There you will be all but sure to see your Atlantic friends, the seagulls, circling slowly within the mountain barriers like prisoners of the air and adding their floating shadows to the reflections in the lake below. For, as Wordsworth notes,--what did Wordsworth fail to note?--the water of these mountain meres is crystal clear and renders back with singular exactitude the "many-coloured images imprest" upon it. But the life of the Cumbrian hills is the life of grazing flocks, of leaping waterfalls and hidden streams with their "voice of unpretending harmony,"--the life of sun and shadow. Sometimes the sky is of a faint, sweet blue with white clouds wandering in it,--the old Greek myth of Apollo's flocks in violet meadows; sometimes the keenest radiance silvers the upper crest of _cumuli_ that copy in form the massy summits below; sometimes the mellow sunset gold is poured into the valleys as into thirsty cups; but most often curling mists wreathe the mountain-tops and move in plumed procession along their naked sides. The scenic effects and the joy of climbing are not lost by American tourists, yet these, as a rule, come to the Lake Country in a temper quite unlike that of the English holiday seekers. We come as pilgrims to a Holy Land of Song. We depend perhaps too little upon our own immediate sense of grandeur and beauty, and look perhaps too much to Wordsworth to interpret for us "Nature's old felicities." The Lake Country that has loomed so large in poetry may even disappoint us at the outset. The memory of the Rockies, of our chain of Great Lakes, of Niagara, may disconcert our first impressions of this clump of hills with only four, Scafell Pike, Scafell, Helvellyn, and Skiddaw, exceeding three thousand feet in height; of lakes that range from Windermere, ten miles long and a mile broad, to the reedy little pond of Rydal Water, more conventionally termed "a fairy mere"; of waterfalls that are often chiefly remarkable, even Southey's Lodore, for their lack of water. Scales Tarn, of which Scott wrote, "Never sunbeam could discern The surface of that sable tarn, In whose black mirror you may spy The stars, while noontide lights the sky," is seventeen feet deep. [Illustration: ISLAND IN GRASMERE LAKE]