the head of Coniston Water—the brooks are poisoned, the mountain sides scarred, and broken up by a hundred hideous buildings. The hills round Grasmere would fare little better if mining operations were carried on there. It is a sad thought, but apparently an inevitable result of the discovery of valuable metals. But here, of course, the question arises, are there such veins of metal, and is the railway an economical necessity? On tins subject we have evidence which ought to be good, if a poet, revered by all men of English speech, spoke true. We have the evidence of Wordsworth.
When the Kendal and Windermere Railway was projected, Wordsworth, as every one knows, wrote a sonnet on the subject, as indeed he did on most subjects. He contrasted the pride of the old hills and their indifference to the scars which their patriotic sons inflicted on them in the process of fortification, with the disgust of the same mountains at the sound of 'that whistle.' He called on the mountains, vales, and floods 'to share the passion of a just disdain.' This was poetry, if not pantheism; but Wordsworth returned to the charge in prose, and it is what he said in that humble medium that is most to the present purpose. 'In this district,' he observed, 'the manufactures are trifling; mines it has none, and its quarries are either wrought out or superseded; the soil is light, and the cultivateable parts of the country are very limited; so that it has little
