The English Lakes

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III BY WORDSWORTH'S ROTHAY EVEN during the height of summer there are dull days sometimes, when dense clouds simply stifle the dales in gloom. This is the more tantalising when one is at Ambleside in the midst of the beauties of Lakeland. But after two o'clock the day became perceptibly brighter; Loughrigg discovered itself opposite our window, a kindly precipice of damp grey crags rearing through a forest of dwarf oaks and clinging ash, green plumed larches and verdant undergrowth, its long crest crowned with patches of heather and wide, quivering wastes of bracken. There is little to interest us in Ambleside : the sun is bursting his cloudy bonds, and we chafe at streets and houses! Out, then, on the Rydal road, past the old moss-grown mill and the bridge-house Ruskin sketched in his youth, past