CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

A HOLIDAY IN THE LAKE-COUNTRY.

Let those who have not as yet made up theirminds how or where to spend their summer holiday,turn their steps towards Lakeland. There,beauty ever changing and ever charming in allher multiform varieties, lies in wait for them atevery turn. Life too among the hills has a freehearty zest, born of the invigorating mountainbreezes, which you search for in vain elsewhere.The wind, as it sweeps along the hill-side, recalls,as it fans the weary brow, the quick glad feelingof existence, the exuberance of gay animal spirits,which were natural and unprized in careless boyhood,but which are too often extinguished by thecares assumed with advancing years.

The steep roads, the green hill-slopes, the peacefulmossy boulders, the picturesque nooks, in whichnestle quaint little homesteads, and the broad calmlake stretching out like a great embossed silvershield at your feet, with the deep shadows of thehills shading into purple gloom in its shiningripples—who that has once seen such a picture,particularly in sunshine, can ever forget it?

In winter evenings, when the curtains are snuglydrawn, and the howling storm shut out, and thefirelight tinges all around with its warm ruddyglow, pleasant visions of the breezy fells, and thegreat hills with their changeful lights and shadows,and the leafy copses running down to the edge ofthe water, recur to the memory. You are againin the swiftly gliding boat; you lean over to gatherthe water-lilies, or to gaze into the clear pebbly-bottomedabysses of that softly yielding flood.Again you see mirrored in its crystal depths thestraggling rifts of vapour, or the long ripplingbeaches of cloud. The sweet do-nothingness ofthe hour, its gay insouciance, or its vanishedromance, are with you once more, and charm youas of old. It is with a feeling of half-sad tendernessthat you turn away from the mental photograph,and leaving it safe in memory's keeping, goback to your busy commonplace world.

Mr Payn, in his beautiful volume entitled TheLakes in Sunshine (Windermere: J. Garnett), givesus a sparkling description of Lakeland. He beginswith Winde

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