button to main menu   West's Guide to the Lakes, 1778/1821

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Page 11:-
and shade, the air, the winds, the clouds, the situation with respect to objects, and the time of the day. For though the ruling tints be permanent, yet the green and gold of the meadow and vale, and the brown and purple of the mountain, the silver gray of the rock, and the azure hue of the cloud-topt pike, are frequently varied in appearance, by an inter-mixture of reflection from wandering clouds, or other bodies, or a sudden stream of sunshine that harmonizes all the parts anew. The pleasure therefore arising from such scenes is in some sort accidental.
  telescope
To render the tour more agreeable, the company should be provided with a telescope, for viewing the fronts and summits of inacccssible (sic) rocks, and the distant country from the tops of the high mountains Skiddaw and Helvellyn. [1]
[1] As descriptions of prospects, greatly extended and variegated, are often more tedious than entertaining, perhaps the reader will not lament that our author has not any where attempted to delineate a view taken from either of these capital mountains, but rather wish he had shown the same judgement of omission in some other parts of his work. However, as an apology of the most persuasive kind for what may appear either prolix or too high-coloured, in some of the following descriptions, let it be noted by the candid reader, at the out-set, that the lakes were his favourite object, and on which he thought enough could scarce ever be said, and, that the seducing effects of an ardent passion, are, in any case, easier to discover in others, than to rectify in ourselves. X.
N. B. In this edition is given Mrs. Radcliffe's description of the scenery in a ride over Skiddaw, Addenda, Article XI.
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