big enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an AEolian harp, and an old sofa, half-bed, etc.; and all looking out upon the last fading view of Skiddaw and his broad-breasted brethren.  What a night!  Here we stayed three full weeks, in which time I visited Wordsworth’s cottage, where we stayed a day or two with the Clarksons (good people and most hospitable, at whose house we tarried one day and night), and saw Lloyd.  The Wordsworths were gone to Calais.  They have since been in London, and passed much time with us; he has now gone into Yorkshire to be married.  So we have seen Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater (where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater,—­I forget the name, [1]—­to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over the middle of Helvellyn.  We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw, and I have waded up the bed of Lodore.  In fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that which tourists call romantic, which I very much suspected before; they make such a spluttering about it, and toss their splendid epithets around them, till they give as dim a light as at four o’clock next morning the lamps do after an illumination.  Mary was excessively tired when she got about half way up Skiddaw; but we came to a cold rill (than which nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones), and with the reinforcement of a draught of cold water she surmounted it most manfully.  Oh, its fine black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with a prospect of mountains all about and about, making you giddy; and then Scotland afar off, and the border countries so famous in song and ballad!  It was a day that will stand out like a mountain, I am sure, in my life.  But I am returned (I have now been come home near three weeks; I was a month out), and you cannot conceive the degradation I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander free as air among mountains, and bathe in rivers without being controlled by any one, to come home and work.  I felt very little.  I had been dreaming I was a very great man.  But that is going off, and I find I shall conform in time to that state of life to which it has pleased God to call me.  Besides, after all, Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw.  Still, I turn back to those great places where I wandered about, participating in their greatness.  After all, I could not live in Skiddaw.  I could spend a year,—­two, three years among them; but I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine away, I know.  Still, Skiddaw is a fine creature.