enchanted land that, speaking relatively, has no history. A democracy in the past of yeomen or peasant owners, with little story but their own extremely racy and domestic one, they owed nothing to landlord, chief, or king but the service of military tenure by which they held their farms, and which they rendered when called upon by the Warden of the Western March, but offering small temptation to the predatory instincts of the Scottish raider. The Lakelanders were neither raiders nor Border fighters in the same sense as the men of the Tyne and Eden, or only incidentally so. They led comparatively humdrum lives. Their ancient condition is one of no little economic and social interest, but not of the kind to stir the blood of the stranger as does that which existed on the Solway, the Irthling, the Tynes, the Coquet, and the Tweed. The modern literary associations of Lakeland have absolutely obscured any ancient story it might have to tell, while the temperament of neither Wordsworth, Southey, the Coleridges, nor de Quincey turned in any appreciable degree to the past of the country that so closely held their affections. Others have done so, if not in very popular or accessible fashion, for those to whom such things appeal. If Wordsworth, however, did not sing much of the past, he sang of his native streams to such effect that it seems likely they will play accompaniments to his verse in the ears of such visitors as have got any so long as time lasts. The Rothay into which the Brathay runs might seem, perhaps, to have the greatest claim on Wordsworth or he on it, since it plunged beneath his very gate on its journey from Rydal to Windermere. But Wordsworth was everywhere. He did not stay indoors all day like the industrious Southey, who must, nevertheless, have accomplished most of his life's work with the song of the Keswick Greta in his ears. Wordsworth lived in the open, was possessed of a stout pair of legs as well as an unrivalled imagination, and looked like a country farmer, little enough as he resembled one. His outward man fitted his environment as a grey mossy rock blends with a mountain stream; and one likes to have it so, for the Nature poet is sometimes in habit and person rather painfully at odds with the scenes of which he sings. One is now among beauteous short-lived rivers and becks innumerable that almost everybody--for who has not been in Lakeland?--is more or less familiar with. Since crossing the Pennines, too, we have been in a country where Scandinavian [Illustration: THE DERWENT, BORROWDALE, CUMBERLAND] [Illustration]