indow, and be off among the islands in a
moment, or into nook or bay where no prying eye, even through telescope
(a most unwarrantable instrument), can overlook your happiness; or you
can secrete yourselves, like buck and doe, among the lady-fern on
Furness Fells, where not a sunbeam can intrude on your sacred privacy,
and where you may melt down hours to moments, in chaste connubial bliss,
brightening futurity with plans of domestic enjoyment, like long lines
of lustre streaming across the lake. But at present, let us visit the
fort-looking building among the cliffs called The Station, and see how
Windermere looks as we front the east. Why, you would not know it to be
the same lake. The Isle called Beautiful, which heretofore had scarcely
seemed an isle, appearing to belong to one or other shore of the
mainland, from this point of view is an isle indeed, loading the lake
with a weight of beauty, and giving it an ineffable character of
richness which nowhere else does it possess; while the other lesser
isles, dropt "in nature's careless haste" between it and the Furness
Fells, connect it still with those lovely shores from which it floats a
short way apart, without being disunited--one spirit blending the whole
together within the compass of a fledgling's flight. Beyond these

"Sister isles, that smile
Together like a happy family
Of beauty and of love,"

the eye meets the Rayrig woods, with but a gleam of water between, only
visible in sunshine, and is gently conducted by them up the hills of
Applethwaite, diversified with cultivated enclosures, "all green as
emerald" to their very summits, with all their pastoral and arable
grounds besprinkled with stately single trees, copses, or groves. On the
nearer side of these hills is seen, stretching far off to other lofty
regions--Hill-bell and High-street conspicuous over the rest--the long
vale of Troutbeck, with its picturesque cottages, in "numbers without
number numberless," and all its sable pines and sycamores--on the
further side, that most sylvan of all sylvan mountains, where lately the
Hemans warbled her native wood-notes wild in her poetic bower, fitly
called Dove-nest, and beyond, Kirkstone Fells and Rydal Head,
magnificent giants looking westward to the Langdale Pikes (here unseen),

"The last that parley with the setting sun."

Immediately in front, the hills are low and lovely, sloping with gentle
undulations down to the lake, here grove-gi