hailed her, rushing like a rhinoceros, we shall advise you how to spend the afternoon and the evening. Stroll into Yewdale and Tilberthwaite—and without a guide. The main-road is easily lost and easily found; and it is delightful to diverge -as you dauner alang-into tributary paths, some of them almost as wide as the main current, which in truth is but narrowish, and still retaining marks of the wood cart-wheels, or the cars of the charcoal-burners,—and others slender as if made-which is probably the case-by hares limping along at dawn or evening and leading you sometimes into a greenery of glade, and sometimes into a bloomery of sweetbriers, and sometimes into a brownery beneath an aged standard's shade, where, lying down on the moss, you may dream yourself into a Druid.

True, that a rivulet winds through Yewdale; but as you have lately been rather gouty, and are still somewhat rheumatic, pray plunge in, and you will seldom find the water much above the waistband of those expressibles-breeches. Mild as milk flows the soothing stream-in temperature so nearly the same as the summer air, that ere you are half across, you know not, but by the pressure on your knees, that you are in the water. What has become of you, my friend? Abuse not the bank for being treacherous-it has violated no trust-broken no promise; but the beautiful brown gravel,

"Mild as the plumage on the pheasant's breast,"

has been hanging by a precarious tenure over that "shelving plum"-as says that old Scottish ballad of the Mermaid-and you are suddenly in her embraces. And now that you rise to the surface, we assure you on our word of honour, that never before saw we you so like a salmon-beg your pardon—an otter. Nankeens in less than no time dry in the sunshine. At present you are yellow as ochre-but by-and-by will be whitish as of yore; you are drying visibly to the naked eye; why, you are like a very wild-drake who flaps himself out from the tarn, and up into the air-crying Quack, quack, quack-as merrily as a moistened horn sounding a reveillé !

Yewdale is but a small place-a swallow, all the while catching flies, could circle it in two minutes-that hawk-do you see him?—has shot through it in one-but then it is intersected by all the lines of beauty, and circumscribed by all the

lines of grandeur. We have a sketch-book-of some threescore pages-filled with views of Yewdale-and they might be multiplied by threescore-nor yet contain a tithe of its enchantments. Walk for a few seconds with your eyes shut, and on opening them, you find they are kaleidoscopes. The houses are a very few in number, but virtually many; and seem to have not only sloping but sliding roofs. You create new cottages at every step out of the old materials—yet they all in succession wear the grey or green garb of age, or hoary are they in an antiquity undecayed; and when the sunshine smites them, cheerful look they in their solemnity among younger dwellings, like sages smiling on striplings, and in their lifefulness forgetting all thoughts and feelings that appertain to death. So for trees-you see at once that every sycamore-clump is cotemporary with its cottage-here and there among the coppice-woods, a noble single stem has been suffered to wear his crown sacred from the woodman's axetortuous and grotesque shoots the ash from the clefts of the rocks, long ago incapable of being pollarded-beloved by blackbirds, the bright holly beats his yew-brother black and blue-and the pensile birch-say not that she weeps-looks on the gloaming like a veiled nun-as we in mid-day do like a ninny for saying so―for the truth is, that she is the mother of a fair family at her feet, at this moment waving their hair in the sunshine, on a small plot of greensward inaccessible to the nibbling of sheep, hare, or cony, but free to the visit of the uninjuring bee, that steals ere sunrise but the honey-dew that sparkles on the fragrant tresses. In spite of the associations connected with some of our earliest and most painful impressions, we all of us love the birch-and especially poets —though of all children that ever were fathers of men they bear, in general, such impressions the deepest, and could exhibit, if need were, their most ineffaceable traces!

Of Tilberthwaite, again, "much might be said on both sides," especially the right, as you walk up it from Yewdale. We prefer it to the Pass over the Simplon-just as we prefer a miniature picture of the Swiss Giantess to the giantess herself -an eyeful for one to an armful for ten. Our mind and its members are, like our body and its members, but of moderate dimensions-its arms are unfit for a vast embrace. No woman in humble life should be above five feet five, and a mountain

ought to be in the same proportion; what that is we leave you to discover who have not yet been in Tilberthwaite. The rule to go by with respect to a precipice is, that it be sufficiently high to insure any living thing being dashed into nothing, in the event of falling from summit to base; but not so high as to make it impossible for ordinary optics to see the commencement of the catastrophe. For these purposes, we should think fifteen hundred feet an adequate height; particularly with a rocky bottom. Hawks and kites command cliffs of that class, as they shoot and shriek across the chasms, or, soaring above them all, look down into the cataracted abysses from their circles in the sky. But when the rocky range is loftier far, to you who look up like a mouse from below, they seem like sparrows-or the specks evanish. True that an Eagle requires-demands three thousand feet at the lowest-but the Royal is a reasonable Bird, and is as well satisfied with his eyrie on Ben Nevis as on Chimborazo. The Condor can cry where you could not sneeze-can live for ages where you could not breathe an instant-can shoot swifter horizontally when forty thousand feet high, than you could drop dead by decades down to the highest habitation of men above the level of the sea. But the Condor is a vulture. We love him not-though he was the Roc, no doubt, of the Arabian Nights, and of Sinbad the Sailor.

Try Tilberthwaite, then, by the Test Act, and few places indeed will be found superior for the purposes of poetry. You feel yourself well shut out and in among cliff and cloud; and though a cheerful and chatty companion when the "glass is at fair”—is he, the rivulet-" down-by yonder," in some of whose pools no angler ever let drop a fly-yet, after a night's rain, he is an ugly customer, and would make no bones of a bridge. By and by there is an end of precipices; and you get in among heights all covered with coppice-wood magnificently beautiful; ever and anon the vast debris shot from slate-quarries, still working, or worked out, giving a chaotic character to the solitude.

Some people will on no account whatever, if they can help it, return the way they came; and such having once turned their backs on Coniston, will pass through Tilberthwaite, impatient to get into little Langdale, half-forgetful of all the grandeur and the loveliness they have ungratefully left behind

VOL. VI.

B

among the woods and rocks. But you are not people of that character; so right-about-face, and back with the wind in your bosom-how delicious!-along the same five multitudinous miles, "alike, but oh! how different!" enjoying the long gloaming-till again the Lake of Coniston lies before you in undazzling lustre, and, looking upwards in your happiness, you behold rising without a halo the bright Queen of Night! "Early to bed, and early to rise,

Is the way to be healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

And you are up next morning at four. A cup of coffee, made in a moment of a tea-spoonful of Essence, and a biscuit, and you are broad awake, and fit to face the mountains. You set out to walk up towards heaven, as if to meet the sun.

The OLD MAN expects you to breakfast-SEATHWAITE Chapel to dinner-and supper will be ready for you in the parlour, where you have slept on a sofa-bed. For a mile you pace the lovely level of the lake, and then, leaving the church and bridge of Coniston, you commence the ascent to LEVERS WATER. The road is steep and irregular; and ere long, on turning round, you will discern, beyond the lake, stretching westward ftom the mouth of the river Leven, a long stripe of

sea.

The copper-mines are passed, and in an hour or so— after having mastered easily about two miles of ascent-you reach the north side of Levers Water, a tarn that is justly proud of its rocks. From it there is a road to Low Water, a little lake just under the Old Man; and the devil's own road it is only more difficult to find. But to-day you have a guide with you; and in about half-an-hour you bathe your forehead in the liquid gloom. We know not how it is with you, but in ascending long rough steeps we are very sulky; silence is then with us the order of the day, and we set down him who breaks it by interrogatory-ejaculations are venial—a blockhead for life. Two great slate-quarries, east and west of the Old Man, are seen near its summit, and from Low Water the guide will conduct you to the eastern one, and thence to the top of the Man. We know not if either be worked now; the western quarry has been silent for fifty years-and its brother may have given up the ghost. Green, in a few words, gives the character of such a place: "It was then in high working condition-it was one grand scene of tinkling animation, noisy

concussion, and thundering explosion. But now all is at rest; the aspiring cliff has tumbled to the area, and invaded it with rubbish so ponderous as to make all future attempts at profit useless." You have surveyed, not without awe, these magnificent excavations so high in heaven, solemn but not gloomy, like temples of the sun, or sacred to the winds; and now, having reached the summit, you make your obeisance to the Old Man, and glance your eyes hurriedly over his kingdom.

We have never been able to sympathise with the luxury of that almost swooning sickness that assails the stranger in Switzerland, some ten or twelve thousand feet up the side of Mont Blanc, as the greedy guides drag the sumph along sinking knee-deep in the snow-nor with that difficulty of breathing which alarms the above sumph with dread of his lungs being at the last gasp of that rarified air—nor with the pleasure of bleeding at nose, ears, and eyes, from causes which the poor philosopher is afterwards proud to explain—nor with that lassitude of soul and body, which terminates on the top of the achievement in pitiable prostration of all his faculties, or in a drivelling delirium, in which the victor laughs and weeps like a born idiot, his cracked lips covered with sanguinary slaver, from which no words escape but "Poor Tom's a-cold!" Pretty pastime for a Cockney in the region of Eternal Snow! Commend us, who are less ambitious, to a green grassy English mountain, or a purple heathery Scotch one, of such moderate dimensions as thine-O Coniston Old Man! There is some snow, like soap on thy beard; but thy chin is a Christian chin-and that cove is a pretty little dimple, which gives sweetness to thy smile. Strong are we on this summit as a stag-ay, we are indeed a hearty old Buck-and there goes our Crutch like a rocket into the sky. Hurra! hurra! hurra! Maga and the Old Man for ever!-hurra! hurra! hurra!

The very first thing some people do, on reaching the top of a high mountain, is to unfold a miserable map-and all maps are miserable except Mudge's, which, we believe, will be happy-and endeavour to identify each spot on the variegated scrawl, by reference to the original. For a while they are sorely puzzled to accommodate the cracked canvass to the mighty world, nor know they whether, in consulting the lying linen oracle, they should insult the sun, by turning their back