in ordinary, and is encircled
with cobwebs. A monstrous spider has there set up his rest; and our
still study ever and anon hearkens to the shrill buzz of some poor fly
expiring between those formidable forceps--just as so many human
ephemerals have breathed their last beneath the bite of his indulgent
master. 'Tis pleasure to look at Domitian--so we love to call
him--sallying from the centre against a wearied wasp, lying, like a
silkworm, circumvoluted in the inextricable toils, and then seizing the
sinner by the nape of the neck, like Christopher with a Cockney, to see
the emperor haul him away into the charnel-house. But we have often less
savage recreations--such as watching our bee-hives when about to send
forth colonies--feeding our pigeons, a purple people that dazzle the
daylight--gathering roses as they choke our small chariot-wheels with
their golden orbs--eating grapes out of vine-leaf-draperied baskets,
beautifying beneath the gentle fingers of the Gentle into fairy network
graceful as the gossamer--drinking elder-flower frontignac from
invisible glasses, so transparent in its yellowness seems the liquid
radiance--at one moment eyeing a page of "Paradise Lost," and at another
of "Paradise Regained;" for what else is the face of her who often
visiteth our Eden, and whose coming and whose going is ever like a
heavenly dream? Then laying back our head upon the cushion of our
triumphal car, and with half-shut eyes, subsiding slowly into haunted
sleep or slumber, with our fine features up to heaven, a saint-like
image, such as Raphael loved to paint, or Flaxman to imbue with the
soul of stillness in the life-hushed marble. Such, dearest reader, are
some of our pastimes--and so do we contrive to close our ears to the
sound of the scythe of Saturn, ceaselessly sweeping over the earth, and
leaving, at every stride of the mower, a swathe more rueful than ever
after a night of shipwreck did strew with ghastliness a lee sea-shore!
Thus do we make a virtue of necessity--and thus contentment wreathes
with silk and velvet the prisoner's chains. Once were we--long, long
ago--restless as a sunbeam on the restless wave--rapid as a river that
seems enraged with all impediments, but all the while in passionate love
"Doth make sweet music with th' enamell'd stones"--
strong as a steed let loose from Arab's tent in the oasis to slake his
thirst at the desert well--fierce in our harmless joy as a red-deer
belling on the hills--tameless as the eagle sporting in the storm--gay
as the "dolphin on a tropic sea"--"mad as young bulls"--and wild as a
whole wilderness of adolescent lions. But now--alas! and alack-a-day!
the sunbeam is but a patch of sober verdure--the river is changed into a
canal--the "desert-born" is foundered--the red-deer is slow as an old
ram--the eagle has forsook his cliff and his clouds, and hops among the
gooseberry bushes--the dolphin has degenerated into a land
tortoise--without danger now might a very child take the bull by the
horns--and though something of a lion still, our roar is, like that of
the nightingale, "most musical, most melancholy"--and, as we attempt to
shake our mane, your grandmother--fair peruser--cannot choose but weep.
It speaks folios in favour of our philanthropy, to know that, in our own
imprisonment, we love to see all life free as air. Would that by a word
of ours we could clothe all human shoulders with wings! Would that by a
word of ours we could plume all human spirits with thoughts strong as
the eagle's pinions, that they might winnow their way into the empyrean!
Tories! Yes! we are Tories. Our faith is in the Divine right of
kings--but easy, my boys, easy--all free men are kings, and they hold
their empire from heaven. That is our political--philosophical--moral--
religious creed. In its spirit we have lived--and in its spirit we hope
to die--not on the scaffold like Sidney--no--no--no--not by any manner
of means like Sidney on the scaffold--but like ourselves, on a
hair-mattress above a feather-bed, our head decently sunk in three
pillows and one bolster, and our frame stretched out unagitatedly
beneath a white counterpane. But meanwhile--though almost as
unlocomotive as the dead in body--there is perpetual motion in our
minds. Sleep is one thing, and stagnation is another--as is well known
to all eyes that have ever seen, by moonlight and midnight, the face of
Christopher North, or of Windermere.
Windermere! Why, at this blessed moment we behold the beauty of all its
intermingling isles. There they are--all gazing down on their own
reflected loveliness in the magic mirror of the airlike water, just as
many a holy time we have seen them all agaze, when, with suspended oar
and suspended breath--no sound but a ripple on the Naiad's bow, and a
beating at our own heart--motionless in our own motionless bark--we
seemed to float midway down that beautiful abyss between the heaven
above and the heaven below, on some strange terrestrial scene composed
of trees and the shadows of trees, by the imagination made
indistinguishable to the eye, and as delight deepened into dreams, all
lost at last, clouds, groves, water, air, sky, in their various and
profound confusion of supernatural peace. But a sea-born breeze is on
Bowness Bay; all at once the lake is blue as the sky: and that
evanescent world is felt to have been but a vision. Like swans that had
been asleep in the airless sunshine, lo! where from every shady nook
appear the white-sailed pinnaces; for on merry Windermere--you must
know--every breezy hour has its own Regatta.
But intending to be useful, we are becoming ornamental; of us it must
not be said, that
"Pure description holds the place of sense"--
therefore, let us be simple but not silly, as plain as is possible
without being prosy, as instructive as is consistent with being
entertaining, a cheerful companion and a trusty guide.
We shall suppose that you have left Kendal, and are on your way to
Bowness. Forget, as much as may be, all worldly cares and anxieties, and
let your hearts be open and free to all genial impulses about to be
breathed into them from the beautiful and sublime in nature. There is
no need of that foolish state of feeling called enthusiasm. You have but
to be happy; and by-and-by your happiness will grow into delight. The
blue mountains already set your imaginations at work; among those clouds
and mists you fancy many a magnificent precipice--and in the valleys
that sleep below, you image to yourselves the scenery of rivers and
lakes. The landscape immediately around gradually grows more and more
picturesque and romantic; and you feel that you are on the very borders
of Fairyland. The first smile of Windermere salutes your impatient eyes,
and sinks silently into your heart. You know not how beautiful it may
be--nor yet in what the beauty consists; but your finest sensibilities
to nature are touched--and a tinge of poetry, as from a rainbow,
overspreads that cluster of islands that seems to woo you to their still
retreats. And now
"Wooded Winandermere, the river-lake,"
with all its bays and promontories, lies in the morning light serene as
a Sabbath, and cheerful as a Holiday; and you feel that there is
loveliness on this earth more exquisite and perfect than ever visited
your slumbers even in the glimpses of a dream. The first sight of such a
scene will be unforgotten to your dying day--for such passive
impressions are deeper than we can explain--our whole spiritual being is
suddenly awakened to receive them--and associations, swift as light, are
gathered into one Emotion of Beauty which shall be imperishable, and
which, often as memory recalls that moment, grows into genius, and vents
itself in appropriate expressions, each in itself a picture. Thus may
one moment minister to years; and the life-wearied heart of old age by
one delightful remembrance be restored to primal joy--the glory of the
past brought beamingly upon the faded present--and the world that is
obscurely passing away from our eyes re-illumined with the visions of
its early morn. The shows of nature are indeed evanescent, but their
spiritual influences are immortal; and from that grove now glowing in
the sunlight may your heart derive a delight that shall utterly perish
but in the grave.
But now you are in the White Lion, and our advice to you--perhaps
unnecessary--is immediately to order breakfast. There are many
parlours--some with a charming prospect, and some without any prospect
at all; but remember that there are other people in the world besides
yourselves--and therefore, into whatever parlour you may be shown by a
pretty maid, be contented, and lose no time in addressing yourselves to
your repast. That over, be in no hurry to get on the Lake. Perhaps all
the boats are engaged--and Billy Balmer is at the Waterhead. So stroll
into the churchyard, and take a glance over the graves. Close to the
oriel-window of the church is one tomb over which one might meditate
half an autumnal day. Enter the church, and you will feel the beauty of
these fine lines 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 cross'd
Like leafless underboughs, 'mid some thick grove,
All wither'd by the depth of shade above!"
Go down to the low terrace-walk along the Bay. The Bay is in itself a
Lake, at all times cheerful with its scattered fleet, at anchor or under
weigh--its villas and cottages, each rejoicing in its garden or
orchard--its meadows mellowing to the reedy margin of the pellucid
water--its heath-covered boathouses--its own portion of the Isle called
Beautiful--and beyond that sylvan haunt, the sweet Furness Fells, with
gentle outline undulating in the sky, and among its spiral larches
showing, here and there, groves and copses of the old unviolated woods.
Yes, Bowness Bay is in itself a Lake; but how finely does it blend away,
through its screens of oak and sycamore trees, into a larger
Lake--another, yet the same--on whose blue bosom you see bearing down to
windward--for the morning breeze is born--many a tiny sail. It has the
appearance of a race. Yes--it is a race; and the Liverpoolian, as of
yore, is eating them all out of the wind, and without another tack will
make her anchorage. But hark--Music! 'Tis the Bowness Band playing "See
the conquering Hero comes!"--and our old friend has carried away the
gold cup from all competitors.
Now turn your faces up the hill above the village school. That green
mount is what is called a--Station. The villagers are admiring a grove
of parasols, while you--the party--are admiring the village--with its
irregular roofs--white, blue, grey, green, brown, and black
walls--fruit-laden trees so yellow--its central church-tower--and
environing groves variously burnished by autumn. Saw ye ever banks and
braes and knolls so beautifully bedropt with human dwellings? There is
no solitude about Windermere. Shame on human nature were Paradise
uninhabited! Here, in amicable neighbourhood, are halls and huts--here
rises through groves the dome of the rich man's mansion--and there the
low roof of the poor man's cottage beneath its one single sycamore! Here
are hundreds of small properties hereditary in the same families for
hundreds of years--and never, never, O Westmoreland! may thy race of
_statesmen_ be extinct--nor the virtues that ennoble their humble
households! See, suddenly brought forth by sunshine from among the old
woods--and then sinking away into her usual unobtrusive serenity--the
lake-loving Rayrig, almost level, so it seems, with the water, yet
smiling over her own quiet bay from the grove-shelter of her pastoral
mound. Within her walls may peace ever dwell with piety--and the light
of science long blend with the lustre of the domestic hearth! Thence to
Calgarth is all one forest--yet glade-broken, and enlivened by open
uplands; so that the roamer, while he expects a night of umbrage, often
finds himself in the open day, beneath the bright blue bow of heaven
haply without a cloud. The eye travels delighted over the multitudinous
tree-tops--often dense as one single tree--till it rests, in sublime
satisfaction, on the far-off mountains, that lose not a woody character
till the tree-sprinkled pastures roughen into rocks--and rocks tower
into precipices where the falcons breed. But the lake will not suffer
the eye long to wander among the distant glooms. She wins us wholly to
herself--and restlessly and passionately for a while, but calmly and
affectionately at last, the heart embraces all her beauty, and wishes
that the vision might endure for ever, and that here our tents were
pitched--to be struck no more during our earthly pilgrimage. Imagination
lapses into a thousand moods. O for a fairy pinnace to glide and float
for aye over those golden waves! A hermit-cell on sweet Lady-Holm! A
sylvan shieling on Loughrig side! A nest in that nameless dell, which
sees but one small slip of heaven, and longs at night for the
reascending visit of its few loving stars! A dwelling open to all the
skyey influence on the mountain-brow, the darling of the rising or the
setting sun, and often seen by eyes in the lower world glittering
through the rainbow!
All this seems a very imperfect picture indeed, or panorama of
Windermere, from the hill behind the school-house in the village of
Bowness. So, to put a stop to such nonsense, let us descend to the White
Lion--and inquire about Billy Balmer. Honest Billy has arrived from
Waterhead--seems tolerably steady--Mr Ullock's boats may be trusted--so
let us take a voyage of discovery on the lake. Let those who have reason
to think that they have been born to die a different death from
drowning, hoist a sail. We to-day shall feather an oar. Billy takes the
stroke--Mr William Garnet's at the helm--and "row, vassals, row, for the
pride of the Lowlands," is the choral song that accompanies the Naiad
out of the bay, and round the north end of the Isle called Beautiful,
under the wave-darkening umbrage of that ancient oak. And now we are in
the lovely straits between that Island and the mainland of Furness
Fells. The village has disappeared, but not melted away; for hark! the
Church-tower tolls ten--and see the sun is high in heaven. High, but not
hot--for the first September frosts chilled the rosy fingers of the morn
as she bathed them in the dews, and the air is cool as a cucumber. Cool
but bland--and as clear and transparent as a fine eye lighted up by a
good conscience. There were breezes in Bowness Bay--but here there are
none--or, if there be, they but whisper aloft in the tree-tops, and
ruffle not the water, which is calm as Louisa's breast. The small isles
here are but few in number--yet the best arithmetician of the party
cannot count them--in confusion so rich and rare do they blend their
shadows with those of the groves on the Isle called Beautiful, and on
the Furness Fells. A tide imperceptible to the eye drifts us on among
and above those beautiful reflections--that downward world of hanging
dreams! and ever and anon we beckon unto Billy gently to dip his oar,
that we may see a world destroyed and recreated in one moment of time.
Yes, Billy! thou art a poet--and canst work more wonders with thine oar
than could he with his pen who painted "heavenly Una with her milk-white
lamb," wandering by herself in Fairyland. How is it, pray, that our
souls are satiated with such beauty as this? Is it because 'tis
unsubstantial all--senseless, though fair--and in its evanescence
unsuited to the sympathies that yearn for the permanencies of breathing
life? Dreams are delightful only as delusions within the delusion of
this our mortal waking existence--one touch of what we call reality
dissolves them all; blissful though they may have been, we care not when
the bubble bursts--nay, we are glad again to return to our own natural
world, care-haunted though in its happiest moods it be--glad as if we
had escaped from glamoury; and, oh! beyond expression sweet it is once
more to drink the light of living eyes--the music of living lips--after
that preternatural hush that steeps the shadowy realms of the
imagination, whether stretching along a sunset-heaven or the mystical
imagery of earth and sky floating in the lustre of lake or sea.
Therefore "row, vassals, row, for the pride of the Lowlands;" and as
rowing is a thirsty exercise, let us land at the Ferry, and each man
refresh himself with a horn of ale.
There is not a prettier place on all Windermere than the Ferry-House, or
one better adapted for a honey-moon. You can hand your bride into a boat
almost out of the parlour window, and be off among the islands in a
moment, or into nook or bay where no prying eye, even through telescope
(a most unwarrantable instrument), can overlook your happiness; or you
can secrete yourselves, like buck and doe, among the lady-fern on
Furness Fells, where not a sunbeam can intrude on your sacred privacy,
and where you may melt down hours to moments, in chaste connubial bliss,
brightening futurity with plans of domestic enjoyment, like long lines
of lustre streaming across the lake. But at present, let us visit the
fort-looking building among the cliffs called The Station, and see how
Windermere looks as we front the east. Why, you would not know it to be
the same lake. The Isle called Beautiful, which heretofore had scarcely
seemed an isle, appearing to belong to one or other shore of the
mainland, from this point of view is an isle indeed, loading the lake
with a weight of beauty, and giving it an ineffable character of
richness which nowhere else does it possess; while the other lesser
isles, dropt "in nature's careless haste" between it and the Furness
Fells, connect it still with those lovely shores from which it floats a
short way apart, without being disunited--one spirit blending the whole
together within the compass of a fledgling's flight. Beyond these
"Sister isles, that smile
Together like a happy family
Of beauty and of love,"
the eye meets the Rayrig woods, with but a gleam of water between, only
visible in sunshine, and is gently conducted by them up the hills of
Applethwaite, diversified with cultivated enclosures, "all green as
emerald" to their very summits, with all their pastoral and arable
grounds besprinkled with stately single trees, copses, or groves. On the
nearer side of these hills is seen, stretching far off to other lofty
regions--Hill-bell and High-street conspicuous over the rest--the long
vale of Troutbeck, with its picturesque cottages, in "numbers without
number numberless," and all its sable pines and sycamores--on the
further side, that most sylvan of all sylvan mountains, where lately the
Hemans warbled her native wood-notes wild in her poetic bower, fitly
called Dove-nest, and beyond, Kirkstone Fells and Rydal Head,
magnificent giants looking westward to the Langdale Pikes (here unseen),
"The last that parley with the setting sun."
Immediately in front, the hills are low and lovely, sloping with gentle
undulations down to the lake, here grove-girdled along all its shores.
The elm-grove that overshadows the Parsonage is especially
conspicuous--stately and solemn in a green old age--and though now
silent, in spring and early summer clamorous with rooks in love or
alarm, an ancient family, and not to be expelled from their hereditary
seats. Following the line of shore to the right, and turning your eyes
unwillingly away from the bright and breezy Belfield, they fall on the
elegant architecture of Storr's Hall, gleaming from a glade in the thick
woods, and still looking southward they see a serene series of the same
forest scenery, along the heights of Gillhead and Gummer's-How, till
Windermere is lost, apparently narrowed into a river, beyond Townhead
and Fellfoot, where the prospect is closed by a beaconed eminence
clothed with shadowy trees to the very base of the Tower. The points and
promontories jutting into the lake from these and the opposite
shores--which are of a humbler, though not tame character--are all
placed most felicitously; and as the lights and shadows keep shifting on
the water, assume endless varieties of relative position to the eye, so
that often during one short hour you might think you had been gazing on
Windermere with a kaleidoscopical eye, that had seemed to create the
beauty which in good truth is floating there for ever on the bosom of
nature.