Page:Landon in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book 1832.pdf/17



I had a charmed bark, 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.

Then I would think all pleasant thoughts; 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.

Kind faces flit before my eyes, 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."