cts of sight
before, nor do I suppose I can ever again. Glorious creatures, fine
old fellows, Skiddaw, &c. I shall never forget ye, how ye lay about
that night, like an intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed for the
night, but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge
had got a blazing fire in his study; which is a large, antique,
ill-shaped room, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big
enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an Aeolian harp, and
an old sofa, half bed, &c. And all looking out upon the last fading
view of Skiddaw, and his broad-breasted brethren: what a night! Here
we stayed three full weeks, in which time I visited Wordsworth's
cottage, where we stayed a day or two with the Clarksons (good people,
and most hospitable, at whose house we tarried one day and night), and
saw Lloyd. The Wordsworths were gone to Calais. They have since been
in London, and passed much time with us: he is now gone into Yorkshire
to be married. So we have seen Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater
(where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater;
I forget the name; to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over
the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw,
and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied
myself that there is such a thing as that which tourists call
_romantic_, which I very much suspected before: they make such a
spluttering about it, and toss their splendid epithets around them,
till they give as dim a light as at four o'clock next morning the
lamps do after an illumination. Mary was excessively tired when she
got about half-way up Skiddaw, but we came to a cold rill (than which
nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones), and with
the reinforcement of a draught of cold water, she surmounted it most
manfully. Oh, its fine black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with
a prospect of mountains all about and about, making you giddy; and
then Scotland afar off, and the border countries so famous in song and
ballad! It was a day that will stand out, like a mountain, I am sure,
in my life. But I am returned (I have now been come home near three
weeks; I was a month out), and you cannot conceive the degradation
I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander free as air among
mountains, and bathe in rivers without being controlled by any one, to
come home and _work_. I felt very _little_. I had been d