The account that follows does not draw, as Wordsworth seems to imply, from one of
his own letters, but instead from one of Dorothy’s, which she wrote to William Johnson
in October 1818. This letter, which Dorothy copied into one of her notebooks, recorded
her recent excursion up Scafell Pike with her friend Mary Barker and three others.

Working from manuscripts in the Wordsworth Library, Owen and Smyser published this
incomplete work as an appendix to the Guide (“Appendix II: An Unpublished Tour”) in their 1974 edition of Wordsworth’s prose.

Wordsworth visited the Alps in 1790 with his friend Robert Jones and in 1820 with
Mary Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and several friends.

The poem here cited is Walter Savage Landor’s “Ad Larium” (“To Lake Como”) from his
1820 collection of original Latin verse Idyllia Heroica (Heroic Idylls). Translated into English (by John Talbot), it reads:

James Radcliffe, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater (1689-1716) and Charles Radcliffe, 5th Earl
of Derwentwater (1693-1746), were fervent Jacobites who were executed, respectively,
at the Tower after the 1715 and 1745 uprisings. In 1731 the family estate on the shore
of Derwentwater was seized by the crown and the timber was cleared to help raise funds
for the Greenwich hospital.

The Aegean peninsula on which Athens is located.

The quotation comes from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things), V.1369-1377 (50 B.C.E.), where the poet honors those who first cleared the land
for vineyards. William Ellery Leonard’s somewhat loose 1916 translation reads: