No wonder that a man loving nature and loving solitude, as Wordsworth did love them, should have demurred to the project of railways, and have shuddered--as does Ruskin now--at the whistling of the demon of civilization among those hills. But it has come there, notwithstanding, and come to stay; and from the station beyond Bowness, upon the charmingest bit of Windermere, there lies now only an early morning’s walk to the old home of Wordsworth at Rydal. Immediately thereabout, it is true, the levels are a little more puzzling to the engineers, so that the thirteen miles of charming country road which stretch thence--twirling hither and yon, and up and down--in a northwesterly direction to the town of Keswick and the Derwent valley, remain now in very much the same condition as when I walked over them, in leisurely way, fifty odd years ago this coming spring. The road in passing out from Rydal village goes near the cottage where poor Hartley Coleridge lived, and earlier, that strange creature De Quincey (of whom we shall have presently more to say); it skirts the very margin of Grasmere Lake; this latter being at your left, while upon the right you can almost see among the near hills the famous “Wishing Gate;” farther on is Grasmere village, and Grasmere church-yard--in a corner of which is the grave of the old poet, and a modest stone at its head on which is graven only the name, William Wordsworth,--as if anything more were needed! A mile or two beyond, one passes the “Swan Inn,” and would like to lodge there, and maybe clamber up Helvellyn, which here shows its great hulk on the right--no miniature mountain, but one which would hold its own (3,000 feet) among the lesser ones which shoulder up the horizon at “Crawford’s,” in the White Mountains. Twirling and winding along the flank of Helvellyn, the road comes presently upon the long Dunmail Rise, where a Cumbrian battle was fought, and where, some six hundred feet above the level of Rydal water, one plunges into mountain savagery. All the while Helvellyn is rising like a giant on the right, and on the left is the lake of Thirlmere, with its shores of precipice. An hour more of easy walking brings one to another crest of hill from which the slope is northward and westward, and from this point you catch sight of the great mass of Skiddaw; while a little hitherward is the white speckle of Keswick town; and stretching away from it to your left lies all the valley of Derwent Water--with a cleft in the hills at its head, down which the brooklet of Lodore comes--“splashing and flashing.” _Robert Southey._