Descriptive letterpress printed opposite this photograph:

A MOUNTAIN-STREAM, BORROWDALE.

WE are on Wordsworthian ground, among the lonely fells, the wild moors, and lofty hills of the Lake district scenes which have had the surpassingly good fortune to possess for their interpreter the great high-priest of the beautiful in Nature, the author of the “Excursion.” He, who of all others most deeply felt the power of Nature; its beauty, sublimity, and holiness, and its mysterious connection with the soul of man. In the presence of Nature he found all that he sought or cared to seek, all that could stir, or soothe, or elevate, a presence that moved him with the joy of elevated thought and the sense of something still more deeply interfused,

“Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.”

And therefore he gloried in being ever a lover of the woods and mountains where, alone with Nature, he found “the anchor of his purest thoughts, the guide and soul of all his moral being.”

“Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,

His daily teachers had been woods and rills,

The silence that is in the starry sky,

The sleep that is among the lonely hills.”

The stream here depicted is on the Borrowdale side of the Stake Pass, descending the hillside towards Rosthwaite. Swollen by heavy rains, it has become what the poet terms “a raving stream,’ rushing onward over black crags, through narrow chasms and rock-strewn ways, with a noise that almost drowns the wild music of the autumn wind among the faded woods, falling quickly from gradual slope to slope, with wild infracted course, until it reaches the level fields around Rosthwaite, and steals at length along the mazes of the quiet dale where it empties itself into the Derwent.

Pursuing the upward path against the stream will shortly take the pedestrian across the Stake Pass into the Langdales and past Dungeon-Ghyll Force, the scene of Wordsworth’s pastoral, “The Idle Shepherd Boys.” The route may then be pursued to Ambleside, or by way of Millbeck and the little chapel of Langdale across Red Bank, Where on his descent one of the fairest scenes in the Lakes, or indeed in England, will unfold itself to his view- the lovely lake and vale of Grasmere!