The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth — Volume 2 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 515 pages of information about The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth — Volume 2.
at the bottom of the valley; it was not a quarter of a mile distant....  The two banks seemed to join before us with a facing of rock common to them both.  When we reached this bottom the valley opened out again; two rocky banks on each side, which, hung with ivy and moss, and fringed luxuriantly with brushwood, ran directly parallel to each other, and then approaching with a gentle curve at their point of union, presented a lofty waterfall, the termination of the valley.  It was a keen frosty morning, showers of snow threatening us, but the sun bright and active.  We had a task of twenty-one miles to perform in a short winter’s day....  On a nearer approach the waters seemed to fall down a tall arch or niche that had shaped itself by insensible moulderings in the wall of an old castle.  We left this spot with reluctance, but highly exhilarated....  It was bitter cold, the wind driving the snow behind us in the best style of a mountain storm.  We soon reached an inn at a place called Hardrane, and descending from our vehicles, after warming ourselves by the cottage fire, we walked up the brook-side to take a view of a third waterfall.  We had not walked above a few hundred yards between two winding rocky banks before we came full upon the waterfall, which seemed to throw itself in a narrow line from a lofty wall of rock, the water, which shot manifestly to some distance from the rock, seeming to be dispersed into a thin shower scarcely visible before it reached the bason.  We were disappointed in the cascade itself, though the introductory and accompanying banks were an exquisite mixture of grandeur and beauty....  After cautiously sounding our way over stones of all colours and sizes, encased in the clearest water formed by the spray of the fall, we found the rock, which before had appeared like a wall, extending itself over our heads, like the ceiling of a huge cave, from the summit of which the waters shot directly over our heads into a bason, and among fragments wrinkled over with masses of ice as white as snow, or rather, as Dorothy says, like congealed froth.  The water fell at least ten yards from us, and we stood directly behind it, the excavation not so deep in the rock as to impress any feeling of darkness, but lofty and magnificent; but in connection with the adjoining banks excluding as much of the sky as could well be spared from a scene so exquisitely beautiful.  The spot where we stood was as dry as the chamber in which I am now sitting, and the incumbent rock, of which the groundwork was limestone, veined and dappled with colours which melted into each other with every possible variety of colour.  On the summit of the cave were three festoons, or rather wrinkles, in the rock, run up parallel like the folds of a curtain when it is drawn up.  Each of these was hung with icicles of various length, and nearly in the middle of the festoon, in the deepest valley of the waves that ran parallel to each other, the stream shot from the rows of icicles in irregular
Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth — Volume 2 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.