Rydal Mount, standing embowered in foliage above the road which afterwards skirts both lakes, is not accessible, but Dove Cottage on Grasmere, where the poet, with his gifted sister and for a time with S. T. Coleridge, spent the years preceding his long married life at Rydal Mount, is open to the pilgrim, be he a devout or an indifferent one. It will be hardly less interesting as the residence for twenty years of that strange genius, stylist, and laudanum drinker, De Quincey. Apart from the great literary obligations under which he has laid posterity, the autobiographical volume which deals with this Lake country, and the brilliant circle of which he was a member, is a book of extraordinary interest. He married a local yeoman's daughter, and the domestic side of his life, including a devoted and successful family, infinitely alleviates the tragedy of his own long and indifferently successful struggle with the fatal drug. The weak-willed but lovable and brilliant Hartley Coleridge, too, who would dash off a sonnet in ten minutes, lived at Nab Cottage, on Rydal Water, till he was laid in Grasmere Churchyard, to be followed there by Wordsworth in the succeeding year of 1850. Wordsworth himself was never really in touch with his humbler neighbours. He had not the temperament for that kind of thing, and remained a continual mystery to most of them.
"Well, John, what's the news?" said the rather too sociable Hartley Coleridge one morning to an old stone-breaker.
"Why, nowte varry particlar, only ald Wudsworth's brocken lowce ageean." This had reference to the poet's habit of spouting his productions as he walked along the roads, which was taken by the country folk as a sign of mental aberration. On another occasion a stranger resting at a cottage in Rydal enquired of the housewife as to Wordsworth's neighbourly qualities.
"Well," said she, "he sometimes goes booin' his pottery about t' rooads an' t' fields an' takes na nooatish o' neabody; but at udder times he'll say 'Good morning, Dolly,' as sensible as oyder you or me."
Lying beside the familiar and continuously beautiful road from Grasmere to Keswick, Thirlmere has happily lost nothing of its pristine beauty in becoming the source of Manchester's water supply. An engine house at one point and the big dam, only visible at the far end, are more than counterbalanced in the raising for many feet of a lake that is three miles long and only a quarter of a mile wide. That first delicious view of it which greets the pilgrim on the downward winding road from the pass of Dunmaile Raise, deep channelled between the rugged wall of Armboth Crags and the northern shoulders of Helvellyn, with the pale cone of Skiddaw rising over the hidden interval beyond, will be among the most familiar memories of the lake tourist. These grey Armboth steeps, falling from the wild moorish table-land above so abruptly to the water's edge, and planting everywhere their knotted pine-feathered toes in the deep clear water, with the little promontories and islands wooded in the like fashion, give a character all its own to the narrow but beautiful lake. As a road now skirts both shores, those denied the physical joy of walking this country can get all that the banks, at any rate, of Thirlmere have to offer. The best of this, no doubt, is the prospect here depicted from the lower end, with Old Helvellyn looming so near and filling up the vista to the southward.