All nature welcomes Her whose sway Tempers the year's extremes; Who scattereth lustres o'er noonday, Like morning's dewy gleams. While mellow warble, sprightly trill The tremulous heart excite, And hums the balmy air to still The balance of delight.
Buttermere in May or early June! The May of the poet, that is to say, which smiles upon us twice or thrice in a decade, not the May of actuality which is spent in overcoats and blighted hopes, and bad tempers and east winds. But there are Mays even yet like those of the invincible tradition, and just enough of them to save the face of the poet. And Buttermere in the full flush of one of them stands always out for me conspicuous in that long gallery of bygone summer pageants, which are not the least of those pleasant fancies kindled by the cheery glow of the winter fireside. Ullswater and Wastwater can turn almost any atmosphere to account. They can grasp the glories of high June and diffuse their radiance over shore and mountain to as much purpose as any, or can turn savage in the storms and clouds of autumn with infinite grandeur.
Honister, too, though surmounted in many moods, I almost prefer to recall in some such one as this, when the replenished ghylls are spouting like silver threads down the dark mountain sides to the right and left as you draw up from Seatoller, and the sombre crag itself is thrusting up a rugged head against a background of whirling clouds. But down in the long secluded vale of Buttermere, its narrowed trough for most of the five miles it winds its beauteous length, filled with the waters of two pellucid lakes, I would have it always June, or rather that ideal, precocious May which has planted it irrevocably in the chambers of my soul.
Of all the better-known lakes or haunts in Lakeland, this one is perhaps the most secluded. A dozen miles by steep roads and some fearsome hills are made light of, it is true, by the coaches of the holiday season; but at other times the valley is cut off from the travelling world dependent on public transport, and its two or three small hostelries are then apt to become very empty havens of peace amid the hills. Lying amid bosky knolls upon the half-mile meadowy interval, through which the Cocker sparkles from the foot of Buttermere to the head of Crummock, with the steep green wall of mountain, cloven here and there by the white trail of falling streams, rising sharply for two thousand feet above it, the pose of this little group of cottages and homesteads scattered around their diminutive church is perfection itself. The sense of snug seclusion from a noisy and ever noisier world, and that, too, in a spot familiar by name at least wherever the English language obtains, is everywhere eloquent, and holds one's fancy above the common. And along the steep western shore of Buttermere itself, following a sheep track on the rough mountain side, amid the scent of thyme and freshly blooming gorse, the hum of bees, with the flowers of the upland showing their shy heads among the ragged moorland grasses, what a picture at such time as I have in mind is this mile and a half of limpid water, fringed upon its farther shore by mantling woods! For though only one residence of any kind trenches upon the margin of either lake, this one of Hasness upon Buttermere has been enfolded by time and taste in groves of larch and beech and sycamore that extend half along the lake shore, and flaunt their earliest foliage of summer upon the glassy water. While on the rugged oaks mingled among them, self-sown, perhaps, some of them by hardy stunted forbears, there still flares that golden tint in which its bursting leaf so curiously forestalls the radiant decay of Autumn.