attributes it
has pleased nature to bestow on the various orders, the plants of
Paradise--This is our occupation--and the happiness of witnessing them
all growing in the light of admiration is our reward.

Finding our way back as we choose to Ivy-cottage, we cross the wooden
bridge, and away along the western shore of Rydal-mere. Hence you see
the mountains in magnificent composition, and craggy coppices with
intervening green fields shelving down to the lake margin. It is a small
lake, not much more than a mile round, and of a very peculiar character.
One memorable cottage only, as far as we remember, peeps on its shore
from a grove of sycamores, a statesman's pleasant dwelling; and there
are the ruins of another on a slope near the upper end, the circle of
the garden still visible. Everything has a quiet but wildish pastoral
and sylvan look, and the bleating of sheep fills the hollow of the
hills. The lake has a reedy inlet and outlet, and the angler thinks of
pike when he looks upon such harbours. There is a single boat-house,
where the Lady of the Hall has a padlocked and painted barge for
pleasure parties; and the heronry on the high pine-trees of the only
island connects the scene with the ancient park of Rydal, whose oak
woods, though thinned and decayed, still preserve the majestic and
venerable character of antiquity and baronial state.

Having taken a lingering farewell of Rydal-mere, and of the new
Chapel-tower, that seems among the groves already to be an antique, we
may either sink down to the stream that flows out of Grassmere and
connects the two lakes, crossing a wooden bridge, and then joining the
new road that sweeps along to the Village, or we may keep up on the face
of the hill, and by a terrace-path reach the Loughrigg-road, a few
hundred yards above Tail-end, a pretty cottage-ornee which you will
observe crowning a wooded eminence, and looking cheerfully abroad over
all the vale. There is one Mount in particular, whence we see to
advantage the delightful panorama--encircling mountains--Grassmere Lake
far down below your feet, with its one green pastoral isle, sylvan
shores, and emerald meadows--huts and houses sprinkled up and down in
all directions--the village partly embowered in groves, and partly open
below the shadow of large single trees--and the Church-tower, almost
always a fine feature in the scenery of the north of England, standing
in stately simplicity among the clustering tenements,