lines of road leading from Grasmere that Wordsworth's associations
cluster,--the route over Dunmailraise, which led him to Keswick, to
Coleridge and Southey at Greta Hall, and to other friends in that
neighbourhood; and the route over Kirkstone, which led him to
Ullswater, and the friendly houses of Patterdale, Hallsteads, and
Lowther Castle. The first of these two routes was that over which
the _Waggoner_ plied; it skirts the lovely shore of Thirlmere,--a
lonely sheet of water, of exquisite irregularity of outline, and
fringed with delicate verdure, which the Corporation of Manchester
has lately bought to embank it into a reservoir. _Dedecorum pretiosus
emptor_! This lake was a favourite haunt of Wordsworth's; and upon a
rock on its margin, where he and Coleridge, coming from Keswick and
Grasmere, would often meet, the two poets, with the other members of
Wordsworth's loving household group, inscribed the initial letters
of their names. To the "monumental power" of this Rock of Names
Wordsworth appeals, in lines written when the happy company who
engraved them had already been severed by distance and death;

O thought of pain,
That would impair it or profane!
And fail not Thou, loved Rock, to keep
Thy charge when we are laid asleep.

The rock may still be seen, but is to be submerged in the new
reservoir. In the vale of Keswick itself, Applethwaite, Skiddaw, St.
Herbert's Island, Lodore, are commemorated in sonnets or inscriptions.
And the Borrowdale yew-trees have inspired some of the poet's
noblest lines,--lines breathing all the strange forlornness of
Glaramara's solitude, and the withering vault of shade.