It will be felt by those who think with me upon this occasion that I
have been writing on behalf of a social condition which no one who is
competent to judge of it will be willing to subvert, and that I have
been endeavouring to support moral sentiments and intellectual pleasures
of a high order against an enmity which seems growing more and more
formidable every day; I mean 'Utilitarianism,' serving as a mask for
cupidity and gambling speculations. My business with this evil lies in
its reckless mode of action by Railways, now its favourite instruments.
Upon good authority I have been told that there was lately an intention
of driving one of these pests, as they are likely too often to prove,
through a part of the magnificent ruins of Furness Abbey--an outrage
which was prevented by some one pointing out how easily a deviation
might be made; and the hint produced its due effect upon the engineer.

Sacred as that relic of the devotion of our ancestors deserves to be
kept, there are temples of Nature, temples built by the Almighty, which
have a still higher claim to be left unviolated. Almost every reach of
the winding vales in this district might once have presented itself to a
man of imagination and feeling under that aspect, or, as the Vale of
Grasmere appeared to the Poet Gray more than seventy years ago. 'No
flaring gentleman's-house,' says he, 'nor garden-walls break in upon the
repose of this little unsuspected _paradise_, but all is peace,' &c.,
&c. Were the Poet now living, how would he have lamented the probable
intrusion of a railway with its scarifications, its intersections, its
noisy machinery, its smoke, and swarms of pleasure-hunters, most of them
thinking that they do not fly fast enough through the country which they
have come to see. Even a broad highway may in some places greatly impair
the characteristic beauty of the country, as will be readily
acknowledged by those who remember what the Lake of Grasmere was before
the new road that runs along its eastern margin had been constructed.

Quanto praestantias esset
Numen aquae viridi si margina clauderet undas
Herba--

As it once was, and fringed with wood, instead of the breastwork of bare
wall that now confines it. In the same manner has the beauty, and still
more the sublimity of many Passes in the Alps been injuriously affected.
Will the reader excuse a quotation from a MS. poem in which I attempted
to describe the imp