Page:Mary Lamb (Gilchrist 1883).djvu/99

Rh Hartley [Hazlitt had painted his portrait] and Shadow Hartley and there's Echo Hartley and there's Catch-me-fast Hartley," seizing his own arm with the other hand; thereby showing, said his father, that "he had begun to reflect on what Kant calls the great and inexplicable mystery that man should be both his own subject and object and that these should yet be one!"

Three delightful weeks they stayed. "So we have seen," continues Lamb to Manning, "Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater (where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater; I forget the name [Patterdale] to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. Mary was excessively tired when she got about half-way up Skiddaw but we came to a cold rill (than which nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones) and, with the reinforcement of a draught of cold water, she surmounted it most manfully. Oh its fine black head! and the bleak air atop of it with the prospect of mountains all about and about making you giddy; and then Scotland afar off and the border countries so famous in song and ballad! It was a day that will stand out like a mountain, I am sure, in my life."

Wordsworth was away at Calais but the Lambs stayed a day or so in his cottage with the Clarksons (he of slavery abolition fame and she "one of the friendliest, comfortablest women we know who made the little stay one of the pleasantest times we ever passed"); saw Lloyd again but remained distrustful of him on account of the seeds of bitterness he had once sown between the friends, and finally got home very pleasantly: