The Lake District
DERWENT WATER NEAR KESWICK – WINTER
Derwent Water – The town of Keswick sits neatly on the edge of the lake. Popular with tourists, but mostly of the appreciative kind, walkers, photographers, culture vultures seeking truth from the sites which inspired so many of the great, English, Romantic poets.
The Lake District used to be like my second home. My aunt, uncle and cousin moved there when I was around eleven years old, so there were happy summers, back in the days when kids could walk a half hour through the woods and swim and play in the cool waters of Lake Windermere without threat of being molested or harmed.
Work Without Hope
by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair-
The bees are stirring-birds are on the wing-
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face dream of Spring!
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
Yet well i ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.
SKELWITH BRIDGE
Pretty, and just a bit off the mass tourist track, Skelwith sits west of Ambleside and Lake Windermere, South of Grasmere.
