75 



importance, from disturbing its serenity. In these days of high 

 pressure and competition the value of places where the beauty of 

 Nature may be enjoyed, apart from the disturbing influences of 

 railway and factory, is such as cannot be estitnaied in gold. If 

 mining companies are to be allowed to fill up our lakes, and 

 railway companies to destroy the grand sweep of our hillsides, 

 where are our poets and artists to draw their inspiration in the 

 future, and where are the masses to cultivate those higher feelings 

 which make it alone possible to understand the artists and poets ?" 



I ask you to remember that last sentence, for Sir F. Leighton, 

 the President of the Royal Academy, in his letter spoke truly 

 when he said : " A passionate love for the beauties of Nature is 

 one of the finest and most wholesome features of English character. 

 The growing tendency to blot out or to foul the springs from 

 which that love is fed, is, in my view, a grave and forecasting evil." 

 He added, " By all means add my name to the names of those 

 who protest with warmth and dismay against the prospect of 

 running a railway through Borrowdale." 



The author of /ohn Inglesant brought into prominent view 

 another feature of the evil of scarring the sides of our Lake hills 

 with quarries and rails, and enlisted the sound commercial spirit 

 on our side. He showed that the opening of fresh quarries, at a 

 time when slate was a glut in the market, was part and parcel of 

 the short-sighted policy by which the projectors of such railways, 

 and the necessary bubble companies to pay for them, were making 

 mischief in the English world of trade. He did not, you may be 

 sure, forget the other reasons in the higher worlds for protest 

 against this special injury to the land of thought, and the resting- 

 place of weary hand and brain workers of to-day. 



Of course, in this national defence, as it eventuated, of a 

 national pleasure-ground, hard things were said of the defenders. 

 They were accused of an unrighteous wish to keep cheap-trippers 

 at a distance ; of 



Grudging that crowded streets sent out 



In Sabbath glee the sons of care and doubt. 



But such calumny was as old as the attack on Wordsworth when 



