Need I quote farther the famous outburst of patriotism?--it was our lake that roused it. And another great enthusiasm was stirred by our Coniston Fells.
In 1797 the landscape painter Turner came here as a youth of 23 on his first tour through the north. After his pilgrimage among the Yorkshire abbeys, so finely described by Ruskin in _Modern Painters_, vol. v., the young artist seems to have arrived among the fells one autumn evening, and sketched the Old Man from the Half-penny Alehouse. Then--I piece this together from the drawings and circumstances--he went round to spend the night at the Black Bull with old Tom Robinson and his wife, the daughter of Wonderful Walker. She was a wonderful woman herself; had been first a miner's wife, helping him to rise to a clerkship at the Leadhill Mines in Dumfriesshire, and on his death returning to Seathwaite; then, sorely against her old father's will, taking up with Tom, and settling at Townend to farm; afterwards for many years at the Black Bull, keeping the inn, managing the carding mill, and acting as parish officer in her turn; a notable figure, in mob cap and bedgown and brat; sharp tongued and shrewd of judgment. What did she make, I wonder, of the sunburnt, broad-shouldered lile cockney, with his long brown curls, his big nose and eagle eyes, and his sketch-book, "spying fancies?" Early in the morning he was out and scrambling up Lang Crags. It was one of the magical, misty autumnal sunrises we know so well. There had been rain, and Whitegill was full, thundering down the precipice at his feet. The fog was breaking away from the valley beneath, and rising in drifts and swirls among the clefts of Raven Crag, and the woods of Tilberthwaite. Far away, serene in the morning light, stood Helvellyn. It was his earliest sight of the mountain glory; the thrill of emotions never to be forgotten. Going home to London, he painted his first great mountain subject, afterwards in the National Gallery--the first picture for which he was moved to quote poetry in the Academy catalogue, and this from _Paradise Lost_--"Morning on Coniston Fells:--
Ye mists and exhalations that now rise From hill or streaming lake, dusky or grey, Till the sun paint your fleecy skirts with gold In honour to the world's Great Author rise."