I was in the region of the Lakes, and felt upon me already the powerful influences which its great poets have left it for an heritage forever. The noble range of the Cumberlands seemed to lift their monumental heads, in memory of Southey and Wordsworth. I went to Kendal, and sighted the castle where Katherine Parr was born, but was glad to take the earliest train to Bowness. Welcome was the sight of Windermere, brightly reflecting the evening sky, and encircled by an army of mountains, lifting their bristling pikes as if to defend it, like a virgin sister in her loveliness. Who can forget Dr. Arnold’s enthusiastic return to this dear spot, from the Continent: his just comparison of its charms with those of foreign scenes, and his close noting of the very minutes that lingered as he hasted to his home at Fox How? To me, there is all the heart of poetry in his honest effusion of genuine English feeling. “I see the Old Man and the Langdale Pikes, rising behind the nearer hills so beautifully! We open on Windermere, and vain it is to talk of any earthly beauty ever equalling this country, in my eyes. No Mola di Gaeta, no Valley of the Velino, no Salerno or Vietri can rival, to me, this Vale of Windermere, and of the Rotha. Here it lies in the perfection of its beauty, the deep shadows on the unruffled water; and mingling with every form, and sound, and fragrance, comes the full thought of domestic affections, and of national and of Christian: here is our own house and home: here are our own country’s laws and language: and here is our English Church!” Good! glorious! every word. I can feel it all, and the last words more than he did. It is to the Church that England owes all the rest, and yet that _palladium_ (I hate the word) of England’s holiest, and dearest, and best peculiarities, he would fain have Germanized! I believe, in my heart, he was better than his theories, and would have been the first to shrink from his own dreams of reform, had he lived to see them coming into shape as realities. I cannot but follow his speaking memoranda:—“Arrived at Bowness, 8.20; left at 8.31; passing Ragrigg Gate, 8.37; over Troutbeck Bridge, 8.51; here is Ecclerigg, 8.58; and here Lowood Inn, 9.04 and 30 seconds!” No fast man, at the Derby, ever held his watch more breathlessly; he was speeding home, and there he was in twenty minutes more, at his own “mended gate,” wife and darlings all round papa, and so ends his journal! Oh, what so enviable as a home, just here? My own is far away—and I stop at Lowood Inn, grateful for such inns as England only affords, and proposing to spend such a Sunday as England only hallows. I am not forgetful of my own dear land; I love her Hudson, as I can never love even an English lake; but the janglings of a Sunday in America, the unutterable wretchedness of perpetuated quarrels among Christians, and all the sadness of religious disunion, in its last stage of social disorganization, take away my sense of repose,