on great excursions which fatigue and do me harm (or else worry me with problems;)—­I am content here with the roadside hedges and streams; and this contentment is the great thing for health,—­and there is hardly anything to annoy me of absurd or calamitous human doing; but still this ancient cottage life—­very rude and miserable enough in its torpor—­but clean, and calm, not a vile cholera and plague of bestirred pollution, like back streets in London.  There is also much more real and deep beauty than I expected to find, in some of the minor pieces of scenery, and in the cloud effects.”

     “July 16.

“I have the secret of extracting sadness from all things, instead of joy, which is no enviable talisman.  Forgive me if I ever write in a way that may pain you.  It is best that you should know, when I write cheerfully, it is no pretended cheerfulness; so when I am sad—­I think it right to confess it.”

     “30th July.

“Downes[14] arrived yesterday quite comfortably and in fine weather.  It is not bad this morning, and I hope to take him for a walk up Saddleback, which, after all, is the finest, to my mind, of all the Cumberland hills—­though that is not saying much; for they are much lower in effect, in proportion to their real height, than I had expected.  The beauty of the country is in its quiet roadside bits, and rusticity of cottage life and shepherd labour.  Its mountains are sorrowfully melted away from my old dreams of them.”

     [Footnote 14:  The gardener at Denmark Hill.]

Next day he “went straight up the steep front of Saddleback by the central ridge to the summit.  It is the finest thing I’ve yet seen, there being several bits of real crag-work, and a fine view at the top over the great plains of Penrith on one side, and the Cumberland hills, as a chain, on the other.  Fine fresh wind blowing, and plenty of crows.  Do you remember poor papa’s favourite story about the Quaker whom the crows ate on Saddleback?  There were some of the biggest and hoarsest-voiced ones about the cliff that I’ve ever had sympathetic croaks from;—­and one on the top, or near it, so big that Downes and Crawley, having Austrian tendencies in politics, took it for a ‘black eagle.’  Downes went up capitally, though I couldn’t get him down again, because he would stop to gather ferns.  However, we did it all and came down to Threlkeld—­of the Bridal of Triermain,

    “’The King his way pursued
    By lonely Threlkeld’s waste and wood,’

     “in good time for me to dress and, for a wonder, go out to dinner
     with Acland’s friends the Butlers.”

     As an episode in this visit to Keswick, ten days were given to the
     neighbourhood of Ambleside, “to show Downes Windermere.”

     “Waterhead, Windermere,

     “10th August, 1867, Evening.