THE LAKE COUNTRY

There are as many "best ways" of making the tour of this enchanted land as there are Lake Country guidebooks, volumes which, at prices varying from ten shillings to "tuppence," are everywhere in evidence.

One may journey by rail to Keswick or to Windermere; one may come up from Furness Abbey to Lakeside, pa.s.sing gradually from the softer scenery to the wilder; or one may enter by way of Penrith and Pooley Bridge, ushered at once into the presence of some of the n.o.blest mountains and perhaps the loveliest lake.

This last was our route, and very satisfactory we found it. Our stay at Penrith had been abbreviated by a munic.i.p.al councillors' convention which left not a bed for the stranger. We had been forewarned of the religious convention which throngs Keswick the last full week in July, and, indeed, an evangelist bound thither had presented us with tracts as we took our train at Carlisle. But we had not reckoned on finding Penrith in such plethoric condition, and, after an uphill look at the broken red walls of Penrith Castle, which, with Carlisle, Naworth, and c.o.c.kermouth, stood for the defence of western England against the Scots, we mounted a motor-bus, of all atrocities, and were banged and clanged along a few miles of fairly level road which transferred us, as we crossed the Eamont, from c.u.mberland to Westmoreland. The hamlet of Pooley Bridge lies at the lower end of Ullswater, up whose mountain-hemmed reaches of ever-heightening beauty we were borne by _The Raven_, a leisurely little steamer with a ruddy captain serenely a.s.sured that his lake is the queen of all. The evening was cold and gusty,--rougher weather than any we had encountered in our midsummer voyage across the Atlantic,--but, wrapped in our rugs and shedding hairpins down the wind, we could have sailed on forever, so glorious was that sunset vision of great hills almost bending over the riverlike lake that runs on joyously, as from friend to friend, between the guardian ranks.

We lingered for a few days at the head of Ullswater, in Patterdale, and would gladly have lingered longer, if only to watch the play of light and shadow over St. Sunday Crag, Place Fell, Stybarrow Crag, Fairfield, and all that shouldering brotherhood of giants, but we must needs take advantage of the first clear day for the coach-drive to Ambleside, over the Kirkstone Pa.s.s,

"Aspiring Road! that lov'st to hide Thy daring in a vapoury bourn."

A week at Ambleside, under Wansfell's "visionary majesties of light,"

went all too swiftly in the eager exploration of Grasmere and Coniston, Hawkshead, Bowness, Windermere, and those "lofty brethren,"

the Langdale Pikes, with their famous rock-walled cascade, Dungeon Ghyll. The coach-drive from Ambleside to Keswick carried us, at Dunmailraise, across again from Westmoreland to c.u.mberland. Helvellyn and Thirlmere dominated the way, but Skiddaw and Derwent Water claimed our allegiance on arrival. What is counted the finest coach-drive in the kingdom, however, the twenty-four-mile circuit from Keswick known as the b.u.t.termere Round, remained to bring us under a final subjection to the silver solitude of b.u.t.termere and Crummock Water and the rugged menace of Honister Crag. The train that hurried us from Keswick to c.o.c.kermouth pa.s.sed along the western sh.o.r.e of pleasant Ba.s.senthwaite Water, but from Workington to Furness Abbey meres and tarns, for all their romantic charm, were forgotten, while, the salt wind on our faces, we looked out, over sand and shingle, on the dim grey vast of ocean.

The Lake Country, it is often said, has no history. The tourist need not go from point to point enquiring

"If here a warrior left a spell, Panting for glory as he fell; Or here a saint expired."

That irregular circle of the c.u.mberland Hills, varying from some forty to fifty miles in diameter, a compact ma.s.s whose mountain lines shut in narrow valleys, each with its own lake, and radiate out from Helvellyn in something like a starfish formation, bears, for all its wildness, the humanised look of land on which many generations of men have lived and died; but the records of that life are scant.

There are several stone-circles, taken to be the remains of British temples, the "mystic Round of Druid frame," notably Long Meg and her Daughters, near Penrith, and the Druid's Circle, just out of Keswick.

About the Keswick circle such uncanny influences still linger that no two persons can number the stones alike, nor will your own second count confirm your first. Storm and flood rage against that mysterious shrine, but the wizard blocks cannot be swept away. The Romans, who had stations near Kendal, Penrith, and Ambleside, have left some striking remembrances, notably "that lone Camp on Hardknott's height,"

and their proud road, still well defined for at least fifteen miles, along the top of High Street ridge. A storied heap of stones awaits the climber at the top of

"The long ascent of Dunmailraise."

Here, in 945, the last king of the c.u.mbrian Britons, Dunmail, was defeated by Edmund of England in the pa.s.s between Grasmere and Keswick. Seat Sandal and Steel Fell looked down from either side upon his fall. Edmund raised a cairn above what his Saxon wits supposed was a slain king, but Dunmail is only biding his time. His golden crown was hurled into Grisedale Tarn, high up in the range, where the shoulders of Helvellyn, Seat Sandal, and Fairfield touch, and on the last night of every year these dark warders see a troop of Dunmail's men rise from the tarn, where it is their duty to guard the crown, bearing one more stone to throw down upon the cairn. When the pile is high enough to content the king, who counts each year in his deep grave the crash of another falling stone, he will rise and rule again over c.u.mberland.

Here history and folk-lore blend. Of pure folk-lore the stranger hears but little. Eden Hall, near Penrith, has a goblet filched from the fairies:

"If e'er this gla.s.s should break or fall.

Farewell the luck of Eden Hall."

The enchanted rock in the Vale of St. John is celebrated in Scott's "Bridal of Triermain." St. Bees has a triumphant tradition of St.

Bega, who, determined to be a nun, ran away from the Irish king, her father, for no better reason than because he meant to marry her to a Norwegian prince, and set sail in a fishing-boat for the c.u.mberland coast. Her little craft was driven in by the storm to Whitehaven, where she so won upon the sympathies of the Countess of Egremont that this lady besought her lord to give the fugitive land for a convent.

It was midsummer, and the graceless husband made answer that he would give as much as the snow should lie upon next morning, but when he awoke and looked out from the castle cas.e.m.e.nt, his demesne for three miles around was white with snow.

Wordsworth's "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," "The Horn of Egremont Castle," and "The Somnambulist" relate three legends of the region, of varying degrees of authenticity, and Lord's Island in Derwent Water brings to mind the right n.o.ble name of James Radcliffe, third and last Earl of Derwent.w.a.ter, who declared for his friend and kinsman, the Pretender of 1715. On October sixth the young earl bade his brave girl-wife farewell and rode away to join the rebels, though his favourite dog howled in the courtyard and his dapple-grey started back from the gate. On October fourteenth the cause was lost, and the Earl of Derwent.w.a.ter was among the seventeen hundred who surrendered at Preston. In the Tower and again on the scaffold his life was offered him if he would acknowledge George I as rightful king and would conform to the Protestant religion, but he said it "would be too dear a purchase." On the evening after his beheading the Northern Lights flamed red over Keswick, so that they are still known in the countryside as Lord Derwent.w.a.ter's Lights.

The dalesfolk could doubtless tell us more. There may still be dwellers by Windermere who have heard on stormy nights the ghastly shrieks of the Crier of Claife, calling across the lake for a ferry-boat, although it was long ago that a valiant monk from Lady Holm "laid" that troubled spirit, binding it, with book and bell, to refrain from troubling "while ivy is green"; and in the depths of Borrowdale, on a wild dawn, old people may cower deeper in their feather beds to shut out the baying of the phantom hounds that hunt the "barfoot stag" through Watendlath tarn and over the fells down into Borrowdale. There is said to be a local brownie, Hob-Thross by name, sometimes seen, a "body aw ower rough," lying by the fire at midnight. For all his s.h.a.ggy look, he has so sensitive a spirit that, indefatigable though he is in stealthy household services, the least suggestion of recompense sends him weeping away. He will not even accept his daily dole of milk save on the condition that it be set out for him in a chipped bowl.

But, in the main, the Lake Country keeps its secrets. The names are the telltales, and these speak of Briton and Saxon and the adventurous Viking. _Dale_, _fell_, _force_ (waterfall), _ghyll_ (mountain ravine), _holm_ (island), _how_ (mound), _scar_ (cliff-face), are Icelandic words. Mountain names that seem undignified, as Coniston Old Man or Dolly Wagon Pike, are probably misp.r.o.nunciations of what in the original Celtic or Scandinavian was of grave import. There appears to be a present tendency to subst.i.tute for the unintelligible old names plain English terms usually suggested by some peculiarity in the mountain shape, but it is a pity to give up the Celtic Blencathara, Peak of Demons, for Saddleback.

The jubilant throngs who flock to Lakeland every summer concern themselves little with its early history. The English pour into that blessed circuit of hills as into a great playground, coaching, walking, cycling, climbing, boating, keenly alive to the beauty of the scenery and eagerly drinking in the exhilaration of the air. They love to tread the loftiest crests, many of which are crowned with cairns raised by these holiday climbers, each adding his own stone. But it is the shepherd who is in the confidence of the mountains, he who has

"been alone Amid the heart of many thousand mists, That came to him, and left him, on the heights."

Wordsworth first learned to love humanity in the person of the shepherd

"descried in distant sky, A solitary object and sublime."

Sheep, too, are often seen against the sky-line, and even the cow--that homelike beast who favours you in her innocent rudeness, from the gap of a hawthorn hedge, with that same prolonged, rustic, curious stare that has taxed your modesty in Vermont or Ohio--will forsake the shade of "the honied sycamore" in the valley for summits

"sharp and bare, Where oft the venturous heifer drinks the noontide breeze."

There have been fatal accidents upon the more precipitous peaks. Scott and Wordsworth have sung the fate of that "young lover of Nature,"

Charles Gough, who, one hundred years ago, fell from the Striding Edge of Helvellyn and was watched over in death for no less than three months by his little yellow-haired terrier, there on the lonely banks of Red Tarn, where her persistent barking at last brought shepherds to the body. In the Patterdale churchyard, whose famous great yew is now no more, we noticed a stone commemorating a more recent victim of Helvellyn, a Manchester botanist, who had come summer by summer to climb the mountain, and who, a few years since, on his last essay, a man of seventy-three, had died from exhaustion during the ascent. The brow of Helvellyn, now soft and silvery as a melting dream, now a dark ma.s.s banded by broad rainbows, overlooks his grave.

I remember that Nathan's story of the rich man who "had no pity," but took for a guest's dinner the "one little ewe lamb" of his poor neighbour, was read in the Patterdale church that evensong, and it was strange to see how intently those st.u.r.dy mountain-lads, their alert-eyed sheep dogs waiting about the door, listened to the parable.

Not only does the Scripture imagery--"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want"--but the phrasing of the prayerbook--"We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep"--come with enhanced significance in a pastoral region.

Lakeland in the tourist season is not at its best in point of flowers.

The daffodils that in Gowbarrow Park--recently acquired and opened as a national preserve--rejoiced the poet as they danced beside the dancing waves of Ullswater, fade before July, and the patches of ling and heather upon the mountain-sides lack the abundance that purples the Scottish hills, but the delicate harebell nods blithely to the wayfarer from up among the rocks, and the foxglove grows so tall, especially in the higher pa.s.ses, as to overtop those ma.s.sive boundaries into which the "wallers" pack away all the loose stone they can.

Birds, too, are not, in midsummer, numerous or varied. Where are Wordsworth's cuckoo and skylark and green linnet? The eagles have been dislodged from their eyries on Eagle Crag. A heavily flapping raven, a congregation of rooks, a few swallows and redb.r.e.a.s.t.s, with perhaps a shy wagtail, may be the only winged wanderers you will salute in an hour's stroll, unless this, as is most likely, has brought you where

"plots of sparkling water tremble bright With thousand thousand twinkling points of light."

There you will be all but sure to see your Atlantic friends, the seagulls, circling slowly within the mountain barriers like prisoners of the air and adding their floating shadows to the reflections in the lake below. For, as Wordsworth notes,--what did Wordsworth fail to note?--the water of these mountain meres is crystal clear and renders back with singular exact.i.tude the "many-coloured images imprest" upon it.

But the life of the c.u.mbrian hills is the life of grazing flocks, of leaping waterfalls and hidden streams with their "voice of unpretending harmony,"--the life of sun and shadow. Sometimes the sky is of a faint, sweet blue with white clouds wandering in it,--the old Greek myth of Apollo's flocks in violet meadows; sometimes the keenest radiance silvers the upper crest of _c.u.muli_ that copy in form the ma.s.sy summits below; sometimes the mellow sunset gold is poured into the valleys as into thirsty cups; but most often curling mists wreathe the mountain-tops and move in plumed procession along their naked sides.

The scenic effects and the joy of climbing are not lost by American tourists, yet these, as a rule, come to the Lake Country in a temper quite unlike that of the English holiday seekers. We come as pilgrims to a Holy Land of Song. We depend perhaps too little upon our own immediate sense of grandeur and beauty, and look perhaps too much to Wordsworth to interpret for us "Nature's old felicities." The Lake Country that has loomed so large in poetry may even disappoint us at the outset. The memory of the Rockies, of our chain of Great Lakes, of Niagara, may disconcert our first impressions of this clump of hills with only four, Scafell Pike, Scafell, Helvellyn, and Skiddaw, exceeding three thousand feet in height; of lakes that range from Windermere, ten miles long and a mile broad, to the reedy little pond of Rydal Water, more conventionally termed "a fairy mere"; of waterfalls that are often chiefly remarkable, even Southey's Lodore, for their lack of water. Scales Tarn, of which Scott wrote,

"Never sunbeam could discern The surface of that sable tarn, In whose black mirror you may spy The stars, while noontide lights the sky,"

is seventeen feet deep.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ISLAND IN GRASMERE LAKE]

It is all in proportion, all picturesque,--almost in too regular proportion, almost too conspicuously picturesque, as if it had been expressly gotten up for the "tripper." There is nothing of primeval wildness about it. Nature is here the lion tamed, an accredited human playmate. Indeed, one almost feels that here is Nature sitting for her portrait, a self-conscious Nature holding her court of tourists and poets. Yet this is but a fleeting and a shamefaced mood. It takes intimacy to discover the fact of reticence, and those are aliens indeed who think that a single coach-drive, even the boasted "circular tour," has acquainted them with the Lake Country,--yes, though they trudge over the pa.s.ses (for it is coach etiquette to put the pa.s.sengers down whenever the road gets steep) Wordsworth in hand. In truth, the great amount of literary a.s.sociation may be to the conscientious "Laker" something of a burden. Skiddaw thrusts forth his notched contour with the insistent question: "What was it Wordsworth said about me?" Ennerdale church and the Pillar Rock tax one's memory of "The Brothers," and every stone sheep-fold calls for a recitation from "Michael." That "cradled nursling of the mountain," the river Duddon, expects one to know by heart the thirty-four sonnets recording how the pedestrian poet

"accompanied with faithful pace Caerulean Duddon from its cloud-fed spring."

The footpath you follow, the rock you rest upon, the yew you turn to admire, Wishing-Gate and Stepping-Stones admonish you to be ready with your quotation. Even the tiny cascade of Rydal Water--so small as presumably to be put to bed at six o'clock, for it may not be visited after that hour--has been sung by the Grasmere laureate. While your care-free Englishman goes clambering over the golden-mossed rocks and far within the slippery recesses of Dungeon Ghyll, your serious American will sit him down amid the bracken and, tranquilly watched by Lingmoor from across the vale, read "The Idle Shepherd-Boys," and the exquisite description of the scene in Mrs. Humphry Ward's "Fenwick's Career." If he can recall Coleridge's lines about the "sinful s.e.xtons' ghosts," so much the better, and if he is of a "thorough" habit of mind, he will have read through Wordsworth's "Excursion" in preparation for this expedition to the Langdales and be annotating the volume on his knee.

There may be something a little nave in this studious att.i.tude in the presence of natural beauty, but the devotion is sincere. Many a tourist, English and American, comes to the Lake Country to render grateful homage to those starry spirits who have cl.u.s.tered there. Fox Howe, the home of Dr. Arnold and dear to his poet son; The Knoll, home of Harriet Martineau; and the Dove's Nest, for a little while the abode of Mrs. Hemans, are duly pointed out at Ambleside, but not all who linger in that picture-book village and climb the hill to the Church of St. Anne, standing serene with its square, grey, pigeon-peopled tower, know that Faber was a curate there in the youthful years before he "went over to Rome." He lived hard by in what is said to be the oldest house in Ambleside, once a manor-house of distinction,--that long, low stone building with small, deep-set windows and the cheery touches of colour given by the carefully tended flowers about the doors. "A good few" people thought he was not "just bright," our landlady told us, "because he would be walking with his head down, busy at his thoughts," yet Wordsworth said that Faber was the only man he knew who saw more things in Nature than he did in a country ramble. Bowness cherishes recollections of the gay, audacious doings of Professor Wilson (Christopher North), and Troutbeck plumes itself on being the birthplace of Hogarth's father. Keswick, where Sh.e.l.ley once made brief sojourn, holds the poet-dust of Southey and of Frederic Myers, and in Crosthwaite Vicarage may be found a living poet of the Lakes, Canon Rawnsley,--a name to conjure with throughout the district, whose best traditions he fosters and maintains.

Opposite Rydal Mount, at Nab Cottage, dwelt, for the closing years of his clouded life, the darling of the dalesfolk, "Li'le Hartley,"

first-born son of Coleridge,--that boy "so exquisitely wild" to whom had descended something of his father's genius crossed by the father's frailty. Hartley's demon was not the craving for opium, but for alcohol. After a sore struggle that crippled but did not destroy, he rests in Grasmere churchyard, his stone bearing the inscription, "By Thy Cross and Pa.s.sion." It was from Nab Cottage that another soul of high endowment, menaced by the opium l.u.s.t, De Quincey, took a bride, Margaret, a farmer's daughter, who made him the strong and patient wife his peril needed. They dwelt in Dove Cottage at Townend, Grasmere, the hallowed garden-nest where Wordsworth and his wife and his sister Dorothy--that ardent spirit the thought of whom is still "like a flash of light"--had dwelt before. Wordsworth's later homes at Allan Bank, the Grasmere Rectory, and even at Rydal Mount are less precious to memory than this, where he and Coleridge and Dorothy dreamed the great dreams of youth together. Thither came guests who held high converse over frugal fare,--among them Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, "the frolic and the gentle," and that silent poet, the beloved brother John. It was a plain and thrifty life that Dove Cottage knew, with its rustic little rooms and round of household tasks, but thrift took on magic powers in the Lake Country a century ago. Amazing tales are told of the "Wonderful Walker," schoolmaster of b.u.t.termere and curate of Seathwaite, the Pastor of the "Excursion,"

but his feats of economy might be challenged by the old-time curate of Patterdale, who, on an income of from sixty to ninety dollars a year, lived comfortably, educated his four children, and left them a tidy little fortune. Such queer turns of fate were his that he published his own banns and married his father.

Most of those for whose sake the Lake Country is holy ground lived a contemplative, sequestered life akin to that of the mediaeval monks, the scholars and visionaries of a fighting world; but Coniston, on the edge of Lancashire, is the shrine of a warrior saint, Ruskin, whose last earthly home, Brantwood, looks out over Coniston Water, and whose grave in the quiet churchyard, for which Westminster Abbey was refused, is beautifully marked by a symbolically carven cross quarried from the fine greenstone of Coniston Fells. In the Ruskin Museum may be seen many heart-moving memorials of that hero life, all the way from the abstracts of sermons written out for his mother in a laborious childish hand to the purple pall, worked for him by the local Linen Industry he so eagerly founded, and embroidered with his own words: "Unto This Last."

Not in any roll-call of the men of letters who have trodden the c.u.mbrian Hills should the poet Gray be forgotten. The first known tourist in the Lake Country, he was delighted with Grasmere and Keswick, but Borrowdale, plunged deep amid what the earliest guide-book, that of West in 1774, was to describe as "the most horrid romantic mountains," turned him back in terror.