14
STORRS, WINDERMERE LAKE.
To sail that lovely lake;
Nor should another prow but mine
Its silver silence wake.
No oar should cleave its sunny tide;
But I would float along,
As if the breath that filled my sail
Were but a murmured song.
Live early youth anew,
When hope took tones of prophecy,
And tones of music too;
And coloured life with its own hues—
The heart's true Claude Lorraine—
The rich, the warm, the beautiful,
I'd live them once again.
Sweet voices fill my ear,
And friends I long have ceased to love,
I'll still think loved, and here.
With such fair phantasies to fill,
Sweet Lake, thy summer air;
If thy banks were not Paradise,
Yet should I dream they were.
The calm and picturesque scenery of the Lake of Windermere might awake a thousand far more romantic visions than that of the return of the first warm feelings of youth. Shut out as it were from the world, and enshrined in delicious seclusion; here might the weary heart dream itself away, and find the freshness of the spring-time of the spirit return upon it. Here, at the mansion of Colonel John Bolton a circumstance which gives interest to the plate did the late Mr. Canning retire from the whirl of public affairs; and, to use the words of Fisher's Illustrations of Lancashire, "here was restored, in some measure, the elasticity of a mind, whose lofty energies were ultimately, and for our country we may say prematurely, exhausted in the preservation of a nation's welfare."