Lake country sketchesRawnsley, H. D. (Hardwicke Drummond)
General
Lake country sketches
Rawnsley, H. D. (Hardwicke Drummond)
Lake District (England); Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850 -- Homes and haunts -- England -- Lake District
and at the grave side a third hymn was sung which had been chosen by
his daughter as expressive of the continuity of happy life in the
world beyond. The bishop pronounced the benediction, the mourners
placed their wreaths at the grave side; silently the vast crowd
melted away, and left to its long rest the body of one of the most
public-spirited servants of the common good that Westmoreland has
known. He will be as sorely missed as he will be surely mourned.
{94}
A DAY WITH ROMAN AND NORSE.
It was burning June. The sun shone on lake and fell. Skiddaw was
cloudless and lifted into the clear heaven its purple lilac shade
powdered with the fresh fern and the emerald green of the bilberry.
The corn-crake cried in the valley, the throstle whistled from the
larch plantation; in and out of the elder-blossom the tireless bees
went humming, and the haymakers could hardly get on with their work
for gazing at the exquisite beauty of the wild roses on the hedge.
In Cumberland, as Southey said, we miss the violet, but we make up
for our loss in April and May by the blush roses of the June. They
embroider the lanes, they dance upon the hedgerows, they flash
against the grey blue waters of the lake, they flutter against the
green fellside. Such roses! not faint in {95} colour and scent as we
see in the South, but red of heart and filled with fragrance,
wonderful wild roses of Cumberland.
What a day of life and loveliness it is! On the old Millbeck Hall
door stone up yonder are the words, 'Vivere mori, mori vivere,' but
we feel that the living, the living are the hearts that praise, and
death is, even by suggestion, out of place here.
To-day as we dash along under Skiddaw to see where Roman and Norseman
once had home, we feel that the same beauty was beheld by earlier
races, and the wild rose that gladdens our sight was very dear to
eyes of far-off generations, and has been a perpetual garden of life
and loveliness for all the passing years.
We are going to see the camps of the warriors of old, and we do well
to gather and put in hat and buttonhole the emblem of England's
warrior saint, the good St. George. As one thinks of the flower,
one's mind does not only go back to Pisanello and his picture of St.
George away there in the church of St. Anastasia in Verona, but to
the hundred shrines wherein are seen that fair Madonna, the Rose of
God, whose painters honoured the wilding rose for her {96} sake, and
gave it immortality on their canvases. To Roman Catholic and to
Protestant alike, how significant and full of tender association is
the wild dog-rose of Cumberland! How close it brings the church days
of an older time back to the present dwellers in this country, seeing
that both on Carlisle's city arms and Carlisle's bishop's coat of
arms, the wild rose shines, memorial of the monastery that honoured
the Rose of Heaven.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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