’He knows it to his cost, good Man! 
  Who does not know the famous SWAN? 
  Object uncouth! and yet our boast,
  For it was painted by the Host;
  His own conceit the figure planned,
  ‘Twas coloured all by his own hand.’

As early as 1819, when the poem was first published, “this rude piece of self-taught art had been supplanted” by a more pretentious figure.  The Waggoner passes the Swan,

  ’And now the conqueror essays
  The long ascent of Dunmail-raise.’

As he proceeds, the storm gathers, and “struggles to get free.”  Road, hill, and sky are dark; and he barely sees the well-known rocks at the summit of Helm-crag, where two figures seem to sit, like those on the Cobbler, near Arrochar, in Argyle.

  ’Black is the sky—­and every hill,
  Up to the sky, is blacker still—­
  Sky, hill, and dale, one dismal room,
  Hung round and overhung with gloom;
  Save that above a single height
  Is to be seen a lurid light,
  Above Helm-crag—­a streak half dead,
  A burning of portentous red;
  And near that lurid light, full well
  The ASTROLOGER, sage Sidrophel,
  Where at his desk and book he sits,
  Puzzling aloft his curious wits;
  He whose domain is held in common
  With no one but the ANCIENT WOMAN,
  Cowering beside her rifted cell,
  As if intent on magic spell;—­
  Dread pair, that, spite of wind and weather,
  Still sit upon Helm-crag together!’

At the top of the “raise”—­the water-shed between the vales of Grasmere and Wytheburn—­he reaches the familiar pile of stones, at the boundary between the shires of Westmoreland and Cumberland.

’... that pile of stones, Heaped over brave King Dunmail’s bones; ...  Green is the grass for beast to graze, Around the stones of Dunmail-raise!’

The allusion to Seat-Sandal laid bare by the flash of lightning, and the description, in the last canto, of the ascent of the Raise by the Waggoner on a summer morning, are as true to the spirit of the place as anything that Wordsworth has written.  He tells his friend Lamb, fourteen years after he wrote the poem of ‘The Waggoner,’

  ’Yes, I, and all about me here,
  Through all the changes of the year,
  Had seen him through the mountains go,
  In pomp of mist or pomp of snow,
  Majestically huge and slow: 
  Or, with a milder grace adorning
  The landscape of a summer’s morning;
  While Grasmere smoothed her liquid plain
  The moving image to detain;
  And mighty Fairfield, with a chime
  Of echoes, to his march kept time;
  When little other business stirred,
  And little other sound was heard;
  In that delicious hour of balm,
  Stillness, solitude, and calm,
  While yet the valley is arrayed,
  On this side with a sober shade;
  On that is prodigally bright—­
  Crag, lawn, and wood—­with rosy light.’