re imported to us from the American United
States, and often amuse us by their picturesqueness, have originally
been carried to America by our own people; in England they lurked for
ages as provincialisms, localised within some narrow circuit, and to
which some trifling barrier (as a river--rivulet--or even a brook)
offered a retarding force. In supercivilised England, a river, it may
be thought, cannot offer much obstruction to the free current of
words; ages ago it must have been bridged over. Sometimes, however, a
bridge is impossible under the transcendent importance of a free
navigation. For instance, at the Bristol Hotwells, the ready and
fluent intercourse with Long Ashton, and a long line of adjacencies,
is effectually obstructed by the necessity of an open water
communication with the Bristol Channel. At one period (_i. e._ when as
yet Liverpool and Glasgow were fifth-rate ports), all the wealth of
the West Indies flowed into England through this little muddy ditch of
the Bristol Avon, and Rownham Ferry became the exponent and measure of
English intercourse with the northern nook of Somersetshire. A river
is bad; but when a mountain of very toilsome ascent happens to be
interposed, the interruption offered to the popular intercourse, and
the results of this interruption, become much more memorable. An
illustration which I can offer on this point, and which, in fact, I
_did_ offer (as, upon inquiry, Mr. Ferguson will find), thirty-eight
years ago, happens to bear with peculiar force upon our immediate
difficulty of Fairfield. The valleys on the northern side of
Kirkstone--namely, in particular, the three valleys of Patterdale,
Matterdale, and Martindale--are as effectually cut off from
intercourse with the valleys on the southern side--namely, the
Windermere valley, Ryedale, and Grasmere, with all their tributary
nooks and attachments--as though an arm of the sea had rolled between
them. It costs a foot traveller half of a summer's day to effect the
passage to and fro over Kirkstone (what the Greeks so tersely
expressed in the case of a race-course[52] by the one word _diaulos_).
And in _my_ time no innkeeper from the Windermere side of Kirkstone
would carry even a solitary individual across with fewer than four
horses. What has been the result? Why, that the dialect on the
northern side of Kirkstone bears the impress of a more ultra-Danish
influence than that upon the Windermere side. In particular this
remarka