THE MOUNTAINS OF

THE ENGLISH LAKE DISTRICT.

THE

HE mountains of Cumberland and Westmoreland may date their celebrity from the time of the Lake poets. Until Wordsworth and Southey settled in their midst and found inspiration and congenial quietude under their abrupt little heads, they were not thought much of by the majority of Englishmen. People who could afford to travel for pleasure crossed the Channel for their "sights." They made straight for the Swiss Alps if they wanted mountains. Lakeland was then in the rough state; neither its roads nor its inns were of the kind to help the tourist on the way to enthusiasm. Poet Gray (of "Elegy " renown), as long ago as 1769, did some tramping in the Cumberland dales, and was fitly impressed. But out of question he would have felt more civilly towards the district if it had yielded him a larger share of the creature comforts to which he was accustomed. We learn from his diary something on this score. When he came afoot to Ambleside he found "the best bedchamber" of the inn there as dark and damp as a cellar, so that he "grew delicate, gave up Wynander-mere in despair," and resolved to go on to Kendal directly. Things are very different at Ambleside now. No one need anywhere in the district be driven away for lack of accommodation. Almost under the lee of Sca Fell Pike itself (where the mountains are at their wildest) one may nowadays enjoy a soft clean bed, as well as the good rich cream, fresh eggs, and Cumberland ham for which the local farmhouses are deservedly famous. Elsewhere, with capital roads for cycling or driving to their very doors, are hotels of excellent repute, even though unprovided with lifts and the very latest luxuries of metropolitan existence.

The poets made Lakeland romantic, and their memories have consecrated the district. It was an uphill fight with them on this first count. The critics in town laughed at Wordsworth for what they called his rhapsodising about the beauties of nature. They thought him preposterous; his verse seemed to them only a jargon.

Poor, dear, town-nurtured souls: they knew no better. But sooner or later they were all forced to yield praise to the Rydal poet. There was no standing against the man who could write such magnificent lines as these :

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away-a sordid boon!
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.-Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn ;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

And so, little by little, the rest of us learnt the glorious lesson which Nature as undefiled as she may be found can and will teach to those who come to her. Early in the century many great men ran north from London to see if Wordsworth was a mere juggler with words. The charm of Lakeland became established. Even Charles Lamb, most thorough-going of Cockneys, had to confess that life held other joys as well as London. "I have satisfied myself," he writes to his friend Manning on September 24, 1802, "that there is such a thing as that which tourists call romantic, which I very much suspected before; they make such a spluttering about it, and toss their splendid epithets around them, till they give as dim a light as at four o'clock next morning the lamps do after an illumination." He had been Southey's guest at Greta Hall, and had thence ascended Skiddaw. "It was a day," he continues, "that will stand out like a mountain, I am sure, in my life. But I am returned (I have now been come home near three weeks, I was a month out), and you cannot conceive the degradation I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander free as air among mountains, and bathe in rivers without being confronted by any one, to come home and work. I felt very little. I had been dreaming I was a very great man. But that is going off, and I find I shall conform in time to that state of life to which it has pleased God to call me. Besides, after all, Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw. Still, I turn back to those great places where I wandered about participating in their greatness." If Lamb could be won to worship Nature in Cumberland, anyone might so be won. And now

at the end of this century every summer thousands of hard-handed factory workers run into Lakeland by excursion trains for the day or the week end and show just the same enthusiasm. It does one good to see how they are impressed. They may not signify their feelings in very elegant speech; but that is a detail. The influence of the lakes and mountains is upon them, even (let us hope) on those of them who towards the evening of their pleasure lurch tipsily from Windermere's crimsoned waters to the railway station whence they have to return to their many-chimneyed towns.

It took some time to establish the romantic reputation of Lakeland. The fashion of climbing its mountains followed even more tardily; and of making them an exercise-ground for cragsmen latest of all. Of course, as mountains these little fellows cannot be expected to take high rank. Sca Fell Pike, the monarch of them, is only 3,210 ft. above the sea-level. There was some excuse for the American visitor who the other day found Helvellyn disappointing. He and his wife chanced to be on Ullswater in the wake of the Emperor of Germany, who was being introduced in very wet weather to some of the Lake district's beauties. The skipper politely explained to the American lady that she saw in front of her the highest mountain in those parts-Helvellyn. "Hel what?" exclaimed the lady. "Helvellyn," courteously replied the skipper. The gentleman from Chicago laughed, and guessed that "if the Rockies could just see this Helvellyn they too would laugh some." The same may be said of Sca Fell and Skiddaw. But really it does not matter. They may not be very majestic peaks, but they are excellently proportioned to their surroundings, and probably nowhere in the world in so small an area will you find such extraordinary variety of scenery, from sweet green glens with trout streams purling through them to lonely uplands and sharp-edged summit crags. Edmund Burke, in his "Essay on the Sublime," makes smallness an essential quality of beauty. The English Lake district will dispense with the attribute of "sublime" so it may keep its more caressing attribute of "lovely."

But to get to the rocks. These Cumberland mountains are remarkable for their steepness. The angle of their slopes makes them as a whole most attractive to climbers. Helvellyn and Skiddaw may be excluded perhaps, though one is unwilling to offer a slight to such sounding names. Skiddaw, especially, is only an undulating hump. Its bulk makes it impressive, and its situation at the foot of Derwentwater (fairest of lakes) keeps it an eternal favourite with the multitude. Deservedly so, too, for though anything but precipitous it is winsome for its cloud effects and the fine purple

carpeting of its heather. As for Helvellyn, it is but a grind to its summit, and no long one either. Wordsworth once wrote a local guide-book, and in it he says of Striding Edge-Helvellyn's boldest approach-"This road ought not to be taken by anyone with weak nerves, as the top in many places scarcely affords room to plant the foot, and is beset with awful precipices on either side." But by now Striding Edge has become a thoroughfare. I have seen a dozen young ladies with parasols take the Edge gaily in procession, and clamber to the breast of Helvellyn without much fuss. Wordsworth and Scott took it together in 1805 for a special purpose that has had much to do with the Edge's reputation for awesomeness. It was the year of Charles Gough's death on the mountain, and the poets wished to see the spot where the body had rested for so many weeks watched over by his little terrier. The poems that were the outcome of this friendly tour may be said to have made Helvellyn's reputation. One wonders how many times these lines have been repeated by Scott-lovers on the great hill, referring to the little dog's watch over its master :

How long didst thou think that his silence was slumber?

When the wind waved his garment, how oft didst thou start?

As a clamber, Striding Edge is interesting; but it has little or no risk, except in a very strong wind or thick fog. The screes on either hand are generally not so steep but that they would yield foothold or a grip to the man who fell on them from above. There is a tombstone midway on the Edge, commemorating a fox-hunter who was killed hereabouts while following the hounds many years ago. It is not a pretty object, and one would like it removed. But its inscription shows that the Edge is not the dreadful thing it has been described. There is another memorial stone on Helvellyn, where the route from the Edge gets on to the summit level. This is in honour of Charles Gough's dog, and also to remind the tourist of the young Quaker's melancholy end. Speaking for myself, I like not these mortuary erections. Moreover, they give an altogether absurd alarmist touch to the swelling heap of "Gial Mellin," the "yellow moor" mountain. They are as reasonable where they are as the novelist Mrs. Radcliffe's account of her ascent of Skiddaw in 1794, when, if she is to be believed, she found the air at so great a height "very thin," and "difficult to be inspired."

The Langdale Pikes, though a thousand feet less in elevation than Sca Fell, are noteworthy among the Lakeland hills. No mountains become so endeared to the visitor who is content to stay by Windermere and enjoy his views at a distance. From the lake VOL. CCLXXXIV. NO. 2005.

D

they are really beautiful, especially towards sunset time, when their audacious little heads are bossed against a sky of crimson and gold. When stormy weather is in the ascendant they are also the best things in sight, unless the clouds elect to cover them up neck and crop, and inky blackness reigns around them. Besides, they are so easy of access. The road from Ambleside-Lakeland's Piccadilly Circus-is a good and short one. In the season, coaches and charsà-bancs follow each other by the half-dozen up the Langdale Valley, and the two hotels at the base of the bracken-clad slopes which lead to the peaks have much ado to find luncheon for all-comers. In a couple of hours you may scramble to the tops of both the mountains. From either it is impossible not to admire the comprehensive view obtained; though the best part of it is that of the near cliffs of the little hills themselves. These are almost pretentiously steep. The crags of Harrison Stickle over the bright little Stickle Tarn and those of Pike o' Stickle from its cone into the valley of Mickleden are warranted to break necks. But the picnickers here for the day do not imperil their bones. They are generally content to gasp in the sunlight by the pretty cascades of Mill Gill or Dungeon Gill until luncheon is ready. By six o'clock the more seriousminded tourist may hope to have this part of the valley to himself. For him by-and-bye the Pikes will don their rosy flushes of the evening, and if he will rise as early as he ought here in midsummer he may also see them transfigured in the dawnlight. This last is the time to get on terms with these pleasant little hills. The dewy bracken is then sweet to smell, and the pools of Dungeon Gill invite to bathe. The moorland between the two summits is then, too, as lonely as the Sahara. Though you are within two hours afoot of crowds of tourists, you are as much secluded from your fellow creatures as if you were pent in by unclimbable precipices.

From the Pikes it is a rude scramble by Rossett Gill into the heart of Lakeland's peaks. This is work of course for none tut pedestrians. That it is so may be surmised from the significant verse about it in a local visitor's book :

If I were a lover and loved a lass,
Who lived on the top of Rossett Pass,
While I abode at Dungeon Gill;

I'd swear by all that's good and ill

To love and cherish her ever and ever,

But go up to visit her never! never !

And yet the whole ascent is barely a thousand vertical feet. From cloud haunted Angle Tarn on its summit, a climb of another