The English Lakes

iscovered itself opposite our window, a kindly precipice of damp grey crags rearing through a forest of dwarf oaks and clinging ash, green plumed larches and verdant undergrowth, its long crest crowned with patches of heather and wide, quivering wastes of bracken. There is little to interest us in Ambleside : the sun is bursting his cloudy bonds, and we chafe at streets and houses! Out, then, on the Rydal road, past the old moss-grown mill and the bridge-house Ruskin sketched in his youth, past the Knoll where Harriet Martineau lived. Now we rejoice to see a riven cloud turn to gleaming silver at its edges, and through the gap a shaft of light strikes down to earth. It is lost ! No, there it is again, kissing the rugged crest of Nab Scar, and hovering along its flank. The clouds above whirl A GLIMPSE OF GR AS.MERE Evenlnf Iiib together, and the welcome gleam is cut off. But the upper heavens are overpent with sunshine ; glance after glance of glory dances down and melts away on Loughrigg fell. For half an hour gloom and coming sunshine wage unequal warfare, then the clouds to westward break up their solid phalanx, and wider and more frequent are the wheeling spokes of light. Here one blazons a scree-drifted hillside, there one peers and glances into a rocky ghyll. Broad streams of radiance flow into unseen abysms beyond the nearer mountain curtain, a flash of refreshing brilliance lights up acres of rugged scrub. By the rivulet we see the usual patient a...