This widely quoted passage is one of the earliest articulations of what would become
the founding ideals of the national parks movements in Britain, the United States,
and elsewhere.

The concluding sestet of “Degenerate Douglas,” a sonnet Wordsworth wrote in 1803 in
outrage over the wholesale clearing of Scottish woodlands by William Douglas, 3rd
Earl of March and 4th Duke of Queensberry.

The species Wordsworth has in mind is prunus padus, most widely known today as the hackberry tree.

In Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales (1782), the famed landscape theorist William Gilpin offers a lengthy denunciation
of the use of white in landscapes. In the midst of this peroration, Gilpin includes
a long quotation on the subject from William Lock (or Locke), a renowned eighteenth-century
patron of the arts.

A renowned portrait painter and the first president of the Royal Academy, Reynolds
(1723-1792) was one of late-eighteenth-century Britain’s most influential aesthetic
theorists. Reynolds’s observation on the color of houses does not appear in any of
his published works, so it seems likely Wordsworth heard it anecdotally.