tion-and it consists of thirty sail-all of the line-the line of peace.

No shape so beautiful as the crescent-" sharpening its mooned horns." So thinks that living fleet. See how it is bending itself into Dian's bow-and gliding along too, like that celestial motion. Still liker must it seem to the eyes of the Naiads, now all looking up from their pleasant palaces through water pure as air. But you look now at the flags, and your thoughts are of the rainbow. And like the rainbow it breaks into pieces. 'Tis confusion all. No-out of momentary seeming disorder arises perfect regularity;-and in two Divisions,—with the NIL TIMEO and her train of barges between, lady-laden, and moving in music,-the Grand Fleet is standing on, under easy sail, bound dreamward, so it is felt, for some port in Paradise.

We have often promised that Maga should, in a few pages, give a guide to the Lakes. All we want to do, gentle lover of Nature, is to land you in the Region of Delight, and with a few directions, from which you will deviate as frequently and as far as you please, to send you with our blessing, like pilgrims towards her shrine among the sacred mountains. Let us begin soberly then with WINDERMERE. For our sake, and its own, love Bowness. There is not in all the world a more cheerful old church. The tower has ceased to deplore the death of her noble pine-trees, and ever looks lovingly down on the limber larches that here and there break the line of the low laurel-wreathed churchyard wall. In the heart of the lively village, pleasant is the Place of Tombs. 'Tis a village of villas. Yet the native Westmoreland cottages keep their ancient sites still, nor, intrenched within their blossoming orchards, seem to heed the gay intruders. Lo! on every knoll above and around "the Port," proud of its own peculiar architecture, a pretty edifice. We find fault with nothing there-houses nor their inhabitants—the cut of their coats, nor the shapes of their chimneys-their faces nor their figures, though some of these are droll enough; and as for the Westmoreland dialect, it wants but to be accompanied with the Scotch accent, to be the language of gods and goddesses. Pretty nymphs peep out of latticed windows and porched doors; nor could Camilla's self, had her feet been clogged like theirs, have clattered more neatly across the

blue-slate floors of their parlour-kitchens. 'Tis impossible to imagine any mode more elegant than theirs of tying up their hair; and the maidens, with a natural gracefulness, can put on and off their large shady bonnets, pink-lined and rosyribanded, without disarranging the snooded trefoil in its glossiness, crowned mayhap with a comb of ivory; auburn, mind ye-not red-for though to vulgar eyes there is a constant confusion of these two colours, different in nature are they as a bunch of carrots on a stall, and the glow of morn beginning to brighten the crest of the golden oak.

Having strolled, but not stared, through the village,—for quiet steps should have quiet eyes, and such will see more in an hour than in a year a traveller who behaves like a surveyor of window-lights, and looks at every domicile as if he were going to tax-nay, to surcharge it-step up to the hill behind the schoolhouse, and ask your own stilled or stirred heart what it thinks of Windermere,—

"Wooded Winandermere, the river lake!"

That is a line of our own; and we cannot help feeling, even at this distance, that it is characteristic. All the islands you see lie together, as if they loved one another, and that part of the Mere which is their birthplace. No wonder. Saw you ever such points and promontories—capes and headlands— and, above all, such bays? In lovelier undulations lay not the lands, where

"Southward through Eden went a river large,”

than the banks and braes of WINDERMERE, from Fell-Foot to Brathay; but the spirit of beauty seems concentrated between Storrs and Calgarth, diffusing itself so as to embrace Elleray and Orerstead apart on their own happy hills, yet feeling themselves, and felt by others, to belong to the Lake on which glad would they be to fling their shadows; and sometimes they do so, for reflection and refraction are two beautiful mysteries, and we have ourselves twice seen, with our own very eyes, those happy hills, those happy houses, and those happy horses, and cows, and sheep, hanging among

"all that uncertain heaven received

Into the bosom of the steady Lake;"

but that miracle must be rare--in all ordinary atmospheres those delightful dwellings are out of the reach of that Mirror, which seems not, in the midst of all the shadowy profusion, to miss the loveliness that would render more celestial still that evanescent world of enchantment.

After Christopher North, the best guide on Windermere, unquestionably, is Billy Balmer. But Billy cannot, any more than a bird, be at above half-a-dozen places at one time; and should he happen to be at Lowood, Waterhead, the Ferry, and Newby-Bridge, you will be in good hands should you for the day engage Tom or Jack Stevenson. There is no such thing

as a bad boat on Windermere. The SNAIL herself would have been in the superlative on the pond in your "policy;" but we entreat you just to cast your eye on these wherries. You are a Cockney, we presume, and you talk of the Thames. Why, that craft there-lying on the greensward-in Mr Colinson's field yonder with her bottom in the sunshine—for she is about to get a soaping-some call her the Nonpareil, and some the Grasshopper-Billy's deaf nephew's chef-d'œuvreand he is the lad to lay a plank-if pulled by the Stewartsons, we would back for fifty against anything at any of the Stairs, and you may take Campbell and Williams for your sculls. We remember the first Thames wherry that ever showed her rowlocks in Bowness Bay-and did not Will Garnet and ourselves give her the go-by like winking round the rock of Pullwyke, in Cowan's Swift? But that is an old story—and the famous Swift was the precursor of a race of Rapids that now shoot like sunbeams along the Lake.

If you are so fortunate as to be yet a bachelor, take a wherry or a skiff—if a Benedick, then embark with Betsy and the brats in that bumboat, and Billy, with a grave face, will pull you all away round by the back of the Great Island, and in among the small ones, requesting you with much suavity to pay particular attention to the Lily of the Valley, and ere long landing you at the Ferry-House, where he can be assisting at the tap of a new barrel, while in a family way your worthy woman and you are ascending the hill to the STATION, covered with laurels. But 'tis unnecessary to give you any farther instructions-for we perceive lying in the stern a three-year-old number of Ebony-and you have only to act over that "DAY ON WINDERMERE."

We remember a man in a coach, but forget his face and name, who, of all the Lakes, asserted most strenuously that the most beautiful was CONISTON. After a few miles we became curious to know the reason of his passionate predilection for that respectable sheet of water-when, putting his mouth close to our ear, he enunciated in a low but distinct and confidential whisper-"Char! Sir! Oh! those incomparable Char! They are the fish for my money, sir-Oh! Char! Char! Char!"

But independently even of Char! Char! Char! CONISTON is a good Lake. Nay, the fundamental features of the OLD MAN of the Mountains, especially when seen at sunrise, may be safely said to be sublime. But you must forget Windermere, before you can feel this her sister Lake to be very beautiful, and you never will for a moment suppose them Twins. It is easy, however, to forget Windermere; for the divinest things of earth are those of which, in ordinary moods, the soul soonest loses hold; so, having crossed the FERRY, lay yourself back in the corner of your carriage, and smoke a cigar. In a few minutes your mind will be in a mood of amiable and equable composure, almost approaching stupidity; and by the time you reach HAWKSHEAD you will be a fit companion for the man in the boat, and may be croaking in soliloquy Char! Char! Char! The country between the Ferry-House and Hawkshead is of the most pleasant and lively character-not unlike an article in Maga-full of ups and downs-here smooth and cultivated-there rough and rocky -pasture alternating with corn-fields, capriciously as one might think, but for good reasons known to themselves— cottages single, or in twos and threes, naturally desirous to see what is stirring, keep peeping over their neatly-railed front-gardens at the gentleman in a yellow post-chay—and as he thrusts his head out of the window to indulge in a final spit that might challenge America, his sense of beauty is suddenly kindled by the sight of sweet ESTHWAITE, whose lucid waters have, all unknown to that lover of the picturesque, been for a quarter of a mile reflecting his vehicle, and the small volume of cigar-smoke ever and anon puffed forth as he moves along among the morning reek of the stationary cottages. Nothing pleasanter than

and our traveller becomes at once poetical on the stately church-tower of the clustering village, bethinking himself fancifully of Hen and Chickens. Perhaps it is market-day morning; and the narrow streets are made almost impassable by bevies of mountain nymphs, sweet liberties, with cheeks lovely bright as the roses that are now letting slip the few unmelted dewdrops from the glow-heaps clustering in the eye of nature around the now lifeless porch of many a mountaindwelling, deserted at dawn, but to be refilled with mirth and music at meridian; for all purchases of household gear are over long before dinner-time. This is not Hawkshead Fair, and there is no dance at evening; nay, man and wife are already jogging homewards, in the good old fashion, on longbacked Dobbin; lasses are tripping over bank and brae, unaccompanied by their sweethearts; and shrill laughter is wafted away into the coppice woods by the wicked, that is, innocent gypsies, as they fling a kiss to you, enamoured Cockney, wheeling along at the rate of eight miles an hour, and fifteenpence a mile, thereby showing you how much dearer to their hearts than man's love at times is woman's friendship. The Lancashire Witches!

What's here! 'Tis a profound abyss-and for a little while you see nought distinctly-only a confused glimmer of dim objects, that, as you continue to gaze, grow into fields, and hedgerows, and single trees, and clumps, and groves, and woods, and houses sending up unwavering smoke-wreaths, and cattle in pastures green as emerald, all busy at longprotracted breakfast, and people moving about at labour or at leisure, an indolent and an industrious world-and lo! now that your eyes, soon familiarised with the unexpected spectacle, have put forth their full power of vision, distinguishable from all the material beauty, serenely smiles towards you, as if to greet the stranger the almost immaterial being of an isleless Lake!

That is CONISTON. Now that you see the Lake, for a while you see nothing else—nothing but the pure bright water and the setting of its sylvan shores. So soothed is the eye, that the eye itself is the same as one's very soul. Seeing is happiness; and the whole day is felt to be, as Wordsworth finely says,

"One of those heavenly days that cannot die."