button to main menu  Wordsworth's Guide 1810, edn 1835
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page 123
After dinner we walked up the Vale: I had never had an idea of its extent and width in passing along the public road on the other side. We followed the path that leads from house to house; two or three times it took us through some of those copses or groves that cover the little hillocks in the middle of the vale, making an intricate and pleasing intermixture of lawn and wood. Our fancies could not resist the temptation; and we fixed upon a spot for a cottage, which we began to build: and finished as easily as castles are raised in the air. - Visited the same spot in the evening. I shall say nothing of the moonlight aspect of the situation which had charmed us so much in the afternoon; but I wish you had been with us when, in returning to our friend's house, we espied his lady's large white dog, lying in the moonshine upon the round knoll under the old yew-tree in the garden, a romantic image - the dark tree and its dark shadow - and the elegant creature, as fair as a spirit! The torrents murmured softly, the mountains down which they were falling did not, to my sight furnish a back-ground for this Ossianic picture; but I had a consciousness of the depth of the seclusion, and that mountains were embracing us on all sides, "I saw not, but I felt that they were there."
Friday, November 9th. - Rain, as yesterday, till 10 o'clock, when we took a boat to row down the lake. The day improved, - clouds and sunny gleams on the mountains. In the
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