It is no doubt a fact that there are isolated prospects elsewhere which are as beautiful and impressive as these, but in most cases they are separated by tracts of intervening country which are deadly dull. Here is no dulness. The feasts of beauty are as great on the way from Derwentwater to Ullswater, or between Coniston and Windermere, as they are at these prospects themselves. The indefinable line of beauty is omnipresent. From end to end and from side to side of this favoured spot there is scarcely an unlovely feature, if we except the quarries and mines which mar some few localities. It may be thought that because the higher mountains barely top three thousand feet the sense of space and immensity will be lacking. But really this is not so. The truth is that the proportions of a mountain are determining factors of greater moment than its mere height in feet or its bulk. Who that has traversed Kirkstone Pass or skirted the edge of Buttermere on a hazy August day, can doubt this? The atmospheric conditions of Lakeland lend a sense of altitude and suggestiveness such as the clearer air of great mountain ranges rarely conveys. This exquisiteness of proportion impressed Wordsworth so greatly that he actually compared the beauties of Lakeland with those of Switzerland, and, needless to say, our homeland lost very little in the comparison. Wordsworth may be thought to be a biassed authority, yet it is the repeated testimony of a very great number of travellers that, whilst they have seen wilder, more sublime and grander scenes elsewhere, they have seen nothing so beautiful as Lakeland. And such is my own impression. My vocation takes me for a month or two every year to Switzerland, yet not a summer passes but I return from the glacier world of the great Alps feeling, as Penrith is neared and glimpses of the Langdale Pikes and the sweep of St. Sunday’s [Illustration: Grasmere and the Island “At Evening.”] Crag over Ullswater are caught, that I have seen nothing better in all my wanderings abroad. Indeed, it ought to have been Lakeland’s own poet, and not Kingsley, who wrote “While we see God’s signet Fresh on English ground, Why go gallivanting With the nations round?” It is hardly the province of a work like the present to treat of the geology of this beautiful district, but it may prove of interest to touch concisely upon the processes which have conduced to the formation of such a wonderful whole.