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The luxuriance of Windermere is of course its dominant note, a quality infinitely enhanced by that noble array of mountains which from Kirkstone to Scafell trail across the northern sky beyond the broad shimmer of its waters. The upward view from various points in the neighbourhood of Bowness, for obvious reasons of railroad transportation, has been the first glimpse of the Lake District for a majority of two or three generations of visitors, and this alone gives some further significance to a s

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 ch

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 o

Kirkstone Pass looms always large in one's Lakeland memories. For one thing, it is the ladder over which all traffic laboriously climbs from the comparatively populous shores of Windermere into the long sequestered trough of Ullswater, while for the walker it links the eastern block of mountains to the Helvellyn and central group. It is, I think, the highest road pass in England, touching the line of 1500 feet where a lonely inn claims, by a natural inference, the uncomfortable distinction of be

What was the great Parnassus' self to thee Mount Skiddaw? In his natural sovereignty Our British hill is fairer far; he shrouds His double front among Atlantic clouds, And pours forth streams more sweet than Castally. — Wordsworth. Mercifully it is not our province here to pass a pious opinion on the comparative beauties of Ullswater and Derwentwater. It is tolerably certain that the one which held you the longer and the most often in its welcome toils would have your verdict. The lake of Ulpho

All nature welcomes Her whose sway Tempers the year's extremes; Who scattereth lustres o'er noonday, Like morning's dewy gleams. While mellow warble, sprightly trill The tremulous heart excite, And hums the balmy air to still The balance of delight. — Wordsworth (Ode to May). Buttermere in May or early June! The May of the poet, that is to say, which smiles upon us twice or thrice in a decade, not the May of actuality which is spent in overcoats and blighted hopes, and bad tempers and east winds