The English Lakes. Arthur Bradley
in equity no justification in this glorious holiday preserve for unlimited vehicles roaring through it at twenty to thirty miles an hour. It lies on no main highway. And for touring use within the district the motor has no single point of sanity. One might almost as well thrash up and down Grasmere in a steam yacht. Their exclusion, with a few exceptions for local purposes or for genuine residents, would be an enormous gain, and any counter plea ridiculously inadequate. I have here pictured Rydal Water as a winsome summer lake, for this I am sure, before most of us who know it, its image rises.
But upon a spring day some years ago I watched it raging with abnormal frenzy under the influence of a helm wind, cleaving diligently myself in the meantime to a stone wall, lest peradventure I should be blown into its seething waters. These hurricanes are idiosyncrasies of the Lake country, and are formed by the contact of winds from the North Sea with the warmer temperature they meet as they leap over the Pennine range, like a wave breaking over a sea wall. The disturbance thus created drives them down in narrow tornadoes upon Lakeland. I have never experienced anything else like it in these islands. The waters of Rydal on this occasion, now here and now there, were lifted high into the air in the fashion of successive waterspouts and hurled in hissing volumes of sleet at a great elevation against the woody foot of Loughrigg Fell. The sun, too, was shining brilliantly, and every hurtling cloud of spray glittered in prismatic colours. But above all are these two lakes bound up with the name and fame of Wordsworth. From one or other of the banks of them for nearly half a century the great nature poet – the prophet, sage, and interpreter of Lakeland – of whose fruits the world will pluck as long as these hills endure, set forth on his almost daily ramble. Whether this or that generation decide that Wordsworth is among the elect of their fleeting day is an altogether trumpery question. Didactic and complaisant youth have tilted against many a classic and passed into oblivion while the subject of their convincing satire remains immovable as a granite rock. Wordsworth has struck roots so deep into this glorious country, has so identified it with his own personality, that even if he were a much lesser poet, immortal fame would be as surely his as the endurance of Skiddaw or Helvellyn. But Wordsworth has a firmer grip than that of mere atmosphere on unborn generations, though this almost alone would endear him to all those with any sense of feeling who love the Lake country, and of such it is inconceivable that future generations will not each supply their ample store. It is pedantry to hector every man or woman who feels the spirit of our British Highlands so perfectly expressed as they are in this Lake country into Wordsworthian enthusiasm. But let them alone, and as the Lakeland fever begins to develop more strongly with each visitation, and as spring and summer come round, if they have the sense of song at all within them they will put their Wordsworth at any rate within reach, and the process thenceforward to some measure of intimacy and delight is merely an affair of time.
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.
"Why, nowte varry particlar, only ald Wudsworth's brocken lowce ageean." This had reference to the poet's habit of spouting his productions as he walked along the roads, which was taken by the country folk as a sign of mental aberration. On another occasion a stranger resting at a cottage in Rydal enquired of the housewife as to Wordsworth's neighbourly qualities.
"Well," said she, "he sometimes goes booin' his pottery about t' rooads an' t' fields an' takes na nooatish o' neabody; but at udder times he'll say 'Good morning, Dolly,' as sensible as oyder you or me."
THIRLMERE AND HELVELLYN
Lying beside the familiar and continuously beautiful road from Grasmere to Keswick, Thirlmere has happily lost nothing of its pristine beauty in becoming the source of Manchester's water supply. An engine house at one point and the big dam, only visible at the far end, are more than counterbalanced in the raising for many feet of a lake that is three miles long and only a quarter of a mile wide. That first delicious view of it which greets the pilgrim on the downward winding road from the pass of Dunmaile Raise, deep channelled between the rugged wall of Armboth Crags and the northern shoulders of Helvellyn, with the pale cone of Skiddaw rising over the hidden interval beyond, will be among the most familiar memories of the lake tourist. These grey Armboth steeps, falling from the wild moorish table-land above so abruptly to the water's edge, and planting everywhere their knotted pine-feathered toes in the deep clear water, with the little promontories and islands wooded in the like fashion, give a character all its own to the narrow but beautiful lake. As a road now skirts both shores, those denied the physical joy of walking this country can get all that the banks, at any rate, of Thirlmere have to offer. The best of this, no doubt, is the prospect here depicted from the lower end, with Old Helvellyn looming so near and filling up the vista to the southward.
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