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

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СКАЧАТЬ irregular circle of the Cumberland Hills, varying from some forty to fifty miles in diameter, a compact mass whose mountain lines shut in narrow valleys, each with its own lake, and radiate out from Helvellyn in something like a starfish formation, bears, for all its wildness, the humanised look of land on which many generations of men have lived and died; but the records of that life are scant.

      There are several stone-circles, taken to be the remains of British temples, the "mystic Round of Druid frame," notably Long Meg and her Daughters, near Penrith, and the Druid's Circle, just out of Keswick. About the Keswick circle such uncanny influences still linger that no two persons can number the stones alike, nor will your own second count confirm your first. Storm and flood rage against that mysterious shrine, but the wizard blocks cannot be swept away. The Romans, who had stations near Kendal, Penrith, and Ambleside, have left some striking remembrances, notably "that lone Camp on Hardknott's height," and their proud road, still well defined for at least fifteen miles, along the top of High Street ridge. A storied heap of stones awaits the climber at the top of

      "The long ascent of Dunmailraise."

      Here, in 945, the last king of the Cumbrian Britons, Dunmail, was defeated by Edmund of England in the pass between Grasmere and Keswick. Seat Sandal and Steel Fell looked down from either side upon his fall. Edmund raised a cairn above what his Saxon wits supposed was a slain king, but Dunmail is only biding his time. His golden crown was hurled into Grisedale Tarn, high up in the range, where the shoulders of Helvellyn, Seat Sandal, and Fairfield touch, and on the last night of every year these dark warders see a troop of Dunmail's men rise from the tarn, where it is their duty to guard the crown, bearing one more stone to throw down upon the cairn. When the pile is high enough to content the king, who counts each year in his deep grave the crash of another falling stone, he will rise and rule again over Cumberland.

      Here history and folk-lore blend. Of pure folk-lore the stranger hears but little. Eden Hall, near Penrith, has a goblet filched from the fairies:

      "If e'er this glass should break or fall.

       Farewell the luck of Eden Hall."

      The enchanted rock in the Vale of St. John is celebrated in Scott's "Bridal of Triermain." St. Bees has a triumphant tradition of St. Bega, who, determined to be a nun, ran away from the Irish king, her father, for no better reason than because he meant to marry her to a Norwegian prince, and set sail in a fishing-boat for the Cumberland coast. Her little craft was driven in by the storm to Whitehaven, where she so won upon the sympathies of the Countess of Egremont that this lady besought her lord to give the fugitive land for a convent. It was midsummer, and the graceless husband made answer that he would give as much as the snow should lie upon next morning, but when he awoke and looked out from the castle casement, his demesne for three miles around was white with snow.

      Wordsworth's "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," "The Horn of Egremont Castle," and "The Somnambulist" relate three legends of the region, of varying degrees of authenticity, and Lord's Island in Derwent Water brings to mind the right noble name of James Radcliffe, third and last Earl of Derwentwater, who declared for his friend and kinsman, the Pretender of 1715. On October sixth the young earl bade his brave girl-wife farewell and rode away to join the rebels, though his favourite dog howled in the courtyard and his dapple-grey started back from the gate. On October fourteenth the cause was lost, and the Earl of Derwentwater was among the seventeen hundred who surrendered at Preston. In the Tower and again on the scaffold his life was offered him if he would acknowledge George I as rightful king and would conform to the Protestant religion, but he said it "would be too dear a purchase." On the evening after his beheading the Northern Lights flamed red over Keswick, so that they are still known in the countryside as Lord Derwentwater's Lights.

      The dalesfolk could doubtless tell us more. There may still be dwellers by Windermere who have heard on stormy nights the ghastly shrieks of the Crier of Claife, calling across the lake for a ferry-boat, although it was long ago that a valiant monk from Lady Holm "laid" that troubled spirit, binding it, with book and bell, to refrain from troubling "while ivy is green"; and in the depths of Borrowdale, on a wild dawn, old people may cower deeper in their feather beds to shut out the baying of the phantom hounds that hunt the "barfoot stag" through Watendlath tarn and over the fells down into Borrowdale. There is said to be a local brownie, Hob-Thross by name, sometimes seen, a "body aw ower rough," lying by the fire at midnight. For all his shaggy look, he has so sensitive a spirit that, indefatigable though he is in stealthy household services, the least suggestion of recompense sends him weeping away. He will not even accept his daily dole of milk save on the condition that it be set out for him in a chipped bowl.

      But, in the main, the Lake Country keeps its secrets. The names are the telltales, and these speak of Briton and Saxon and the adventurous Viking. Dale, fell, force (waterfall), ghyll (mountain ravine), holm (island), how (mound), scar (cliff-face), are Icelandic words. Mountain names that seem undignified, as Coniston Old Man or Dolly Wagon Pike, are probably mispronunciations of what in the original Celtic or Scandinavian was of grave import. There appears to be a present tendency to substitute for the unintelligible old names plain English terms usually suggested by some peculiarity in the mountain shape, but it is a pity to give up the Celtic Blencathara, Peak of Demons, for Saddleback.

      The jubilant throngs who flock to Lakeland every summer concern themselves little with its early history. The English pour into that blessed circuit of hills as into a great playground, coaching, walking, cycling, climbing, boating, keenly alive to the beauty of the scenery and eagerly drinking in the exhilaration of the air. They love to tread the loftiest crests, many of which are crowned with cairns raised by these holiday climbers, each adding his own stone. But it is the shepherd who is in the confidence of the mountains, he who has

      "been alone

       Amid the heart of many thousand mists,

       That came to him, and left him, on the heights."

      Wordsworth first learned to love humanity in the person of the shepherd

      "descried in distant sky,

       A solitary object and sublime."

      Sheep, too, are often seen against the sky-line, and even the cow—that homelike beast who favours you in her innocent rudeness, from the gap of a hawthorn hedge, with that same prolonged, rustic, curious stare that has taxed your modesty in Vermont or Ohio—will forsake the shade of "the honied sycamore" in the valley for summits

      "sharp and bare,

       Where oft the venturous heifer drinks the noontide breeze."

      There have been fatal accidents upon the more precipitous peaks. Scott and Wordsworth have sung the fate of that "young lover of Nature," Charles Gough, who, one hundred years ago, fell from the Striding Edge of Helvellyn and was watched over in death for no less than three months by his little yellow-haired terrier, there on the lonely banks of Red Tarn, where her persistent barking at last brought shepherds to the body. In the Patterdale churchyard, whose famous great yew is now no more, we noticed a stone commemorating a more recent victim of Helvellyn, a Manchester botanist, who had come summer by summer to climb the mountain, and who, a few years since, on his last essay, a man of seventy-three, had died from exhaustion during the ascent. The brow of Helvellyn, now soft and silvery as a melting dream, now a dark mass banded by broad rainbows, overlooks his grave.

      I remember that Nathan's story of the rich man who "had no pity," but took for a guest's dinner the "one little ewe lamb" of his poor neighbour, was read in the Patterdale church that evensong, and it was strange to see how intently those sturdy mountain-lads, their alert-eyed sheep dogs waiting about the door, listened to the parable. Not only does the Scripture imagery—"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall СКАЧАТЬ