Windemere, August 1
. . I am more and more struck with the fact that the mass of summer “trippers” who pour through the Lake region, almost wholly English, view it simply as a place for excursions and care absolutely nothing for the literary or personal associations with the place.
I usually find, on sounding them, that they do not know any minor name associated with the region as those of De Quincey and Professor Wilson ( “Christopher North” ) and hardly anybody beyond Wordsworth and perhaps Southey.
This is like the utter want of English travellers at Stratford-on-Avon, a fact with which every American is struck.
It is so different from the throng of visitors to Cambridge and Concord in America. ... It seems to me that the Boer War has intensified the love of royalty everywhere, and I get no glimpse anywhere, even in the newspapers, of that strong republican minority of which one caught sight thirty years ago. In this respect the late Queen's moderate reign has been perhaps an evil as commending institutions bad in themselves, and perhaps Thackeray's “Four Georges” builded better than they knew.Grasmere, August 4
. . My wife and I drove out to Rydal Mount. . . . My host took me . . . up to the little upper-story room where the poet [Wordsworth] died; and he described to me how his widow lived there till her death years after, always coming down the steep stairway unaided, leaning on the rail, she being blind, 