I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.

England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and clay.

All birds are incipient or would-be songsters in the spring. I find corroborative evidence of this even in the crowing of the cock.

Few places on earth have been as affectionately alchemised into literature as the Lake District.

The country is more of a wilderness, more of a wild solitude, in the winter than in the summer. The wild comes out. The urban, the cultivated, is hidden or negatived.

No one else looks out upon the world so kindly and charitably as the pedestrian; no one else gives and takes so much from the country he passes through.