The entrance of Great Langdale* wants the soft
beauty of the scenery we had already beheld, but it
possesses what tends more to exalt the imagination,
namely, a character of wildness and stern grandeur,
mingled with beauties in which art has no share, but
such as nature often scatters with a careless yet
magnificent profusion in a mountainous country. The
trees are plentiful, and mount high up the craggy
hills, feathering the sides of rugged precipices ; the
verdure of the dale is of a living green ; but no arti-
ficial grove, or shapely lawn, or handsome mansion
offends the character of the place. The Brathay
winds in the bottom — sometimes a huddling stream
hemmed in by thickets, and sometimes spreading out
in small sheets, which reflect the pastures, trees, and
hills with the most brilliant clearness.
A little within the vale, we found ourselves sur-
rounded by an amphitheatre of wooded hills, and in
the midst of a scene which, of its own character, is
perhaps not to be equalled at the lakes. The woods
of Loughrigg rose behind us, and those of Skelwith
mantled the opposite hill. Wansfell reared his pike
beyond Windermere and Ambleside, and Wetherlam
lifted his sublime mass over Little Langdale.
* Langdale sufficiently explains its own meaning — long-dale.
Yet it is a modern corruption of Langden ; den being the Saxon
word for valley. In Yorkshire this termination is common, e. g.
