ing it on to the inn at Waterhead, be seated, we pray you, for half an hour, on a moss-cushioned stone, or a grassy couch among the heather. That huge mountain is Coniston Old Man; and he certainly is, with his firm foot and sunny brow,

"The prince o' gude fellows, and wale o'

auld men.'

It is

No doubt, from his summit there is a noble empire for an eagle's eye; but you will find it slavish work to reach the summit on foot or pony-back, so be satisfied with imagination. obvious, from the slightest anatomical knowledge of the structure of the human frame, that it is not good for man to be alone on the mountain-tops. We have more than once managed to climb Chimborazo in our sleep, and even then it was fatiguing enough, although the view certainly repaid us; but when broad awake and sober, no sensible man will ever, in defiance of his own gravity, raise himself up thousands of feet above the level of the sea. You see yonder, three-fourths up the mountain, the mouth of a mine! If it is hard labour you are in search of, become a miner at once; or why not have a private tread-mill of your own, on which to perform the principal character?

Winding away down hill, and every moment widening the glorious panorama, the road leads you, smiling, and talking, and making love perhaps, to the pretty, little, white, comfortable, sycamore-shaded inn of Coniston Waterhead. There you get an admirable breakfast, the lake all the time rippling a low, cheerful song, for there is only the road between you; and when the wind, however gentle, comes from the south and the sea, the edge of the crescent-bay is here all in a murmur. The view down the Lake is nothing very remarkable; but a fine sheet of water, shining in the sun, or darkening in the shadow, is always worth gazing on; and there is a tempting pinnace so hand or lift the ladies on board, and, without aim or object, pull away a mile or two, and then let your hark drift and dally with the wavelets. No wonder you cannot keep your eyes off that face, for it is indeed a pretty one, and there is something more than ordinarily sweet and insinuating in its smile; so without taking your arm from the gunwale, although it has rather too much the effect of

being round Louisa's waist, look towards the head of the lake, and you will acknowledge that Coniston can almost bear a comparison with Windermere.

Here, indeed, are no islands like those of Windermere-no single cliff, crowned with oak and elm, and matted with broom, briar, and the nutbearing hazel-no low-lying ridge of rocks, covered with lichens, and thinly sprinkled with dwarf birches sown by bird or breeze-no Isle of the Oratory, where once the penitent prayed-no Lady-Holm, where stood the Virgin's Chapel-no Belle-Isle, whose noble forest-trees fling their shadows from shore to shore, till two separate Lakes, upper and lower, rejoice each in its own independent and different beauty. But there is great grandeur in the bold breadth of that amphitheatre; and those surely are noble woods and groves that not only embower the meadows, but ascend the mountain-sides, broken but by castellated cliffs, round which flies and cries hawk or kite, or perhaps the eagle. That kingly bird gives name to yonder solitary mountain in the darkness of the glen; but you must not expect to see him, for he is fond of foreign travel, and revisits his paternal mansion only about four times à century.

Coniston Lake is best seen, no doubt, by entering the country over the sands from Lancaster; and by doing so, you may likewise pay a visit to the interesting ruins of Furness-Abbey. "The stranger," says Mr Wordsworth, with his usual poetical feeling, "from the moment he sets his foot on these sands, seems to leave the turmoil and traffic of the world behind him; and, crossing the majestic plain, when the sea has retired, he beholds, rising apparently from its base, the cluster of mountains among which he is going to wander; and towards whose recesses, by the Vale of Coniston, he is gradually and peacefully led." Did time permit, every lake in the world, besides Coniston, ought to be approached from the foot; but the attempt would be often difficult, and indeed human life is too short for such a scientific survey. But now that you are afloat, you may pull away to the foot of the lake, if you choose, and you will be well repaid for your labour by the pretty promontories and bashful bays they conceal, and merry meadows lying in

ambush, and “ corn-riggs sae bonny" trespassing upon the coppice-woods, that year after year yield up their lingering roots to the ploughshare, and grey, white, blue, green, and brown cottages, of every shape and size, and pastoral eminences of old lea, crowned with a few pine-trees, or with an Oak, itself a grove.

It is indeed a pretty sight to see two young ladies attempting to row. How white the gleam of the delicate little fingers on the yellow weather-beaten oar! Pity that there should ever rise a blister on such smooth silken palms ! Ever and anon, their heads are tossed backward and aside, the auburn head that glitters like the sunshine, and the head dark as the raven's wing,-that the dishevelled tresses may not blind altogether those blue or dark-grey laughing eyes. Those slender ankles would blush through the silk, and fly for shelter beneath the flounces, were there the slightest suspicion how innocently they are betrayed! How pants in its close concealment the heaving of the lilied bosom, whose slightest glimpse breathes over the senses at once beauty, brightness, and balm! But a wave, bolder than the rest, has taken hold of the deep-dipping oar, and the fair rower, falling back with a mirth-mingled shriek of fear, is caught in her lover's arms, while something like a kiss is, in spite of all her efforts to prevent it, left upon the blushes that burn even on her snow-white forehead.

By this time the Old People at the Inn have become angrily uneasy; but the landlord gives them a telescope, (the gift of an Ulverston sea-captain,) and their parental wrath is appeased by the far-off, but approaching display of parasols, that comes brightening along, and in half an hour, has brought its green reflection into the mirror of the home-bay, now indistinguishable from shore, air, or sky.

As you have brought with you four horses, what's to hinder them from being saddled-now that they have been combed and curried-and an equestrian excursion made into Yewdale and Tilberthwaite? That curlypated pigmy will be your guide, and if murmuring streams, and dashing torrents, and silent pools, and shadowhaunted grass fields, and star-studded meadows, and glimmering groves, and cliff-girdling coppice-woods, and a

hundred charcoal Sheilings, Huts, and Cottages, and one old Hall, and several hall-like Barns, and a solitary Chapel among its green graves, and glades, and dells, and glens without number, knolls, eminences, hillocks, hills, and mountains,-if these, and many other such sights as these, all so disposed that beauty breathes, whispers, moves, or hangs motionless over all, have power to charm your spirit, then put all the side-saddles in the village in requisition, and you males being nimble as deer, pace proudly each by his own lady's palfrey, and away with the cavalcade into the heart of the expecting mountains!

On such excursions there are sure to occur a few enviable adventures. First, the girths get wrong, and without allowing your beloved virgin to alight, you spend more time than is absolutely necessary in arranging it ; nor can you help admiring the attitude into which the graceful creature is forced to draw up her delicate limbs, that her fairy feet may not be in the way to impede your services. By and by, a calf, -which you hope will be allowed to grow up into a cow,-stretching up her curved red back from behind a wall, startles John Darby, albeit unused to the starting mood, and you leap four yards to the timely assistance of the fair shrieker, tenderly pressing her bridle-hand as you find the rein that has not been lost, and wonder what has become of the whip that never existed. A little farther on, a bridgeless stream crosses the roada dangerous-looking ford indeed-a foot deep at the very least, and scorning wet feet, as they ought to be scorned, you almost carry, serene in danger, your affianced bride (or she is in a fair way of becoming so), in your arms off the saddle, nor relinquish the delightful clasp till all risk is at an end, some hundred yards on, along the velvet herbage. Next stream you come to has indeed a bridge-but then what a bridge! A long, coggly, cracked slate-stone, whose unsteady clatter would make the soberest stced jump over the moon. You beseech the timid girl to sit fast, and she almost leans down to your bosom, as you press to meet the blessed burthen, and to prevent the steady old stager from leaping over the battlements. But now the chasm on each side of the narrow path is so tremendous, that she must

dismount, after due disentanglement, from that awkward, old-fashioned crutch and pummel, and from a stirrup, into which a little foot, when it has once crept like a mouse, finds itself caught as in a trap of singular construction, and difficult to open for releasement. You feel that all you love in the world is indeed fully, freshly, and warmly in your arms, nor can you bear to set the treasure down on the rough, stony road, but look round, and round, and round, for a soft spot, which you finally prophesy at some distance up the hill, whitherwards, in spite of pouting Yea and Nay, you persist in carrying her whose head is ere long to lie in your tranquil bosom.

Gallantry forbids, but Truth commands to say, that young ladies are sorry sketchers. The dear creatures have no notion of perspective. At flower-painting and embroidery, they are pretty fair hands, but they make sad work among waterfalls and ruins. They pencil most extraordinary trees, and nothing can be more puzzling than their horned cattle. Their women are like boys in girls' clothes all as flat as flounders; nor can there be greater failures than the generality of their men. Notwithstanding, it is pleasant to hang over them, seated on stone or stool, drawing from nature; and now and then to help them in with a cow or a horse, or a hermit. It is a difficult, almost an impossible thing-that foreshortening. The most speculative genius is often at a loss to conjecture the species of a human being foreshortened by a young lady. The hanging Tower at Pisa is, we believe, some thirty feet or so off the perpendicular, and there is one at Caerphilly about seventeen; but these are nothing to the castles in the air we have seen built by the touch of a female magician; nor is it an unusual thing with artists of the fair sex to order their plumed chivalry to gallop down precipices considerably steeper than a house, on animals apparently produced between the tiger and the elephant.

Their happiest landscapes betray indeed an amiable innocence of all branches of natural history, except perhaps botany, the foreground being accordingly well stocked with rare plants, which it would stagger a Hooker, a Greville, or a Graham, to christen out of any accredited nomenclature. VOL XX

When they have succeeded in getting something like the appearance of water between banks, like Mr Barrow of the Admiralty they are not very particular about its running occasionally up-hill; and it is interesting to see a stream stealing quietly below trees in gradual ascension, till, disappearing round a corner for a few minutes, it comes thundering down in the shape of a waterfall on the head of an elderly gentleman, unsuspectingly reading Mr Wordsworth's Excursion, perhaps, in the foreground. Nevertheless, we repeat, that it is delightful to hang over one of the dear creatures, seated on stone or stool, drawing from nature; for whatever may be the pencil's skill, the eye may behold the glimpse of a vision whose beauty shall be remembered when even Coniston and Windermere have faded into oblivion.

Several such sketches having enriched the port-folios of the party, you all return the best way you can, in straggling order, to the inn. Yesterday's Epicurean dinner at Bowness may have made you all rather fastidious; but the cook at Coniston Waterhead is a woman of great merit, and celebrated as the "Lady of the Lardner." In the cool of the evening you leave the inn in your barouche, the homewardbound horses with difficulty being kept from the gallop,-and lo, at the Ferry, a group of intimates from the neighbourhood of your seat in Yorkshire or Surrey!

What cordial shaking of hands amongst the young gentlemen! what loving kisses among the young ladies! a hundred unanswered questions are immediately put into circulation; and the silence of the twilight is cheered by a sweet susurring, that whispers innocence and joy. A general assignation is made between the affectionate parties for to-morrow; and, after their ew hours' dreamy sleep of wavering woods, lo, in the twinkling of the sun's eye, to-morrow rises on the world and Windermere.

It is very much the same with plea sant scenery as with pleasant people ; we feel as if we knew the character of place or person even from a single interview. So is it now with the coalition of parties. Not a single soul among them had seen Windermere till vesterday, and now they are all talking away about it as if the friendship had been of twenty years' standing at

B

the least. They scramble up the hill above the School-house, which we believe was first discovered by Mr Arthur Young, and a wonderful discovery it was, so far remote, for a gentleman somewhat advanced in life, and so entirely devoted to agricultural pursuits. From that eminence the Lake is seen in all its length, breadth, and beauty; and now, and not till now, can it be said that you have seen Winandermere.

This is a fine, warm, cool, bright, dark, calm, and breezy forenoon; so you must pedestrianize it for a few unmeasured miles, over hill and dale, through brake and wood. Find your way, then, the best you can, over stone-wall, or through hedge-gap gate, or stile, along the breast and brow of Bannerig, and along the heights of Elleray and Oresthead. Thence you not only behold all the Lakes, but also many of the noblest ranges of the Westmoreland, Lancashire, and Cumberland mountains. There is not, perhaps, such another splendid prospect in all England. The lake has indeed much of the character of a river, without, however, losing its

own.

The Islands are seen almost all lying together in a cluster-below which all is loftiness and beauty above, all majesty and grandeur. Bold or gentle promontories break all the banks into frequent bays, seldom without a cottage or cottages embowered in trees; and while the whole landscape is of a sylvan kind, parts of it are so laden with woods that you see only here and there a wreath of smoke, but no houses, and could almost believe that you are gazing on the primeval forests.

Lunch over, and your Surrey friends off to Coniston with a laughing and tearful farewell, you wheel away to Lowood. But be persuaded and go round by Troutbeck Chapel. Your way lies up a narrow vale, with a stream deep down and picturesquely wooded, with frequent holm-grounds - nooks, in which build cottages, according to your own fancies, and let them melt away like dew-webs in the sunshineavoid both Grecian and Gothic architecture and let the whole building, as you love us, be on the groundfloor.

Passing a snug way-side cottage, called Cook's House, and turning suddenly to the left, you come gazing

along the magnificent terrace of Millar-ground, and then descending into the soft or solemn shadows of the Rayrigg woods, like our first parents, Who, hand in hand, with wandering steps, and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way,

you find yourself unconsciously returned to Bowness, the Port of Paradise.

Now, very probably, not a single person in the whole party has admired the long vale-village of Troutbeck. Leaving the splendours of Windermere, of which now but a single gleam is visible, you may be pardoned for a feeling of disappointment in a place so somewhat impatiently at the muchshut up and secluded, and you glance bepraised picturesqueness of the many chimneyed cottages, rejoicing in their unnumbered gables, and slate-slab porticos, all dripping with roses and matted with the virgin's-bower. To feel the full force of the peculiar beauty breathing over these antique tenements, you must understand their domestic economy. Now you are in perfect ignorance of it all, and have not the faintest conception of the use or meaning of any one thing you see,-roof, eaves, chimney, beam, props, door, window, hovel, shed, and hanging staircase, being all huddled together, as you think, in unintelligible confusion; whereas they are all precisely what and where they ought to be, and have had their colours painted, forms shaped, and places allotted by wind and weather, and the perpetually but scarcely felt necessities of the natural condition of mountaineers.

Understanding, however, and enjoying as much as you can of Troutbeck, after an hour's ramble in lane and alley, you again collect your scat

tered forces on the hill above the cha

pel, and proceed towards Lowood, the most beautifully situated inn in this world, and that is a wide word. It is likewise an excellent inn, both for bed and board, and the party that leaves it without passing there an afternoon and a night, must be a party of savages, and, in all probability, cannibals.

A few years ago, a grove of stately pines stood on the shore of Lowoodbay. The axe has been laid unsparingly to the root, and but two, three, or four survive. There may be more,

for we never had heart to count them, remembering us of their murdered compeers. It is as absurd to ban gentlemen of landed and wooded property for felling their own trees, as for reaping their own corn; but the truth is, that the trees we speak of belonged to Mankind at large, and no person was entitled to put them to death, without an order signed by the Representative (at the approaching election a sharp contest is expected) of the Human Race.

Here it is that you must see Windermere in sunset. Her broad bosom still and serene in the evening lightand not a sound in the hush of Nature but that of your own dipping oars— you fix your eyes in a trance of solemn enthusiasm on the glowing and gorgeous west, where cloud and mountain are not to be named in the bewilderment of the golden glory that confuses earth with heaven.

We are, after all that has been rumoured to the contrary, plain matterof-fact men, have little or no unnecessary talent for description, but love to call things by their right name-bread bread, and the sun the sun. We shall never forget ourselves so far, we hope, as to attempt to describe either a sunset or a sunrise. Pretty work indeed has been made of that luminary in print; and in some late poetry, in particular, he has been so grossly flattered to his face, that to conceal his burning blushes he has been under the absolute necessity of hiding his head behind a cloud. No mode of worship he likes so well as calm, wordless, self-withdrawn silence the silence of life, intenser than of death. Hush, therefore, thou vain babbler! Hush! and speak not till the pomp of the pageant has faded and floated dreamily away within your imagination, and the delightful but less elevated beauty of the pensive twilight brings back thoughts and feelings of a character more akin to the flow of ordinary existence. Soon as the Evening-star, or any other star, comes shining through the blue light of the concave, you may begin, if you are so disposed, gently to laugh, cheerfully to murmur, and gladly to sing, to breathe upon the voice-like flute, or bid the horn or trumpet startle the echoes on Langdale Pikes, or within that one cloud, deep, pure, and settled as a snow-wreath, that crowns the head of the Great

Gable, and is reflected in Wastwater, loneliest of lakes, and all unhaunted by strife and stir of this weary world!

It would be easy to write a whole volume about such a village as Ambleside, where you are now sitting at breakfast in the Salutation Inn-nay, we have three volumes written about it already- -a story of which the scene is laid there-lying in MS. and eager for publication. Meanwhile, we request you to walk away up to Stockgill Force. There has been a new series of weather, to be sure, almost as dry as the New Monthly ; but to our liking, a waterfall is best in a rainless summer. After a flood, the noise is beyond all endurance. You get stunned and stupefied till your head splits. Then you may open your mouth, like a barn-door, and roar into a friend's ear all in vain a remark on the cataract. To him you are a dumb man. In two minutes you are as completely drenched in spray as if you had fallen out of a boat-and descend to dinner with a toothache that keeps you in starvation in the presence of provender sufficient for a whole bench of bishops. In dry weather, on the contrary, like the New Monthly, the waterfall is in moderation; and instead of tumbling over the cliff in a perpetual peal of thunder, why, it slides and slidders merrily and musically away down the green shelving rocks, and sinks into repose in many a dim or lucid pool, amidst whose foam-bells is playing or asleep the fearless Naiad. Deuce a headache have you-speak in a whisper and not a syllable of your excellent observation is lost; your coat is dry, except that a few dew-drops have been shook over you from the branches stirred by the sudden wing-clap of the cushat-and as for toothache interfering with dinner, you eat as if your tusks had been just sharpened, and would not scruple to discuss nuts, upper-and-lower-jawwork fashion, against the best crackers in the county. And all this comes of looking at Stockgill Force, or any other waterfall, in weather dry as the New Monthly, or even not quite so dry, but after a few refreshing and fertilizing showers, that make the tributary rills to murmur, and set at work a thousand additional feeders to every Lake.

However, with all this talk of dinner, it still wants several hours of that