Sacred as that relic of the devotion of our ancestors deserves to be kept, there are temples of Nature, temples built by the Almighty, which have a still higher claim to be left unviolated.  Almost every reach of the winding vales in this district might once have presented itself to a man of imagination and feeling under that aspect, or, as the Vale of Grasmere appeared to the Poet Gray more than seventy years ago.  ’No flaring gentleman’s-house,’ says he, ’nor garden-walls break in upon the repose of this little unsuspected paradise, but all is peace,’ &c., &c.  Were the Poet now living, how would he have lamented the probable intrusion of a railway with its scarifications, its intersections, its noisy machinery, its smoke, and swarms of pleasure-hunters, most of them thinking that they do not fly fast enough through the country which they have come to see.  Even a broad highway may in some places greatly impair the characteristic beauty of the country, as will be readily acknowledged by those who remember what the Lake of Grasmere was before the new road that runs along its eastern margin had been constructed.

                    Quanto praestantias esset
    Numen aquae viridi si margina clauderet undas
    Herba—­

As it once was, and fringed with wood, instead of the breastwork of bare wall that now confines it.  In the same manner has the beauty, and still more the sublimity of many Passes in the Alps been injuriously affected.  Will the reader excuse a quotation from a MS. poem in which I attempted to describe the impression made upon my mind by the descent towards Italy along the Simplon before the new military road had taken the place of the old muleteer track with its primitive simplicities?

                            Brook and road
    Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy Pass,
    And with them did we journey several hours
    At a slow step.  The immeasurable height
    Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
    The stationary blasts of waterfalls. 
    And in the narrow rent, at every turn,
    Winds thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn,
    The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
    The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
    Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
    As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
    And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
    The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,
    Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light,
    Were all like workings of one mind, the features
    Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
    Characters of the great Apocalypse,
    The types and symbols of Eternity,
    Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
          
                                         1799.