e the perpendicular elevation above the level
of the lake cannot be above one half of that extent. Seated on such an
eminence, but yet surrounded by foregrounds of such quiet beauty, and
settling downwards towards the lake by such tranquil steps as to take
away every feeling of precipitous or dangerous elevation, Elleray
possesses a double character of beauty, rarely found in connection;
and yet each, by singular good fortune, in this case absolute and
unrivalled in its kind. Within a bow-shot of each other may be found
stations of the deepest seclusion, fenced in by verdurous walls of
insuperable forest heights, and presenting a limited scene of
beauty--deep, solemn, noiseless, severely sequestered--and other
stations of a magnificence so gorgeous as few estates in this island
can boast, and of those few perhaps none in such close connection with
a dwelling-house. Stepping out from the very windows of the
drawing-room, you find yourself on a terrace which gives you the
feeling of a 'specular height,' such as you might expect on Ararat, or
might appropriately conceive on 'Athos seen from Samothrace.' The
whole course of a noble lake, about eleven miles long, lies subject to
your view, with many of its islands, and its two opposite shores so
different in character--the one stern, precipitous, and gloomy; the
other (and luckily the hither one) by the mere bounty of nature and of
accident--by the happy disposition of the ground originally, and by
the fortunate equilibrium between the sylvan tracts, meandering
irregularly through the whole district, and the proportion left to
verdant fields and meadows,--wearing the character of the richest park
scenery; except indeed that this character is here and there a little
modified by a quiet hedge-row or the stealing smoke which betrays the
embowered cottage of a labourer. But the sublime, peculiar, and
not-to-be-forgotten feature of the scene is the great system of
mountains which unite about five miles off at the head of the lake to
lock in and inclose this noble landscape. The several ranges of
mountains which stand at various distances within six or seven miles
of the little town of Ambleside, all separately various in their forms
and all eminently picturesque, when seen from Elleray appear to blend
and group as parts of one connected whole; and when their usual
drapery of clouds happens to take a fortunate arrangement, and the
sunlights are properly broken and thrown from the m