as simple as his own most severely unadorned pastoral; but I had not
attained as yet to the region of sentiment which makes such things
impressive. The bare mountains, the blue lakes, and the gray ruins
filled me with riotous intoxication. The North of England and Scotch
mountains were much more effective in their nakedness than the wooded
hills I had seen in Berkshire of Massachusetts, and their contours were
more sharply modelled and various. They were just large enough to make
their ascent seem easy until you undertook it, then those seemingly
moderate slopes lengthened out unaccountably. The day we reached the
hotel at the base of Helvellyn, I started, nothing doubting, to climb to
its summit before supper; the weather was clear, the top looked close
at hand, and I felt great surprise that the young gentleman mentioned in
Scott's poem ("I climbed the dark brow of the mighty Helvellyn," etc.)
should have allowed himself to be lost. But after a breathless struggle
of fifteen or twenty minutes, finding myself apparently no nearer my
goal than at first, I thought differently. Mr. Bright told my father,
by-the-way, that the legend of the fidelity of the dead adventurer's
little dog, "who scared the hill-fox and the raven away," was far from
being in accordance with the prosaic facts. This unsentimental little
quadruped had, in truth, eaten up a large part of her master by the
time his remains were discovered, and had, furthermore, brought into the
world a litter of pups. Well, nothing can deprive us of the poem; but it
is wholesome to face realities once in a while.

Unless one have a vein of Ruskin in him, one does not recollect scenery,
however enchanting, with the same particularity as persons. It is the
human element in things that sticks to us. Scenes are more punctually
recalled in proportion as they are steeped in historic or personal
interest. The thatched cottages of Burns and of Shakespeare stand clear
in my memory; I recall our ramble over the battlements of Carlisle,
where imprisoned Queen Mary had walked three centuries before; I
remember the dark stain on the floor of the dark room in which one of
her lovers was slain; I can see the gray towers of Warwick rising above
the green trees and reflected in the still water; and, entering the keep
of the castle, I behold myself again trying on the ponderous helmet of
the gigantic Guy, and climbing into his monstrous porridge-pot. But
vain would be the attempt to mar