Shall I take you for a visit there,—­to Brantwood as it was in those old times?

It is a weary way to Coniston, whatever road you choose.  The inconvenience of the railway route was perhaps one reason of Ruskin’s preference for driving on so many occasions.  After changing and changing trains, and stopping at many a roadside station, at last you see, suddenly, over the wild undulating country, the Coniston Old Man and its crags, abrupt on the left, and the lake, long and narrow, on the right.  Across the water, tiny in the distance and quite alone amongst forests and moors, there is Brantwood; and beyond it everything seems uncultivated, uninhabited, except for one grey farmhouse high on the fell, where gaps in the ragged larches show how bleak and storm-swept a spot it is.

To come out of the station after long travel is to find yourself face to face with magnificent rocks, and white cottages among the fir-trees.  As you are whirled down through the straggling village, and along the shore round the head of the lake, the panorama, though not Alpine in magnitude, is almost Alpine in character.  The valley, too, is not yet built up; it is still the old-fashioned lake country, almost as it was in the days of the “Iteriad.”  You drive up and down a narrow, hilly lane, catching peeps of mountains and sunset, through thick, overhanging trees; you turn sharp up through a gate under dark firs and larches, and the carriage stops in what seems in the twilight a sort of court,—­a gravelled space, one side formed by a rough stone wall crowned with laurels and almost precipitous coppice, the brant (or steep) wood above, and the rest is Brantwood, with a capital B.[41]

[Footnote 41:  The archway supporting a great pile of new buildings did not exist in the time when this visit is supposed to be made.  Since that time new stables and greenhouses also have been built; with other additions somewhat altering the cottage-like house of Ruskin’s working days.]

You expect that Gothic porch you have read of in “Lectures on Architecture and Painting,” and you are surprised to find a stucco classic portico in the corner, painted and grained, and heaped around with lucky horseshoes, brightly blackleaded, and mysterious rows of large blocks of slate and basalt and trap—­a complete museum of local geology, if only you knew it—­very unlike an ideal entrance; still more unlike an ordinary one.  While you wait you can see through the glass door a roomy hall, lit with candles, and hung with large drawings by Burne-Jones and by the master of the house.  His soft hat, and thick gloves, and chopper, lying on the marble table, show that he has come in from his afternoon’s woodcutting.