Pass by, not over, the bridge—a horse passing over it might remind one of the famous asinine performer on the tight-rope—and you come to the hamlet of Hallgarth, which has little to distinguish it from a thousand others, save the rather uncomfortable peculiarity of not being touched upon by the “blessed sun” for about three months in the year. As you leave it by a steep acclivity, you had better take a survey of Little Langdale which lies spread out at your feet. Rather farther than midway between you and the abruptly rising range of hill called Lingmoor, which divides this vale from its larger namesake, lies Langdale Tarn, which bears out the Poet Laureate's assertion, that “Tarns are often surrounded by an unsightly tract of boggy ground.” The chief beauty of Little Langdale consists in the irregular hillocky nature of its ground and the sites of its dwellings, many of which nestle so cozily in little dells, behind rocky knolls, and beneath umbrageous trees, as to convey a notion of the most attractive snugness; but here I am heretic enough to dispute the infallibility of the Poet Laureate’s taste. He has declared war against whitewash in something like the following terms:—“The objections to white, as a colour, in large spots or masses in landscapes, especially in a mountainous country, are insurmountable”—and, quoting somebody who [Sidenote: A WORD FOR WHITE HOUSES.] says “that white destroys the gradations of distance,” he holds on thus—“Five or six white houses, scattered over a valley, by their obtrusiveness, dot the surface, and divide it into triangles, or other mathematical figures, haunting the eye, and disturbing that repose which might otherwise be perfect.” By the bye, a fair lady, whose opinion, in most matters of taste, I hold in the deepest reverence, recently became a convert to this doctrine of Mr Wordsworth, because she noticed the effect just instanced, not when gazing upon a landscape, but when compiling patch work in which fragments of white intruded amongst the blues, yellows, greens, reds, and neutrals, woefully disturbed the harmony and repose of the cushion cover or quilt. Mr Wordsworth says also, in support of his anti-whitewashing theory, that “in nature, pure white is scarcely ever found but in small objects, such as flowers; or in those which are transitory, as the clouds, foam on rivers, and snow.” But I must remind those who take for gospel every word that Mr Wordsworth preaches, that the “White Cliffs of England,” the snows upon a thousand hills, and the foam of a thousand cataracts are neither minute nor transitory; and that large masses of white in nature, such as these, as well as white clouds, and the terrible white of a stormy sea upon a rocky coast are all calculated to excite sensations of the sublime and beautiful in any bosom, whether the possessor be very much of a man of feeling and imagination or the reverse. But coming back to cottages, with all due