oods, which cover the undulations of hill and margin beneath and
around, rising and falling, spreading and contracting, with green
meadows interposed, down to the white pebbly strand. To my eye, this
view is unsurpassed by any in the District.

Bishop Watson's two daughters were living in the neighborhood till two
years ago,--antique spinsters, presenting us with a most vivid specimen
of the literary female life of the last century. They were excellent
women, differing from the rest of society chiefly in their notion that
superior people should show their superiority in all the acts of their
lives,--that literary people should talk literature, and scientific
people science, and so on; and they felt affronted, as if set down among
common people, when an author talked about common things in a common
way. They did their best to treat their friends to wit and polite
letters; and they expected to be ministered to in the same fashion. This
was rather embarrassing to visitors to whom it had never occurred to
talk for any other purpose than to say what presented itself at the
moment; but it is a privilege to have known those faithful sisters, and
to have seen in them a good specimen of the literary society of the last
century.

There is another spot in that neighborhood which strangers look up to
with interest from the lake itself,--Dovenest, the abode of Mrs. Hemans
for the short time of her residence at the Lakes. She saw it for the
first time from the lake, as her published correspondence tells, and
fell in love with it; and as it was vacant at the time, she went into it
at once. Many of my readers will remember her description of the garden
and the view from it, the terrace, the circular grass-plot with its one
tall white rose-tree. "You cannot imagine," she wrote, in 1830, "how I
delight in that fair, solitary, neglected-looking tree." The tree is not
neglected now. Dovenest is inhabited by Mrs. Hemans's then young friend,
the Rev. R.P. Graves; and it has recovered from the wildness and
desolation of thirty years ago, while looking as secluded as ever among
the woods on the side of Wansfell.

All this time, illustrious strangers were coming, year by year, to visit
residents, or to live among the mountains for a few weeks. There was
Wilberforce, spending part of a summer at Rayrigg, on the lake shore.
One of his boys asked him, "Why should you not buy a house here? and
then we could come every year." The reply was charact