“I was at Coniston to-day.  Our old Waterhead Inn, where I was so happy playing in the boats, exists no more.—­Its place is grown over with smooth Park grass—­the very site of it forgotten! and, a quarter of a mile down the lake, a vast hotel built in the railroad station style—­making up, I suppose, its fifty or eighty beds, with coffee-room—­smoking-room—­and every pestilent and devilish Yankeeism that money can buy, or speculation plan.

“The depression, whatever its cause, does not affect my strength.  I walked up a long hill on the road to Coniston to-day (gathering wild raspberries)—­then from this new Inn, two miles to the foot of Coniston Old Man; up it; down again—­(necessarily!)—­and back to dinner, without so much as warming myself—­not that there was much danger of doing that at the top; for a keen west wind was blowing drifts of cloud by at a great pace, and one was glad of the shelter of the pile of stones, the largest and oldest I ever saw on a mountain top.  I suppose the whole mountain is named from it.  It is of the shape of a beehive, strongly built, about 15 feet high (so that I made Downes follow me up it before I would allow he had been at the top of the Old Man) and covered with lichen and short moss.  Lancaster sands and the Irish sea were very beautiful, and so also the two lakes of Coniston and Windermere, lying in the vastest space of sweet cultivated country I have ever looked over,—­a great part of the view from the Rigi being merely over black pine forest, even on the plains.  Well, after dinner, the evening was very beautiful, and I walked up the long hill on the road back from Coniston—­and kept ahead of the carriage for two miles:  I was sadly vexed when I had to get in:  and now—­I don’t feel as if I had been walking at all—­and shall probably lie awake for an hour or two—­and feeling as if I had not had exercise enough to send me to sleep.”

     “LANGDALE, 13th August, Evening.

“It is perfectly calm to-night, not painfully hot—­and the full moon shining over the mountains, opposite my window, which are the scene of Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion.’  It was terribly hot in the earlier day, and I did not leave the house till five o’clock.  Then I went out, and in the heart of Langdale Pikes found the loveliest rock-scenery, chased with silver waterfalls, that I ever set foot or heart upon.  The Swiss torrent-beds are always more or less savage, and ruinous, with a terrible sense of overpowering strength and danger, lulled.  But here, the sweet heather and ferns and star mosses nestled in close to the dashing of the narrow streams;—­while every cranny of crag held its own little placid lake of amber, trembling with falling drops—­but quietly trembling—­not troubled into ridgy wave or foam—­the rocks themselves, ideal rock, as hard as iron—­no—­not quite that, but so hard that after breaking some of it, breaking solid white quartz seemed