FIRST VIEW OF DERWENTWATER.

Western Star, Issue 1339, 23 March 1889, Page 1 (Supplement)

FIRST VIEW OF DERWENTWATER.

"The Moor, sir,' said the driver and he pulled up and put the skid on. I was right glad—the last quarter of a mile had been so uninteresting; it was a good preparative for a surprise. Suddenly such a scene opened as you will not describe. Skiddaw seemed to leap into the air, so suddenly did its height grow upward from the depth that was as suddenly revealed. Broadwater or Bassenthwaite looked as if the sea had put forth an arm of silver brightness and was .feeling his way up into the land. Wynthop and Barf and Grisedale shone mottled with wood and upland green and purple-shaded shale. The plain was prinked and patterned out in sugares of green and gold, and like a serpent the I/erwent coiled through the fields towards the far-off lake; There, beyond the clumps of. trees where nestles the vicarage of Crosswaite, was seen the ancient parish church of good St Kentigern. Southey's resting-place I know, was there and nearer hid by the vale of trees upon its mound by Gf otaside was dimly seen Greta Hall, to which, at Coleridge's invitation came ; Robert Southey, with his wife nigh heartbroken for her little one'sjloss in September 1803, and from which on a dark and stormy morning March 21, 1843 there was, borne to his rest by the side of his wife and his children three beneath yonder white church tower on tbe plain the mortal remains of the most learned, the most'unselfisb, and.high-minded Laureate England has known. Nearer the tower is seen, beneath its veil of opal smoke St John's Church, spire and "DerWent'water lies a queen confessed!" What a view ! just such a scene as Southey painted iu the opening stanzas' of his "Vision-of Judgment." And certainly as one gazes down upor. the plain with its welcome of hospitalities—for the farms gleam among happy fields and cared-for plots, and there pink and warm gleams the Derwentwater Hotel at Portinscale; here,gray, and solidly comfortable, stands the Keswick Hotel, while all the quiet little town chimneys are breathing up the assurance of home firesides and household mirth—one feels that one is gazing on a scene as may well cause a traveller to say with Gray the poet (in his journal dated Oct. 8, 1769), "Mounted an eminence called Castle Rigg, and the sun breaking out discovered the most beautiful view I have yet seen of the whole valley, the two lakes, the river, the mountains in all their glory; so that I had a mind to have gone back again." No wonder that Gray was so near recalled as he set forth for Ambleside. —From "A Coach Drive at the Lakes," in the Corrihill Magazine.