We get no knowledge of our
fellow-guests, all of whom, like ourselves, live in their own circles,
and are just as remote from us as if the lake lay between. The only
words I have spoken since arriving here have been to my own family or to
a waiter, save to one or two young pedestrians who met me on a walk, and
asked me the distance to Lowwood Hotel. "Just beyond here," said I, and
I might stay for months without occasion to speak again.
Yesterday forenoon J----- and I walked to Ambleside,--distant barely two
miles. It is a little town, chiefly of modern aspect, built on a very
uneven hillside, and with very irregular streets and lanes, which
bewilder the stranger as much as those of a larger city. Many of the
houses look old, and are probably the cottages and farm-houses which
composed the rude village a century ago; but there are stuccoed shops and
dwellings, such as may have been built within a year or two; and three
hotels, one of which has the look of a good old village inn; and the
others are fashionable or commercial establishments. Through the midst
of the village comes tumbling and rumbling a mountain streamlet, rushing
through a deep, rocky dell, gliding under an old stone inch, and turning,
when occasion calls, the great block of a water-mill. This is the only
very striking feature of the village,--the stream taking its rough
pathway to the lake as it used to do before the poets had made this
region fashionable.
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