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I often find myself, however, after gazing upon these sublime things, longing for a scene more quiet, some unpretend ing commonplace of nature." At the same time the least pretending thing that meets the eye here would be a nine days' wonder to one familiar with the gentle meadows through which the Thames winds its way near London town.

Perhaps as pleasing an hour as any we passed was at the Borrowdale Yews. Some philologers say that yew is radically the same word as ever; and these four trees might bear the name not only by their unfading green, but by the length of their years. It is awful to think of the age of these yews, beneath which Wordsworth imagined "ghastly shapes" holding their festivities or rites, while Darwin would probably think of them as housing the first arboreal men. Seated here on a

mossy stone, turning our eyes away from the scarred summits of the hills, lulled by the four gentle rivulets which sing their way down past the yews to the full stream below, watching the butterflies, the creeping things, the luminous wild flowers, all joyful in the sunshine, we reflect how many generations of such animated beings-nay, of men like the poets who have celebrated them, and drawn others to seek them-have these great yews seen. They have borne no marketable fruit to man: they are not utilitarians; their trunks are gnarled, and one is a hut in which three may sit; but they bid fair to enjoy a green old age after the Victorian age shall have become as classic as the Elizabethan. One of them has lately been struck by lightning, as if Zeus had become jealous of his longevity; and though he was yet green, it may be that it is only like the vaunt of

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some ancient institution which makes a transient show of life after its death-touch. One thing that impressed me was the way in which the aged trunks leaned toward each other and mingled their branches, like old friends left alone, on that bare slope of a desolate hill. Yet so gnarled and hollowed are their trunks, so ugly some of their lower dead branches, and so hewn and hacked are they with the names of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, that I fancy the gentle sigh I hear passing along their commingling needles is a longing for death.

They must have seen enough of life. When prehistoric man set up those "Druid" stones in St. John's Vale, they might have smiled upon his infant superstitions. They would have sheltered the Wandering Jew, had he come in this hol

low where I sit and think of Shelley's lines about him:

"Thus have I stood, through a wild waste of years,
Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony,
Yet peaceful and serene and self-enshrined.
Even as a giant oak, which heaven's fierce flame
Had scathed in the wilderness, to stand
A monument of fadeless ruin there;
Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves
The midnight conflict of the wintry storm,
As in the sunlight's calm it spreads
Its worn and withered arms on high
To meet the quiet of a summer's noon."

It may have been that from sheltering many a wanderer in that mythical era these ancient trees gave their whispered secrets to Shelley while those lines were born in him. For hither, indeed, did he bring his girl-wife Harriet when they had eloped. Expelled Oxford for heresy in March, Shelley has eloped and married in

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FAMONT BRIDGE, ON THE BORDER BETWEEN WESTMORELAND AND CUMBERLAND.

September, and by October is dwelling at Keswick, since the only friend he now has in the world-a Duke of Norfolklives in this region. Protestant Oxford and orthodox parents have sent him forth into the world at nineteen an outcast; but a Roman Catholic duke stands by him, and this ancient temple of the Yews will raise heavenward arches above his excommunicated head. Harriet also was an exile; she had thrown" herself on his protection" from her father's petty tyranny.

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What mere children they were appears in | tations, carries on his studies in seclusion. a little story told by De Quincey. There was a pretty garden attached to the house near Keswick. They occupied only half the house, however, and when the Southeys called they asked Mrs. Shelley if the garden belonged to their part. "Oh no,' she replied; but then, you know, the people let us run about in it whenever Percy and I are tired of sitting in the house."

Southey was the only one who called upon them. De Quincey came, but the fledgelings were fled. Coleridge always regretted that he had not got hold of Shelley during that visit. "Why didn't he come to me? I would have understood him." It was but a brief butterfly existence they passed here. A few years later, and she was at the bottom of the Serpentine Water in Hyde Park; a few years more, and his form is undergoing with horrible literalness the water and fire which made the ordeal of life; and the only part of their united lives which one may recall without sorrow was that in which they "ran about" the Keswick garden, or skimmed Derwentwater, or, it may be, nestled in the covert of this ancient yew, and told fairy tales, or dreamed of a fair world never to be realized.

At Penrith we called on the venerable Orientalist Dr. Nicholson, one who, like many learned scholars to be found in England (more rarely elsewhere), with scholarship enough to stock several repu

VOL. XLII.-No. 369.-23

He told us much of the antiquities in the neighborhood. We then walked about under a grand harvest-moon; under its mystical light looked upon Penrith Castle, upon the picturesque old church, and the giant's grave beside it. That strange old monument so fascinated Sir Walter Scott that he would never pass through Penrith without stopping to gaze upon it. Eighty-four years ago Mrs. Ratcliffe travelled through this region, visiting the old castles and legendary places, which were the natural food of her mystery-loving fancy, and she also was much impressed by these runic stones, curiously carved, which stand like head-and-foot stones of a grave, but fifteen feet apart. "We pored intently over these traces, though certainly without the hope of discovering anything not known to the eminent antiquarians who have confessed their ignorance concerning the origin of them." So she wrote. The antiquarians have since

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MAYBURGH MOUND; ARTHUR'S SEAT.

Stonehenge, the largest of the stone circles is that a few miles out of Penrith, called "Long Meg and her Daughters." This consists of seventy-six upright stones, the largest, Long Meg, being fifteen feet in girth and eighteen feet in height. "Speak, giant mother," exclaimed Wordsworth:

"Tell it to the morn, Whilst she dispels the cumbrous shades of night; Let the moon hear, while emerging from a cloud, At whose behest up rose on British ground That sisterhood in hieroglyphic round."

But Long Meg does not speak through any letter or scratch on her side. Per haps it is as well she does not. I have heard that an English traveller among the Tartars found a stone circle very much like this, with a large assembly praying in it. They went around from stone to stone, and prayed each to assist their cattle and crops, and said, "May our cows bring forth two calves at a birth, and may we sell them for double as much as they are worth." If Long Meg should ever have heard such prayers, she had better keep it to herself, and with her daughters remain a rosary of mystery rather than of superstition and selfishness. On our way we stopped to visit "King Arthur's Round Table," which is a large circle, such as one may conceive made by a basin fifty yards in diameter, pressed down, bottom uppermost, and so moulding the earth-this overgrown with long grass. And a few hundred yards from this is "Mayburgh Mound." This is a circle a hundred yards in diameter, surrounded by piled stones, among which grow ash-trees, through which are

some pretty outlooks. In the centre is a large ash-tree, which has shaped its trunk to a stone twelve feet high, and curved at the top. Robert Ferguson of Carlisle believes that these circles were used for the holmegang, or "duel" of the Northmen. This duel was a fair one, the swords being of equal length; but it was superseded by the Norwegian "duel of the girdle" (practiced up to the last century), in which the longest blade went to the strongest arm, each man, before commencing, sticking his knife into a block of wood, that part of the blade not buried being bound round with leather. The combatants were kept from running away by being buckled together by a girdle around their waists. Yes, it is well enough these old places should be silent. They are close to the river (Eamont) boundary between Westmoreland and Cumberland; and if, as is probable, they were places for executions and duels between the hostile kingdoms, we may turn from them to dwell with satisfaction on a signboard near Eamont Bridge, representing a Westmoreland and a Cumberland man shaking hands. Beneath the sign quite as many of them as is desirable now pass to take "a cup of kindness" together. Indeed, I suspect that the famous cup called the "Luck of Eden Hall," near this, the subject of Uhland's poem, is one in which the last rivals of this Border may have

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BROUGHAM CASTLE.

pledged each other. The guide-books say | ing together in peace and friendship to the cup has on it the letters "I. H. S." This is not true; the letters are I. H. C. It is a beautiful cup, with ornamentation of red flowers and arabesque scroll on a blue ground. It is Oriental. The story is that a festive group of fairies, surprised by a servant at the well, left this cup be

win sustenance from the earth. The haymakers have a happy, substantial look, which one can hardly imagine to have been possessed by the old Border roughs and ruffians who preceded them. They do not seem to know anything of the eight-hour movement here. In harvest

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The cup is kept with great care. prosaic-looking house ("Eden" here only means "the confluence of rivers") was the ancient seat of the Musgraves, and is still owned by Sir George Musgrave, baronet. From being chief of a Border clan the family came to give the king his chief in the Parliamentary war, and one so appears in the "Legend of Montrose"; so the family has been lucky enough to keep its name and estates.

time they work twelve hours per day. They breakfast at six o'clock on oatmeal porridge, and sometimes coffee, with ryeleäf (rye loaf) black as a coal, and Dutch cheese. They "bait" (lunch) at half past nine, on ryeleäf, cheese, and beer. They dine at twelve on meat, potatoes, dumplings, and preserves. They take tea at four-bread and butter. They sup from nine to ten, supper being of much the same as breakfast. They are as hardy and quiet a set of folk as ever sprung from a restless race of fighters.

From Penrith a pleasant drive brings us to Ullswater, which means "Wolf's Water." Ulf was the first baron of Greystock, or Greystoke, now owned by the We are in a region where, from the si- Howards, and the finest castle on this lake. lent Druid graves to the grand castles- The Norman form of the name was Brougham, Penrith, Lowther castles-ev-"l'Ulf," the Wolf, and it is preserved in erything tells of ancient struggles. And it is pleasant amid these battlements to see better crops than usual (for a deluged season), and laborers of both counties toil

Lyulph's Tower, a castellated shootingbox beside the water, built by the late Duke of Norfolk, Shelley's friend. Near it is the cascade called Airey Force. This

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