Already much that was of inestimable value has been lost. The Lake District has in this respect been more fortunate than some other localities, because, owing to the powerful sentiment aroused by the Lake poets, there is a considerable public opinion opposed to any act of desecration. For this we have to thank, in the first place, the great name of Wordsworth, and, next, the faithful band of defenders which has stood between the enterprising contractor and his prey, as in the case of the once threatened railway to Ambleside and Grasmere. But even in Lakeland no little damage has been done, as by the mining which has ruined the scenery of Coniston, and by the permission granted to Manchester to turn the once sylvan and secluded Thirlmere into a suburban tank--Thirlmere first, and now the ruin of Haweswater is to follow. Mention has been made in an earlier part of this book of a visit which I paid to Coniston in the winter of 1878-79. It so happened that a spell of severe frost and cloudless skies had then turned the Lakeland mountains into a strange realm of enchantment, the rocks being fantastically coated with fronds and feathers of snow, and the streams and waterfalls frozen into glittering masses of ice. I was the only visitor in the place (it was before Mr. Harrison Riley’s arrival), and for several days I had been scrambling over the range of the Old Man mountain without meeting a human being, when one afternoon, on the shore of Levers Water, a solitary figure came suddenly round a buttress of the hill and stalked silently past me as if wrapped in thought. I knew at once that it was Ruskin, for what other inhabitant of Coniston would be on the fells at such a season? A few days later, when I went to Brantwood with Harrison Riley, as I have described, Ruskin talked a good deal of his favourite mountain haunts, as he showed us his wild strawberry beds, and terraces on the hillside made like Swiss roads; also a small beck running through his grounds to the lake, which he said was never dry, and was as precious to him as a stream of pure gold. The Lake scenery, he said, almost compensated him for the loss of Switzerland, which he could not hope to see again; his feeling for it was one less of affection than of “veneration.” But the sunsets had been a disappointment to him, for the sky above the Old Man was often sullen and overclouded, and this he attributed to the poisonous influence of the copper mines.