moonshine upon
the round knoll under the old yew-tree in the garden, a romantic
image--the dark tree and its dark shadow--and the elegant creature, as
fair as a spirit! The torrents murmured softly: the mountains down which
they were falling did not, to my sight, furnish a back-ground for this
Ossianic picture; but I had a consciousness of the depth of the
seclusion, and that mountains were embracing us on all sides; 'I saw
not, but I _felt_ that they were there.'

Friday, November 9th.--Rain, as yesterday, till 10 o'clock, when we took
a boat to row down the lake. The day improved,--clouds and sunny gleams
on the mountains. In the large bay under Place Fell, three fishermen
were dragging a net,--picturesque group beneath the high and bare crags!
A raven was seen aloft: not hovering like the kite, for that is not the
habit of the bird; but passing on with a straight-forward perseverance,
and timing the motion of its wings to its own croaking. The waters were
agitated; and the iron tone of the raven's voice, which strikes upon the
ear at all times as the more dolorous from its regularity, was in fine
keeping with the wild scene before our eyes. This carnivorous fowl is a
great enemy to the lambs of these solitudes; I recollect frequently
seeing, when a boy, bunches of unfledged ravens suspended from the
church-yard gates of H----, for which a reward of so much a head was
given to the adventurous destroyer.--The fishermen drew their net
ashore, and hundreds of fish were leaping in their prison. They were all
of the kind called skellies, a sort of fresh-water herring, shoals of
which may sometimes be seen dimpling or rippling the surface of the lake
in calm weather. This species is not found, I believe, in any other of
these lakes; nor, as far as I know, is the chevin, that _spiritless_
fish, (though I am loth to call it so, for it was a prime favourite with
Isaac Walton,) which must frequent Ullswater, as I have seen a large
shoal passing into the lake from the river Eamont. _Here_ are no pike,
and the char are smaller than those of the other lakes, and of inferior
quality; but the grey trout attains a very large size, sometimes
weighing above twenty pounds. This lordly creature seems to know that
'retiredness is a piece of majesty;' for it is scarcely ever caught, or
even seen, except when it quits the depths of the lake in the spawning
season, and runs up into the streams, where it is too often destroyed in
disregard o