Go down to the low terrace-walk along the Bay. The Bay is in itself a Lake, at all times cheerful with its scattered fleet, at anchor or under weigh--its villas and cottages, each rejoicing in its garden or orchard--its meadows mellowing to the reedy margin of the pellucid water--its heath-covered boathouses--its own portion of the Isle called Beautiful--and beyond that sylvan haunt, the sweet Furness Fells, with gentle outline undulating in the sky, and among its spiral larches showing, here and there, groves and copses of the old unviolated woods. Yes, Bowness Bay is in itself a Lake; but how finely does it blend away, through its screens of oak and sycamore trees, into a larger Lake--another, yet the same--on whose blue bosom you see bearing down to windward--for the morning breeze is born--many a tiny sail. It has the appearance of a race. Yes--it is a race; and the Liverpoolian, as of yore, is eating them all out of the wind, and without another tack will make her anchorage. But hark--Music! 'Tis the Bowness Band playing "See the conquering Hero comes!"--and our old friend has carried away the gold cup from all competitors.
Now turn your faces up the hill above the village school. That green mount is what is called a--Station. The villagers are admiring a grove of parasols, while you--the party--are admiring the village--with its irregular roofs--white, blue, grey, green, brown, and black walls--fruit-laden trees so yellow--its central church-tower--and environing groves variously burnished by autumn. Saw ye ever banks and braes and knolls so beautifully bedropt with human dwellings? There is no solitude about Windermere. Shame on human nature were Paradise uninhabited! Here, in amicable neighbourhood, are halls and huts--here rises through groves the dome of the rich man's mansion--and there the low roof of the poor man's cottage beneath its one single sycamore! Here are hundreds of small properties hereditary in the same families for hundreds of years--and never, never, O Westmoreland! may thy race of _statesmen_ be extinct--nor the virtues that ennoble their humble households! See, suddenly brought forth by sunshine from among the old woods--and then sinking away into her usual unobtrusive serenity--the lake-loving Rayrig, almost level, so it seems, with the water, yet smiling over her own quiet bay from the grove-shelter of her pastoral mound. Within her walls may peace ever dwell with piety--and the light of science long blend with the lustre of the domestic hearth! Thence to Calgarth is all one forest--yet glade-broken, and enlivened by open uplands; so that the roamer, while he expects a night of umbrage, often finds himself in the open day, beneath the bright blue bow of heaven haply without a cloud. The eye travels delighted over the multitudinous tree-tops--often dense as one single tree--till it rests, in sublime satisfaction, on the far-off mountains, that lose not a woody character till the tree-sprinkled pastures roughen into rocks--and rocks tower into precipices where the falcons breed. But the lake will not suffer the eye long to wander among the distant glooms. She wins us wholly to herself--and restlessly and passionately for a while, but calmly and affectionately at last, the heart embraces all her beauty, and wishes that the vision might endure for ever, and that here our tents were pitched--to be struck no more during our earthly pilgrimage. Imagination lapses into a thousand moods. O for a fairy pinnace to glide and float for aye over those golden waves! A hermit-cell on sweet Lady-Holm! A sylvan shieling on Loughrig side! A nest in that nameless dell, which sees but one small slip of heaven, and longs at night for the reascending visit of its few loving stars! A dwelling open to all the skyey influence on the mountain-brow, the darling of the rising or the setting sun, and often seen by eyes in the lower world glittering through the rainbow!