d, and a woodsman. A Westmoreland cottage has scarcely any
resemblance to a Scottish one. A Scottish cottage (in the Lowlands) has
rarely any picturesque beauty in itself--a narrow oblong, with steep
thatched roof, and an ear-like chimney at each of the two gable-ends.
Many of the Westmoreland cottages would seem, to an ignorant observer,
to have been originally built on a model conceived by the finest
poetical genius. In the first place, they are almost always built
precisely where they ought to be, had the builder's prime object been to
beautify the dale; at least, so we have often felt in moods, when
perhaps our emotions were unconsciously soothed into complacency by the
spirit of the scene. Where the sedgy brink of the lake or tarn circles
into a lone bay, with a low hill of coppice-wood on one side, and a few
tall pines on the other, no--it is a grove of sycamores--there, about a
hundred yards from the water, and about ten above its ordinary level,
peeps out from its cheerful seclusion that prettiest of all
hamlets--Braithwaite-fold. The hill behind is scarcely sylvan--yet it
has many hazels--a few bushes--here and there a holly--and why or
wherefore, who can now tell, a grove of enormous yews. There is sweet
pasturage among the rocks, and as you may suppose it a spring-day, mild
without much sunshine, there is a bleating of lambs, a twitter of small
birds, and the deep coo of the stock-dove. A wreath of smoke is always a
feature of such a scene in description; but here there is now none, for
probably the whole household are at work in the open air, and the fire,
since fuel is not to be wasted, has been wisely suffered to expire on
the hearth. No. There is a volume of smoke, as if the chimney were in
flame--a tumultuous cloud pours aloft, straggling and broken, through
the broad slate stones that defend the mouth of the vomitory from every
blast. The matron within is doubtless about to prepare breakfast, and
last year's rotten pea-sticks have soon heated the capacious grid-iron.
Let the smoke-wreath melt away at its leisure, and do you admire, along
with us, the infinite variety of all those little shelving and sloping
roofs. To feel the full force of the peculiar beauty of these antique
tenements, you must understand their domestic economy. If ignorant of
that, you can have no conception of the meaning of any one thing you
see--roofs, eaves, chimneys, beams, props, doors, hovels, and sheds, and
hanging staircase, be