were ever more enlivening--not even the ups and downs
of a bird learning to fly. Sheep-fences, six feet high, are admirable
contrivances for shutting out scenery; and by shutting out much scenery,
why, you confer an unappreciable value on the little that remains
visible, and feel as if you could hug it to your heart. But sometimes
one does feel tempted to shove down a few roods of intercepting
stone-wall higher than the horse-hair on a cuirassier's casque--though
sheep should eat the suckers and scions, protected as they there shoot,
at the price of the concealment of the picturesque and the poetical from
beauty-searching eyes. That is a long lane, it is said, which has never
a turning; so this must be a short one, which has a hundred. You have
turned your back on Windermere--and our advice to you is, to keep your
face to the mountains. Troutbeck is a jewel--a diamond of a stream--but
Bobbin Mills have exhausted some of the most lustrous pools, changing
them into shallows, where the minnows rove. Deep dells are his
delight--and he loves the rugged scaurs that intrench his wooded
banks--and the fantastic rocks that tower-like hang at intervals over
his winding course, and seem sometimes to block it up; but the miner
works his way out beneath galleries and arches in the living
stone--sometimes silent--sometimes singing--and sometimes roaring like
thunder--till subsiding into a placid spirit, ere he reaches the wooden
bridge in the bonny holms of Calgarth, he glides graceful as the swan
that sometimes sees his image in his breast, and through alder and
willow banks murmurs away his life in the Lake.

Yes--that is Troutbeck Chapel--one of the smallest--and to our eyes the
very simplest--of all the chapels among the hills. Yet will it be
remembered when more pretending edifices are forgotten--just like some
mild, sensible, but perhaps somewhat too silent person, whose
acquaintanceship--nay, friendship--we feel a wish to cultivate we scarce
know why, except that he is mild, sensible, and silent; whereas we would
not be civil to the _brusque_, upsetting, and loquacious puppy at his
elbow, whose information is as various as it is profound, were one word
or look of courtesy to save him from the flames. For Heaven's sake,
Louisa, don't sketch Troutbeck Chapel. There is nothing but a square
tower--a horizontal roof--and some perpendicular walls. The outlines of
the mountains here have no specific character. That bridge is but a poo