Quitting the slate quarries, you follow the road by which you formerly travelled on your way to the classic Duddon, till you reach the stream separating Lancashire from Westmorland. You now cross this stream at the point where you approach it, and at once enter Little Langdale, up which the road takes you past “the New Houses,” Birk How, “Langden Jerry,” The Busk, and Langdale Tarn, all of which have been noticed either collectively or separately, on a previous occasion. After winding by a rough ascending road, half way round the mountain range called Lingmoor, you arrive at Blea Tarn, which, to quote _the_ Professor, is “a lonely, and if in nature there be anything of that character, a melancholy piece of water!” It is thus finely described in Mr Wordsworth’s Excursion, as the abode of his Solitary: 'Urn-like it is in shape—deep as an urn; With rocks encompassed, save that to the south Is one small opening, where a heath-clad ridge Supplies a boundary less abrupt and close, A quiet treeless nook with two green fields, A liquid pool that glitters in the sun, And one bare dwelling; one abode—no more! It seems the home of poverty and toil, Though not of want. The little fields made green By husbandry of many thrifty years, Pay cheerful tribute to the moorland house. There crows the cock, single in his domain; The small birds find in spring no thicket there To shroud them; only from the neighbouring vales The cuckoo, straggling up to the hill-top, Shouteth faint tidings of some gladder place!' [Sidenote: “BLEA-POND.”] ‘What!’ methinks we hear a voice exclaim—‘Is that a description of bare, dull, dreary, moorland Blea-Pond, where a man and a Christian would die of mere blank vacancy, of weary want of world, of eye and ear?’ Hush, critic, hush! forget you that there are sermons in stones, and good in everything? In what would the poet differ from the worthy man of prose, if his imagination possessed not a beautifying and transmuting power over the objects of the inanimate world?” It is indisputable that the poet must possess something that may be called “a transmuting power” of vision, for to the unpoetical optics of any “worthy man of prose,” like you or me, Blea Tarn is much more like a platter than “an urn.” Once upon a time, I—even I myself—in a very sentimental mood, perpetrated a sonnet upon Blea Tarn, and, if you can tolerate such enormity, here it is: