We are nearing White Moss.  Our eyes may haply now fall on a jutting point of land that runs with its clump of willows into Rydal Water; it is held by some to be Point Rash Judgment.  Here, on a September morning in the year 1800, Coleridge and Dorothy, who had sauntered with Wordsworth through the thickets that descend to the Rotha, saw an old man fishing.  Wordsworth exclaimed at the idleness of the fisher, who had far better have been with the harvesters; but a nearer view showed that,

            Too weak to labour in the harvest field,
            The man was using his best skill to gain
            A pittance from the dead, unfeeling lake;

and the poet commemorated his feelings of shame for hasty judgment in the poem, ‘A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags.’ (p. 390)

The little house close by the White Moss quarry on the right was built by Wordsworth, it is said, in two tenements, that he might obtain two votes for Parliament.  It is a happy coincidence that now a granddaughter of the poet resides here.  For this White Moss is consecrated by the many poems suggested by the locality to the poet. (p. 390)….

But what a surprise view this first prospect of Grasmere and the Easedale hollow, and the gap of Dunmail Raise, flanked by Steel Fell and Seat Sandal, surely is!  There is the white old church, Allan Bank among its trees behind; and here in front, the glittering lake, and—

            Its isle at anchor with its dusky crew—

crew of Scotch firs, as faithful as they are beautiful!  What wondrous beauty has that western shore!  How serenely slope the meadows to the water’s edge!  How snugly beneath the hills from White Dale Head to Silver How Cottage stand the happy houses of comfortable men! (p. 393)

That curious circular abutment from the road into the lake was the favourite view of Hartley Coleridge.  Hither, sometimes twice in a day, would he ramble from the Nab.  Now shouldering his stick and hustling along as if he were in hot pursuit; now standing as one dazed in silent reverie.  How the old folk loved him; how the little ones feared him!  ‘Flayte to death o’most were the barns of our lààl Hartley. (p. 393)….

‘Time’s up, sir,’ cries the coachman, and round by Mrs. Nelson’s—the champion baker of cakes in the North Country; away by the house Lord Cadogan built—the Rothay Hotel of to-day; round to the left through the ‘Red Lion’ yard, and then swiftly to the right we speed. (p. 397)

Allan Bank is sighted—Allan Bank, where between 1808 and 1811 Wordsworth found shelter, where the ‘Excursion’ was for the most part written, where Coleridge wrote the ‘Friend,’ where Hartley Coleridge learned his classics, where De Quincey, popping into Coleridge’s study for a book, was first introduced to a tall, lithe-looking young man in a sailor’s dress with the words, ‘Mr. Wilson, of Elleray.’  Nearer is seen the old post office where Arthur Clough and Matthew Arnold spent such happy long-vacation times. (pp. 397-398)….

The white house at the end of the road is a halting-place.  We pull up short at the ‘Swan’ and look for the sign that the old landlord painted, in vain.  ‘Who does not know the famous Swan?’  Waggoner or tourist—what man does not stop here who ‘e’er essays the long scent of Dunmail Raise?’ (p. 398)

Sir Walter Scott, Southey, and Wordsworth, mounted on their grey ponies, essayed from hence the height of Helvellyn years ago, and hither, so tradition has it, Sir Walter repaired daily to find the extra comforts which the humble board of his host at Townend could at that time ill afford.  Wordsworth drank cold water of the spring.  Scott liked to mix his with the mountain dew.  And doubtless the shepherd Michael often sauntered hither from his cottage that in the last century was standing there where the Hollies lifts its tower of grey beneath Thunacar Knott.  Michael’s cottage, which, whether from its window glaring in the sun, or from its ‘constant light so regular’ of fire or homely lamp, was called ‘the evening star,’ is gone.  But as one’s eyes wander up towards the great hollow in the Fairfield Hill one’s mind may picture that ‘old man, stout of heart and strong of limb’ climbing up that mountain cleft to build in his sorrow the fold whose unfinished ‘remains may still be seen beside the boisterous brook of Greenhead Ghyll.’ (p. 398)

Other shepherds have haunted this spot since Michael’s time.  Edward Thring, the great headmaster, came for thirteen consecutive years to build up thoughts that should build up men beside this self-same ghyll. (p. 399)

The coachmen cracks his whip; away we go; we have yet twelve miles to Keswick.  The hawthorns have shed their bloom that gave such glory last month to this part of our drive, but the purple shales of Helm Crag have won such verdure from the fresh fern bunches as atone for any loss of blossom. (p. 399)

Stone Arthur towers on our right hand; to that emissary—

            The last that parleys with the setting sun—

how often Wordsworth looked as he sat upon his orchard seat in the Townend Cottage?  To that height the companion at his side gave her poet husband’s name. (p. 399)

What a picturesque grouping of Scotch firs is that yonder at the foot of the ascent to Grisedale; what a picturesque mill-wheel is that yonder to our left as, crossing Tongue Ghyll Beck, we begin to ascend the Raise!  There is no more beautiful waterfall hereabouts than the Tongue Ghyll up in the meadow to the right; but the coach stops for none. (p. 399)….

Now we begin the ascent in earnest.  The coach stops, and we dismount to lighten the load, and it is well. (p. 399)….

We remount the coach, and along over the moraine-covered plateau that gave its name to the Raise, ‘Dun Meols’ or Dunmail Raise, we go at a brisk trot.  We cross a tiny bridge.  We are in Cumberland. (p. 400)

(Cornhill Magazine, 11 (October 1888), 390-404)

[This article was published, along with Parts I and III, in book form - A Coach Drive at the Lakes: Windermere to Keswick (Keswick, 1890)]

Hits: 4012

Sir,—The writer of the interesting article on cinematograph on April 9 says—“Whether in this extraordinary greed of the eye we are to see reason for alarm or not we do not know”; and, after suggesting that the cinematograph may after all be helping us in our “fumbling towards some new form of art which is to have movement and shape,” he adds—In the meantime we have a fury for seeing and remain happy, greedy, and terribly indiscriminate.” As to our happiness I cannot agree.  Those of us who know what a large proportion of the spectators are children between four and 14, and that before these children’s greedy eyes with heartless indiscrimination horrors unimaginable are in many of the halls presented night after night, are the reverse of happy.  Terrific massacres, horrible catastrophes, motor-car smashes, public hangings, lynchings, badger baiting, bull fights, prize fights, pictures of hell fires and the tortures of the damned, etc., are passed before them, and become such realities that they cannot sleep at night and have been known to implore the policemen to guard them on their way home from “the horrid man with the beard.”

Those of us who know that these same children, after sitting in the cinematograph hall till 11 o clock at night, come weary and listless to school the following morning, who also from police and magisterial reports are informed that, while many children become petty pilferers to get pence for admission to the show, others actually begin their downward course of crime by reason of the burglary and pick-pocket scenes they have witnessed, cannot help feeling very real alarm.  It remains to be seen if Mr. Redford, the film censor, can work the change for the better that many film-makers desire.  Meanwhile I dare to suggest that all who care for the moral well-being and education of the child will set their faces like flint against this new form of excitement, shall insist that no children under school age be allowed to go to these shows in the evening unless accompanied by their parents or guardians, and that our civic authorities should be called upon not to license any cinematograph hall that will not undertake to give afternoon shows for children on Saturday afternoon, at which all films shall be fit for a child to see.

(Times, 12 April 1913, p. 10)

Hits: 4013

Anyone who loves for old Dake’s sake a bit of coaching, can find a choice of sixteen well-appointed four-in-hands ready to scamper off north, east, or west, to any part of the Lake District from Windermere, on any day of the week during the tourist season. (p. 256)….

There is not anywhere in England a drive so full of that mingled natural and human interest which makes scenery so impressive.  It is well-nigh impossible for sensitive minds not to feel something of ‘the light that never was on sea or land’ as they pass the thresholds of the good and great, whose thoughts have helped our England to be pure.  In this coach drive to Keswick they not only go by the homes of the thinkers and poets and philosophers, but their foreheads feel the wind and rain that gave such freshness to the seers of the last generation; the sunlight on lake or mountain head that filled their minds with glory fills ours to-day.  The woods and waterfalls that speak to us upon our way spoke also to them.  We can in fancy see their familiar forms upon the road, and, as in eastern travels the ‘weli’ or wayside tomb made the journey’s stage rememberable, so we find in this pilgrim stage through poet-land that the great dead lend it a kind of solemn sweetness, and the dust of two Laureates hallows the wonder-giving way. (pp. 256-257)

Taken all in all, there is no twenty-one miles’ coach drive that so stirs the imagination as this coach drive from Windermere to Keswick, and yet, as one listens to the chatter on the box or the chaff on the seat behind the driver, one feels that few journeys are so little known about as having worthy associations. (p. 257)….

We note the simple beauty of a Westmorland farm-house, its milk-white porch, its welcome retirement in the fields just off the road to the right, wish we were lodgers there, then plunge into the Ecclerigg woods—the air full breathed of the sweet rowan flowers.  How gay the rhododendrons shine, and if it were but rose time we should marvel at the show of roses in this close-kept sanctuary of rest on our right. (p. 260)

Now Lowood is seen—the tall dark pines by the lake shore, the white water gleaming across to Wray, with its castled height not old in story, for the castle was only built this century, and that too out of a bit of spleen with the wild north-wester which had unroofed Dr. Dawson’s little cottage close by.  But, if the castle is but young, so well is it built of native stone that it seemeth truly no new or inharmonious thing, and high above it towers the larch-covered barrow where Lather the Norse chieftain had his village and found his burial. (pp. 260-261)

One cannot gaze from Lowood across to Wray without going over the hill beyond, I fancy, to that little Norwegian-looking town of Hawkshead, lying in its happy hollow by Esthwaite Lake, and thinking of the schoolboy who was there

            From Nature and her overflowing soul
            . . . . received so much that all his thoughts
            Were steeped in feeling;

And here at our feet, as we sight Lowood, is running across the road a little unpretending rill, whereby that schoolboy, grown to be a man, once rested with his sister Dorothy as they were trudging from Kendal to pay their first visit together to the land they have jointly immortalised. (p. 261)….

That house in its sloping garden grounds to the right is still tenanted by a lady who remembers how half afraid of Hartley Coleridge the little girls with whom he played, when he was at school at Ambleside, were.  Scale How to-day, it was called Green Bank in the time half-a-century ago when it received as tutor to the boys of the family a man of whom Wordsworth used to say, ‘He is the only one I know who sees more things in Nature than I do in a country walk.’ (p. 264)

There Father Faber, then fresh from Oxford, lived and wrote.  One cannot, as one gazes across the field to the left and sees the shoulder of Loughrigg Fell glimmer into green and gold between the houses, forget that day by the Brathay stream in those meadows Faber poured out his soul in verse, and on that bossy upland height of broken ground thought out the broken snatches of his son and refreshed his soul. (p. 264)

The house to our left, behind the chapel, is the Knoll.  There Miss Harriet Martineau dwelt, and still in the north terrace garden stands the dial, with her prayer inscribed thereon, ‘Come light, visit me.’  A little further, and the one time home of a learned man of the old school, old Doctor Davy, is passed—Lesketh How.  There in the old days was often seen the manly figure of Sir John Richardson, of Arctic fame, for Doctor Davy, Sir Humphrey’s brother, married the sister of beautiful Lady Richardson, one of the Fletchers of the country, whose name is gracious still.  We look now keenly to the left, for away under Loughrigg may be seen Dr. Arnold’s haunt, Fox How. (pp. 264-265)….

What a site for a house is yonder!  How the stateliness of the hills and the majesty of the woods enshrines the Rydal Hall!  In silver tones, after flood, comes borne down the ox-eye daisy strewn field a sound of falling waters such as makes one feel the presence of an enchanter’s wand, and possibilities of the merry greenwood faerie. (p. 266)

And we are back in old days truly here, for yonder crag on the left of Loughrigg goes by the name of the ‘Gate’ Crag.  In early British times the wild goat sprang from ledge to ledge, while the deer swept up the lawn, and, dark against the sky, stood magnified.  Blow your horn, coachman, blow your horn, and wake all echoes that will not break our dream. (p. 266)

‘Pelter Bridge, sir,’ said the coachman, ‘it was a most partic’ler favourite walk over that bridge, and round by Red Bank, for Mr. Wordsworth and his sister, Miss Dorothy, so the saying is.  And that is Backhouse’s spot.  You have heard tell of Backhouse.  He was Mr. Wordsworth’s man i’ the house, you know, sir.  He was living to within a year since, and I used to see him creepin’ along with his stick to bridge end and back.  Ah, many a crack he and me have had together about Mr. Wordsworth.  He used to break plates, you know, at his master’s study door, to bring him to his dinner, so the sayin’ is, for Mr. Wordsworth was that deaf in study.  Ay, and he had his master’s old stable lantern which he and Miss Dorothy used to walk the roads with after dark; he was as proud of that lantern as if it was his only child, was old Backhouse, sir, and no wonder either, for Mr. Wordsworth, so the sayin’ is, did a deal of his po’try after dark.’ (p. 266)

‘You see these spruces, sir,’ continued the coachman, who, from pre-Amblesidian silence, had warmed up to Rydalian volubility, ‘they was the first spruces planted in this part, so they tell, and they’ve done their best, sir, them; none this-a-way better.’ (p. 266)….

The coach-driver caught up the infection of the scene and sunlight, and saying, ‘Nab Cottage, where Hartley Coleridge lived and died,’ he cracked his whip and whistled to his horses, well content. (p. 268)

Nab Cottage, or, as it is better known, the Nab, who can ever pass its homely little roof-tree without trying to spell out the meaning of the quaint letters on the black, lozenge-shaped stone above its door?  Those initials, I. A. 3. P., are meaningless, but the date 1702 beneath tells us that the yeomen of nigh two centuries ago built themselves houses into which they built their hearts’ blood, even as they built in the solid walls the initials of their names. (p. 268)

The great ash-tree, the twin sycamores, red with a thousand seedlings to-day, tell us little of the Nab proprietors of old, though the yew-tree at their side proclaims that they came of a stock of men who handled the bow in the rude border days, and grew, by edict of Henry VIII., the tree that should supply their battle-arms. (pp. 268-269)

But there is about the Nab a graciousness of creeping foliage and flowers, a gentleness of order in its tiny garden plot, a fragrance of refined care from the great laurustinus that shades the tiny dormer window, that one feels that Nathaniel Hawthorne was right when he described it as ‘a small, buff-tinted, plastered stone cottage, I should think of a very humble class originally, but it now looks as if persons of taste might sometimes or other have sat down in it and caused flowers to spring up about it.’ (p. 269)….

But other persons of taste, as Hawthorne suggests, have sat down at this cottage.  Here Derwent Coleridge dwelt a while, and here, too, affectionately cared for by one of Nature’s gentlemen, lived till his death one who to the end preserved ‘A young lamb’s heart amid the full-grown flocks,’ one who ‘without a strife slipped in a moment out of life’ on Saturday, January 6, 1849,—Hartley Coleridge. (p. 269)

Truly Nab Cottage has seen the tragedies of heavenly minds at war with human frailties.  Hartley Coleridge, stumbling along the road after dark; De Quincey returning from a midnight ramble—the little candle in the window ever kept to light the weary dreamers home; the fair form of Margaret Simpson; the tall figures of Southey or of Wordsworth bending as they stoop to pass the low doorway; the sound of high argument, such impassioned discourse—these are memories of sight and sound that haunt this little roadside cottage. (pp. 269-270)

(Cornhill Magazine, 11 (September 1888), 255-70)

[This article was published, along with Parts II and III, in book form - A Coach Drive at the Lakes: Windermere to Keswick (Keswick, 1890)]

Hits: 4128

This dazzling courage, which catches all our eyes and infects all our hearts, is the courage of the heart that waits still upon God, and in the Lord has put its trust.  The man who acts so courageously feels rightly that he is but a weapon in the hand of the Almighty, and that it is the spirit of the living God, in him and of him, that enables him to dare the right in scorn of consequence. (p. 5)

But this deep-seated moral courage is also rarer than we have reason to expect.  And it has been well said that the disease of our day is “Moral Cowardice.”  It certainly is a paralysing disease and an infectious one, for since the day when Nicodemus came to Jesus by night until this day, it has plagued Christian congregations and Christian Associations of every denomination. (pp. 5-6)

The Young Men’s Christian Association has largely, as I believe, a reason for its existence in its wish to stay this plague of moral cowardice. (p. 6)

We cannot be blind to its effects.  The young lad at school wants to be generous, pure, devoted, yet he hardly would dare to say his prayers before his fellow-schoolboys.  He grows up and goes to the shop, and hates profanity with all his heart; goes to the club or the public, and hates the drink as he sees it there stupefying all the best affections of a young man’s heart, and converting a young man’s brains into idiocy, his body into a sponge for poison and paralysis, and his mind into a sty for all uncleanness.  But he dare not be brave enough not to join in the oath or the liquor; he has not the moral courage of his convictions either to protest or to leave the company. (p. 6)

And when he goes out into the world of trade or public life, if he gets to know the dishonourable dodges by which men succeed, he will not lift up his voice.  He dare not: is afraid of being accused of being a purist, a moralist, afraid of being called a Pharisee.  Nay, often he will not go to a house of worship for fear of what men may say of him, but will let his wife go instead.  And all the while he is a coward, and knows it.  Yes, and knows that the very men who make him a coward are men who are contemptible, whose good report of him is as worthless as their ill report of him is really of no weight. (p. 6)

But moral cowardice is not to be reasoned with.  A man is not persuaded by argument to be any the less afraid of his fellow-men.  We need to have our eyes lifted to the hills.  We need to look above our fellow-men unto the Father. (p. 6)….

Once let us see and know that we come from God; are indeed His sons and go to Him—that it matters nothing what the people or our next door neighbour think of us, so that we think rightly of our Heavenly Father, and that the Heavenly Father’s face shines brightly upon us—we cease to be respecters of persons in our efforts after righteousness, we dare to be Daniels, we follow the Christ, and looking unto him, the Author and Finisher of our salvation, to him the Perfect Man, we learn Perfect Manliness. (p. 7)

It is here where we would appeal to the Young Men’s Christian Association, that having before us plain the fact that many men actually dare not be known to be followers of Christ, dare not be openly rejoicers in the religious life, it is the solemn duty of members of this Association to see to it that they put away unmanliness, and play the man in season and out of season; set such an example of manliness before their friends that it shall never be possible for people to laugh at this Association, and say, as I have heard it said:—"It should be called the Young Women’s Christian Association.” (p. 7)….

Ideas of true manliness alter.  The Greeks thought it manly to be a clever imposter; to be able to lie well was manly.  The Red Indians think it manly to bear pain without a sign.  The Viking thought it manly to face death and smile upon it. (p. 10)

The Christian thinks it manly, living or dying, to dare to do the right—and as we do it, to have one desire, and one desire only, that God may be glorified and our brethren may be served. (p. 10)

And we who look unto the Perfect Man, Christ Jesus, feel and know that manliness, such as was Christ’s, means the giving up of all we are and have, body, soul, and spirit to God, that He may fill us with Himself, that filled with God’s spirit, we, though clothed in the body of this death, may daily do and think deeds of everlasting life. (p. 10)

In a word, friends, it seems that till we actually live Christ’s life, we cannot tell how He will use all the manhood in us to His glory.  It is not till we actually learn the joy of bringing His Spirit into all our doings, that we know how gladly He the Master will find work for us in all departments of our life, and how He who stands at the door and knocks, is unwilling that any portion of it shall be barred against His presence “till we all come unto a perfect man.” (p. 10)

(An Address Delivered at the Annual Conference of the North-Western District Union of Young Men’s Christian Associations held at Keswick, Sept 28th, 1893)

Hits: 4077