ght.

Oft before have those woods and waters--those clouds and mountains--that
sun and sky, held thy spirit in Elysium,--thy spirit, that then was
disembodied, and living in the beauty and the glory of the elements.
'TIS WINDERMERE--WINDERMERE! Never canst thou have forgotten those more
than fortunate--those thrice-blessed Isles! But when last we saw them
within the still heaven of thy smiling eyes, summer suns had overloaded
them with beauty, and they stooped their flowers and foliage down to the
blushing, the burning deep, that glowed in its transparency with other
groves as gorgeous as themselves, the whole mingling mass of reality and
of shadow forming one creation. But now, lo! Windermere in Winter. All
leafless now the groves that girdled her as if shifting rainbows were in
love perpetually letting fall their colours on the Queen of Lakes. Gone
now are her banks of emerald that carried our calm gazings with them,
sloping away back into the cerulean sky. Her mountains, shadowy in
sunshine, and seeming restless as seas, where are they now?--The
cloud-cleaving cliffs that shot up into the blue region where the
buzzard sailed? All gone. But mourn not for that loss. Accustom thine
eye--and through it thy soul, to that transcendent substitution, and
deeply will they be reconciled. Sawest thou ever the bosom of the Lake
hushed into profounder rest? No white-winged pinnace glides through the
sunshine--no clanking oar is heard leaving or approaching cape, point,
or bay--no music of voice, stop, or string, wakens the sleeping echoes.
How strangely dim and confused on the water the fantastic frostwork
imagery, yet more steadfastly hanging there than ever hung the banks of
summer! For all one sheet of ice, now clear as the Glass of Glamoury in
which that lord of old beheld his Geraldine--is Windermere, the
heaven-loving and the heaven-beloved. Not a wavelet murmurs in all her
bays, from the sylvan Brathay to where the southern straits narrow into
a river--now chained too the Leven on his sylvan course towards that
perilous Estuary afar off raging on its wreck-strewn sands. The frost
came after the last fall of snow--and not a single flake ever touched
that surface; and now that you no longer miss the green twinkling of the
large July leaves, does not imagination love those motionless frozen
forests, cold but not dead, serene but not sullen, inspirative in the
strangeness of their appareling of wild thoughts about the scenery o