At least from that centre the several dales diverge, like the ribs from the top of a half-opened umbrella. The mountainous tract of the Lakes, though it measures only some thirty-two miles from west to east by twenty-three from north to south, rises to heights of more than 3,000 feet, and as it springs almost directly from the margin of the Irish Sea, it loses none of the full effect of its elevation. Its fells present a thoroughly highland type of scenery, and have much of the dignity of far loftier mountains. Their sky-line often displays notched crests and rocky peaks, while their craggy sides have been carved into dark cliff-girt recesses, often filled with tarns, and into precipitous scars, which send long trails of purple scree down the grassy slopes. Moreover, a mild climate and copious rainfall have tempered this natural asperity of surface by spreading over the lower parts of the fells and the bottoms of the dales a greener mantle than is to be seen among the mountains further north. Though the naked rock abundantly shows itself, it has been so widely draped with herbage and woodland as to combine the luxuriance of the lowlands with the near neighbourhood of bare cliff and craggy scar. Such was the scenery amidst which William Wordsworth was born and spent most of his long life. Thence he drew the inspiration which did so much to quicken the English poetry of the nineteenth century, and which has given to his dales and hills so cherished a place in our literature. The scenes familiar to him from infancy were loved by him to the end with an ardent and grateful affection which he never wearied of publishing to the world. No mountain-landscapes had ever before been drawn so fully, so accurately, and in such felicitous language. Every lineament of his hills and dales is depicted as luminously and faithfully in his verse as it is reflected on the placid surface of his beloved meres, but suffused by him with an ethereal glow of human sympathy. He drew from his mountain-landscape everything that 'Can give an inward help, can purify And elevate, and harmonize and soothe.' It brought to him 'authentic tidings of invisible things'; and filled him with 'The sense Of majesty and beauty and repose, A blended holiness of earth and sky.' For his obligations to that native scenery he found continual expression. 'Ye mountains and ye lakes, And sounding cataracts, ye mists and winds That dwell among the hills where I was born, If in my youth I have been pure in heart, If, mingling with the world, I am content With my own modest pleasures, and have lived With God and Nature communing, removed From little enmities and low desires-- The gift is yours.'