79 



Lord Houghton continues : — 



Disordered laughter, and encounter rude, 



The poet's finer sense perchance may pain. 



Yet many a glade and nook of solitude 



For quiet walk and thought will still remain 



Where he the poor intruders may elude, 



Nor lose one golden dream from all their homely gain. 



It is a grotesque picture— Wordsworth dodging, to get away from 

 the tourist swarms in Ambleside, up the Stock Ghyll ravine, then 

 losing half of his "golden dream" by finding he has to elude more 

 "poor intruders" at the top of the Force; or, turning home by 

 some old familiar way, to find he must double back to get to Rydal 

 without " encounter rude," and its accompaniment of " disordered 

 laughter," all the poet's "golden dream" now lost, and himself in a 

 bad temper into the bargain. We maintain, as is maintained by 

 Dr. Cradock— than whom no one living more thoroughly knows 

 the poet's haunts— that once let "the harsh steam-car, with the 

 cataract's shout" mingle its "swift roll" in any single valley, a 

 precedent will be established "for even worse outrages," and no 

 vale mil be safe. We shall have, as Professor Ruskin prophesied 

 the other day, "a railway for Cook's excursion trains up Scaw 

 Fell, another up Helvellyn, and a third up Skiddaw, with a circular 

 line to connect all three branches." 



No glade, no nook of sohtude 



For quiet walk and thought will then remain, 



and England will be immeasurably the poorer. Professor E. 

 Dowden of Dublin, in a letter of protest against the steam-dragon 

 of Honister, wrote:— "As one century generally discovers the 

 sins of its predecessors, and is hard on them, I have some hopes 

 that the twentieth century, so close at hand, may grow indignant 

 with the nineteenth for its destruction of so much that forms part 

 of the true wealth of life, and resolve to act more wisely." Let 

 us, as a Literary and Scientific Society in Cumberland and 

 Westmorland, determine, so far as pertains to Westmorland and 

 Cumberland, to help the nineteenth century to a timely repent- 

 ance. England is beginning to become a nation that believes 



