English Lands Letters and Kings: The Later Georges to Victoria

It is no wonder; for those Lake counties are very beautiful,—as if, some day, all the tamer features of English landscape had been sifted out, and the residue of picturesqueness and salient objects of flood and mountain had been bunched together in those twin regions of the Derwent and of Windermere. Every American traveller is familiar, of course, with the charming glimpses of Lake Saltonstall from the Shore-line high-road between New York and Boston; let them imagine these multiplied by a score, at frequently recurring intervals of walk or drive; not bald duplications; for sometimes the waters have longer stretch, and the hills have higher reach, and fields have richer culture and more abounding verdure; moreover, occasional gray church towers lift above the trees, and specks of villages whiten spots in the valleys; and the smoothest and hardest of roads run along the margin of the lakes; and masses of ivy cover walls, and go rioting all over the fronts of wayside inns. Then, mountains as high as Graylock, in Berkshire, pile suddenly out of the quieter undulations of surface, with high-lying ponds in their gulches; there are deep swales of heather, and bald rocks, and gray stone cairns that mark the site of ancient Cumbrian battles.

No wonder that a man loving nature and loving solitude, as Wordsworth did love them, should have demurred to the project of railways, and have shuddered—as does Ruskin now—at the whistling of the demon of civilization among those hills. But it has come there, notwithstanding, and come to stay; and from the station beyond Bowness, upon the charmingest bit of Windermere, there lies now only an early morning’s walk to the old home of Wordsworth at Rydal. Immediately thereabout, it is true, the levels are a little more puzzling to the engineers, so that the thirteen miles of charming country road which stretch thence—twirling hither and yon, and up and down—in a northwesterly direction to the town of Keswick and the Derwent valley, remain now in very much the same condition as when I walked over them, in leisurely way, fifty odd years ago this coming spring. The road in passing out from Rydal village goes near the cottage where poor Hartley Coleridge lived, and earlier, that strange creature De Quincey (of whom we shall have presently more to say); it skirts the very margin of Grasmere Lake; this latter being at your left, while upon the right you can almost see among the near hills the famous “Wishing Gate;” farther on is Grasmere village, and Grasmere church-yard—in a corner of which is the grave of the old poet, and a modest stone at its head on which is graven only the name, William Wordsworth,—as if anything more were needed! A mile or two beyond, one passes the “Swan Inn,” and would like to lodge there, and maybe clamber up Helvellyn, which here shows its great hulk on the right—no miniature mountain, but one which would hold its own (3,000 feet) among the lesser ones which shoulder up the horizon at “Crawford’s,” in the White Mountains.