The English Lakes

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Arthur Bradley. The English Lakes

WINDERMERE AND CONISTON

THE HEART OF LAKELANDRYDAL AND GRASMERE

THIRLMERE AND HELVELLYN

KIRKSTONE AND ULLSWATER

BASSENTHWAITE AND DERWENTWATER

BUTTERMERE

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Those delectable little sister lakes of Rydal and Grasmere probably suggest themselves to most of us as the heart of Lakeland. If we took a map and measuring rule we might possibly be surprised to find, as we should do, this vague intuition geometrically verified. How singularly felicitous, then, one may surely deem it, that Wordsworth lived and died here, and that the shrine of the sage and all thereby implied should be thus planted in the very innermost sanctuary of the hills.

The intrinsic charm of these two little lakes and all that pertains to them lies in the delightful variety exhibited within a small compass of wood and water, of rugged crag and fern-clad slope, of velvety park-like meadow and stately timber. The blithesome Rothay unites the upper and larger lake of Grasmere with Rydal Water by a short half-mile display in meadow and ravine of every winsome mood that a mountain stream has at command. The broken, straggling heights and skirts of Loughrigg Fell fill most of the western side of either lake, and on a minor scale, like the stream below, show every type of form and colouring, of drapery primeval or man-made, from naked crag to bowery lawn, all within the compass of three miles and the modest altitude of a thousand feet.

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Rydal Mount, standing embowered in foliage above the road which afterwards skirts both lakes, is not accessible, but Dove Cottage on Grasmere, where the poet, with his gifted sister and for a time with S. T. Coleridge, spent the years preceding his long married life at Rydal Mount, is open to the pilgrim, be he a devout or an indifferent one. It will be hardly less interesting as the residence for twenty years of that strange genius, stylist, and laudanum drinker, De Quincey. Apart from the great literary obligations under which he has laid posterity, the autobiographical volume which deals with this Lake country, and the brilliant circle of which he was a member, is a book of extraordinary interest. He married a local yeoman's daughter, and the domestic side of his life, including a devoted and successful family, infinitely alleviates the tragedy of his own long and indifferently successful struggle with the fatal drug. The weak-willed but lovable and brilliant Hartley Coleridge, too, who would dash off a sonnet in ten minutes, lived at Nab Cottage, on Rydal Water, till he was laid in Grasmere Churchyard, to be followed there by Wordsworth in the succeeding year of 1850. Wordsworth himself was never really in touch with his humbler neighbours. He had not the temperament for that kind of thing, and remained a continual mystery to most of them.

"Well, John, what's the news?" said the rather too sociable Hartley Coleridge one morning to an old stone-breaker.

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