THE LITERATURE AND SCENERY OF THE ENGLISH LAKE DISTRICT. BY GEORGE MILNER. [Read March 28, 1881.] T is a fortunate thing for those who live immured IT for the major part of their lives in the unpicturesque towns of the North of England that there should be so near to them-certainly within a two or three hours' railway journey-a region singularly adapted to serve as the playground of a hard-working race-a region where health of body may be gained and the love of natural beauty fostered at one and the same time. What is known as the Lake Country is usually so closely associated with the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland that we are apt to forget how near to it we Lancashire people really are, and to overlook the fact that many of its beauties may be seen without leaving our native shire. The western side of Windermere, Esthwaite Water the very haunt of sylvan peace, Coniston Lake, Coniston Old Man, and the eastern bank of the classic Duddon, are in what is usually considered the prosaic county of Lancashire. Nor must we forget in estimating the recreative value of the district its great wealth of literary association. In no other part of England is there any parallel to this, and even in Scotland the quality is neither so strong nor so widely spread. Nowhere in the Lake Country do we ever lose the great personality of Wordsworth: the power of his spirit is on every mountain and valley, and is felt as that of a local genius in the old Greek sense. And besides him how many more there are who in one way or other have connected their names or their works with the country. So that we get just what is needed to make a holiday complete, the charm of literature combined with that of scenery an intellectual interest added to the æsthetic and the physical. The connection indeed between the Lake Country and Literature is not merely adventitious or external, it is curiously intimate and essential. I never enter the region myself without having the same feeling arising within me that would come upon the perusal of certain books or classes of books. And this does not apply merely to given writers or to particular poems which may, as it were, be labelled with the names of places; the connection is deeper and touches the very life and history of letters in England during one of its most interesting periods of revival. It was a man of letters, Thomas Gray, who is usually credited with having discovered the Lake Country (just as Sir Walter Scott is said to have discovered the romantic parts of Scotland), and the discovery was coincident with and largely operative in the development of a remarkable change of tone in our literature with regard to country life and with reference to the whole question of what is known as External Nature. In the early part of the eighteenth century the change is coming, but only, as might be expected, in a tentative and halting fashion. Addison, writing in 1712 on the mutual interdependence of Nature and Art, under the lines of Horace Alterius sic Altera poscit opem res et conjurat amice, while he yet contends that the works of Nature are found to be more pleasing the more they resemble those of Art, is bold in his anticipation of the modern spirit. "If," he says, Iwe consider the Works of Nature and Art, as they are qualified to entertain the Imagination, we shall find the last very defective, in comparison of the former; for though they may sometimes appear as Beautiful or Strange, they can have nothing in them of that Vastness and Immensity which afford so great an Entertainment to the Mind of the Beholder. The one may be as Polite and Delicate as the other, but can never show her self so August and Magnificent in the Design. There is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless Strokes of Nature than in the nice Touches and Embellishments of Art. The Beauties of the most stately Garden or Palace lie in a narrow compass, the Imagination immediately runs them over, and requires something else to gratify her; but, in the wide Fields of Nature, the Sight wanders up and down without Confinement, and is fed with an infinite variety of Images, without any certain Stint or Number. For this Reason we always find the Poet in Love with a Country-Life, where Nature appears in the greatest Perfection, and furnishes out all those Scenes that are most apt to delight the Imagination." This passage, which is as admirable in its clearness of expression as it is true in its philosophy, indicates with sufficient distinctness the lines upon which the English mind would hereafter proceed in its admiration of landscape in general, and still more of such landscape in particular, as that which we find in the country of the Lakes. Twenty years later than this James Thomson had published his Seasons. While yet a student at the University of Edinburgh he had written some lines in praise of a country life, which faintly anticipate the plan and subject of the larger poem. Thomson himself says that the idea. of writing The Seasons was suggested to him by a poem entitled "A Winter's Day," the production of a now obscure enough Scotch minister, Robert Riccaltoun, of Hobkirk. This poem exhibits the modern sympathy with Nature and the love for disordered wildness in landscape. On the cold cliff I'll lean my aching head, |