From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England. Katharine Lee Bates

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СКАЧАТЬ of tempting old folios, and here his oratory, with its fine wood-carvings, its Flemish altar-piece, and its deep-windowed recess outlooking on a fair expanse of green earth and silver sky.

      This castle, with its magnificent baronial hall, its treasures of art and spirit of frank hospitality, was harder to escape from than Carlisle. There was no time to follow the Irthing eastward to the point where, as the Popping Stones tell, Walter Scott offered his warm heart and honest hand to the dark-eyed daughter of a French emigre. But we could not miss Lanercost, the beautiful ruined abbey lying about a mile to the north of Naworth. An Augustine foundation of the twelfth century, it has its memories of Edward I, who visited it with Queen Eleanor in 1180 and came again in broken health, six years later, to spend quietly in King Edward's Tower the last winter of his life. The nave now makes a noble parish church in which windows by William Morris and Burne-Jones glow like jewels. The choir is roofless, but gracious in its ruin, its pavement greened by moss, feathery grasses waving from its lofty arcades, and its walls weathered to all pensive, tender tints. The ancient tombs, most of them bearing the scallop-shells of the Dacres, are rich in sculpture. Into the transept walls are built some square grey stones of the Roman Wall, and a Roman altar forms a part of the clerestory roof. The crypt, too, contains several Roman altars, dedicated to different gods whose figures, after the lapse of two thousand years, are startling in their spirited grace, their energy of life.

      

KING EDWARD'S TOWER, LANERCOST ABBEY

      But Lanercost reminds us that we have all but ignored Carlisle Cathedral, and back we drive, by way of the village of Brampton with its curious old market-hall, to the Border City. After all, we have only followed the custom of the place in slighting the cathedral. Carlisle was ever too busy fighting to pay much heed to formal worship.

      "For mass or prayer can I rarely tarry,

       Save to patter an Ave Mary When I ride on a Border foray."

      The cathedral dates from the time of William Rufus, and still retains two bays of its Norman nave, which suffered from fire in the early part of the thirteenth century. A still more disastrous fire, toward the close of that century, all but destroyed the new choir, which it took the preoccupied citizens one hundred years to rebuild, so that we see to-day Early English arches in combination with Decorated pillars and Late Decorated capitals. These capitals of fresh and piquant designs are an especial feature of the choir, whose prime glory, however, is the great east window with its perfect tracery, although only the upper glass is old. The cathedral has suffered not alone from a series of fires, but from military desecration. Part of its nave was pulled down by the irreverent Roundheads to repair the fortifications, and it was used after Carlisle was retaken from Prince Charlie as a prison for the garrison. Even to-day canny Cumberland shows a grain too much of frugality in pasturing sheep in the cathedral graveyard. Carlisle Cathedral has numbered among its archdeacons Paley of the "Evidences," and among its archdeans Percy of the "Reliques." Among its bridegrooms was Walter Scott, who wedded here his raven-haired lady of the Popping Stones.

      One drive more before we seek the Lake Country,—ten miles to the north, this time, across the adventurous Esk, where a fierce wind seemed to carry in it the shout of old slogans and the clash and clang of arms, and across the boundary stream, the Sark, to Gretna Green, where breathless couples used to be married by blacksmith or innkeeper or the first man they met, the furious parents posting after all in vain. Then around by Longtown we drove and back to Carlisle, across the Solway Moss,—reaches of blowing grass in the foreground; dark, broken bogs, where men and women were gathering in the peat, in the middle distance; and beyond, the blue folds of hills on hills. It was already evening, but such was the witchery of the scene, still with something eerie and lawless about it despite an occasional farmhouse with stuffed barns and plump ricks and meadows of unmolested kine, that we would gladly, like the old Borderers whose armorial bearings so frequently included stars and crescents, have spent the night in that Debatable Land, with the moon for our accomplice in moss-trooping.

THE LAKE COUNTRY

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      There are as many "best ways" of making the tour of this enchanted land as there are Lake Country guidebooks, volumes which, at prices varying from ten shillings to "tuppence," are everywhere in evidence. One may journey by rail to Keswick or to Windermere; one may come up from Furness Abbey to Lakeside, passing gradually from the softer scenery to the wilder; or one may enter by way of Penrith and Pooley Bridge, ushered at once into the presence of some of the noblest mountains and perhaps the loveliest lake.

      This last was our route, and very satisfactory we found it. Our stay at Penrith had been abbreviated by a municipal councillors' convention which left not a bed for the stranger. We had been forewarned of the religious convention which throngs Keswick the last full week in July, and, indeed, an evangelist bound thither had presented us with tracts as we took our train at Carlisle. But we had not reckoned on finding Penrith in such plethoric condition, and, after an uphill look at the broken red walls of Penrith Castle, which, with Carlisle, Naworth, and Cockermouth, stood for the defence of western England against the Scots, we mounted a motor-bus, of all atrocities, and were banged and clanged along a few miles of fairly level road which transferred us, as we crossed the Eamont, from Cumberland to Westmoreland. The hamlet of Pooley Bridge lies at the lower end of Ullswater, up whose mountain-hemmed reaches of ever-heightening beauty we were borne by The Raven, a leisurely little steamer with a ruddy captain serenely assured that his lake is the queen of all. The evening was cold and gusty,—rougher weather than any we had encountered in our midsummer voyage across the Atlantic,—but, wrapped in our rugs and shedding hairpins down the wind, we could have sailed on forever, so glorious was that sunset vision of great hills almost bending over the riverlike lake that runs on joyously, as from friend to friend, between the guardian ranks.

      We lingered for a few days at the head of Ullswater, in Patterdale, and would gladly have lingered longer, if only to watch the play of light and shadow over St. Sunday Crag, Place Fell, Stybarrow Crag, Fairfield, and all that shouldering brotherhood of giants, but we must needs take advantage of the first clear day for the coach-drive to Ambleside, over the Kirkstone Pass,

      "Aspiring Road! that lov'st to hide

       Thy daring in a vapoury bourn."

      A week at Ambleside, under Wansfell's "visionary majesties of light," went all too swiftly in the eager exploration of Grasmere and Coniston, Hawkshead, Bowness, Windermere, and those "lofty brethren," the Langdale Pikes, with their famous rock-walled cascade, Dungeon Ghyll. The coach-drive from Ambleside to Keswick carried us, at Dunmailraise, across again from Westmoreland to Cumberland. Helvellyn and Thirlmere dominated the way, but Skiddaw and Derwent Water claimed our allegiance on arrival. What is counted the finest coach-drive in the kingdom, however, the twenty-four-mile circuit from Keswick known as the Buttermere Round, remained to bring us under a final subjection to the silver solitude of Buttermere and Crummock Water and the rugged menace of Honister Crag. The train that hurried us from Keswick to Cockermouth passed along the western shore of pleasant Bassenthwaite Water, but from Workington to Furness Abbey meres and tarns, for all their romantic charm, were forgotten, while, the salt wind on our faces, we looked out, over sand and shingle, on the dim grey vast of ocean.

      The Lake Country, it is often said, has no history. The tourist need not go from point to point enquiring

      "If here a warrior left a spell,

       Panting for glory as he fell;

       Or here a saint expired."

      That СКАЧАТЬ