The larger Vales are all serene and cheerful; and among the sylvan knolls with which their wide levels, highly cultivated, are interspersed, cottages, single or in groups, are frequent, of an architecture always admirably suited to the scenery, because in a style suggested not by taste or fancy, which so often disfigure nature to produce the picturesque, but resorted to for sake of the uses and conveniences of in-door life, to weather-fend it in storms, and in calm to give it the enjoyment of sunshine. Many of these dwellings are not what are properly called cottages, but statesmen’s houses, of ample front, with their many roofs, over-shadowed by a stately grove, and inhabited by the same race for many generations. All alike have their suitable gardens, and the porches of the poorest are often clustered with roses; for everywhere among these hills, even in minds the most rude and uncultivated, there is a natural love of flowers. The villages, though somewhat too much modernised in those days of improvement--and indeed not a few of them with hardly any remains now of their original architecture--nothing old about them but the church tower, perhaps the parsonage--are nevertheless generally of a pleasing character, and accordant, if not with the great features of nature, which are unchanged and unchangeable, with the increased cultivation of the country, and the many villas and ornamented cottages that have risen and are rising by every lake and river side. Rivers indeed, properly so called, there are none among these mountains; but every vale, great and small, has at all times its pure and undefiled stream or rivulet; every hill has its hundreds of evanescent rills, almost every one its own perennial torrent flowing from spring, marsh, or tarn; and the whole region is often alive with waterfalls, of many of which, in its exquisite loveliness, the scenery is fit for fairy festivals--and of many, in its horrid gloom, for gatherings of gnomes revisiting “the glimpses of the moon” from their subterraneous prisons. One lake there is, which has been called “wooded Winandermere, the river lake;” and there is another--Ulswater--which you might imagine to be a river too, and to have come flowing from afar; the one excelling in isles, and bays, and promontories, serene and gentle all, and perfectly beautiful; the other, matchless in its majesty of cliff and mountain, and in its old forests, among whose hoary gloom is for ever breaking out the green light of young generations, and perpetual renovation triumphing over perpetual decay. Of the other lakes--not river-like--the character may be imagined even from that we have faintly described of the mountains; almost every vale has its lake, or a series of lakes; and though some of them have at times a stern aspect, and have scenes to show almost of desolation, descending sheer to the water’s edge, or overhanging the depth that looks profounder in the gloom, yet even these, to eyes and hearts familiar with their spirit, wear a sweet smile which seldom passes away. Witness Wastwater, with its huge single mountains, and hugest of all the mountains of England, Scawfell, with its terrific precipices--which, in the accidents of storm, gloom, or mist, has seemed, to the lonely passer-by, savage in the extreme--a howling or dreary wilderness--but in its enduring character, is surrounded with all quiet pastoral imagery, the deep glen in which it is embedded being, in good truth, the abode of Sabbath peace. That hugest mountain is indeed the centre from which all the vales irregularly diverge; the whole circumjacent region may be traversed in a week; and though no other district of equal extent contains such variety of the sublime and beautiful, yet the beautiful is so prevalent that we feel its presence, even in places where it is overpowered; and on leaving “The Lakes,” our imagination is haunted and possessed with images, not of dread, but of delight.