to Coniston, whatever road you choose. The
inconvenience of the railway route was perhaps one reason of Ruskin's
preference for driving on so many occasions. After changing and changing
trains, and stopping at many a roadside station, at last you see,
suddenly, over the wild undulating country, the Coniston Old Man and its
crags, abrupt on the left, and the lake, long and narrow, on the right.
Across the water, tiny in the distance and quite alone amongst forests
and moors, there is Brantwood; and beyond it everything seems
uncultivated, uninhabited, except for one grey farmhouse high on the
fell, where gaps in the ragged larches show how bleak and storm-swept a
spot it is.

To come out of the station after long travel is to find yourself face to
face with magnificent rocks, and white cottages among the fir-trees. As
you are whirled down through the straggling village, and along the shore
round the head of the lake, the panorama, though not Alpine in
magnitude, is almost Alpine in character. The valley, too, is not yet
built up; it is still the old-fashioned lake country, almost as it was
in the days of the "Iteriad." You drive up and down a narrow, hilly
lane, catching peeps of mountains and sunset, through thick, overhanging
trees; you turn sharp up through a gate under dark firs and larches, and
the carriage stops in what seems in the twilight a sort of court,--a
gravelled space, one side formed by a rough stone wall crowned with
laurels and almost precipitous coppice, the _brant_ (or steep) wood
above, and the rest is Brantwood, with a capital B.[41]

[Footnote 41: The archway supporting a great pile of new buildings did
not exist in the time when this visit is supposed to be made. Since that
time new stables and greenhouses also have been built; with other
additions somewhat altering the cottage-like house of Ruskin's working
days.]

You expect that Gothic porch you have read of in "Lectures on
Architecture and Painting," and you are surprised to find a stucco
classic portico in the corner, painted and _grained_, and heaped around
with lucky horseshoes, brightly blackleaded, and mysterious rows of
large blocks of slate and basalt and trap--a complete museum of local
geology, if only you knew it--very unlike an ideal entrance; still more
unlike an ordinary one. While you wait you can see through the glass
door a roomy hall, lit with candles, and hung with large drawings by
Burne-Jones and by the master of the ho