The trunks of the trees,
too, exhibit a similar parasitical vegetation. Parasitical is an unkind
phrase to bestow on this beautiful love and kindness which seems to exist
here between one plant and another; the strong thing--being always ready
to give support and sustenance, and the weak thing to repay with beauty,
so that both are the richer,--as in the case of ivy and woodbine,
clustering up the trunk of a tall tree, and adding Corinthian grace to
its lofty beauty.
Mr. W------, our landlord, has lent us a splendid work with engravings,
illustrating the antiquities of Furness Abbey. I gather from it that the
hotel must have been rebuilt or repaired from an old manor-house, which
was itself erected by a family of Prestons, after the Reformation, and
was a renewal from the Abbot's residence. Much of the edifice probably,
as it exists now, may have been part of the original one; and there are
bas-reliefs of Scripture subjects, sculptured in stone, and fixed in the
wall of the dining-room, which have been there since the Abbot's time.
This author thinks that what we had supposed to be the school-house (on
the authority of an old book) was really the building for the reception
of guests, with its chapel. He says that the tall arches in the church
are sixty feet high. The Earl of Burlington, I believe, is the present
proprietor of the abbey.
THE LAKES.
July 16th.--On Saturday, we left Newby Bridge, and came by steamboat up
Windermere Lake to Lowwood Hotel, where we now are.
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