n144

The region of southwestern Switzerland that includes Zermatt, the Matterhorn, and
other famous Alpine landmarks.

n146

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:

And day by day they’d force the woods to move
Still higher up the mountain, and to yield
The place below for tilth, that there they might,
On plains and uplands, have their meadow-plats,
Cisterns and runnels, crops of standing grain,
And happy vineyards, and that all along
O’er hillocks, intervales, and plains might run
The silvery-green belt of olive-trees,
Marking the plotted landscape; even as now
Thou seest so marked with varied loveliness
All the terrain which men adorn and plant
With rows of goodly fruit-trees and hedge round
With thriving shrubberies sown.

n147

The Aegean peninsula on which Athens is located.

n148

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.

n149

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:

O Como! Along your ragged shores
You deny none of the pious the shelter
Of a painted wall and stone roof;
From where you are, you hear the sailors’ many reports
Of astonishing storms, nor do you repel them from your peaceful shore;
But you soon prepare new wonders, either in the form of the south and east winds
Battering the caves even in summer,
Or a blinding hailstorm drawn up
From the bed of the surging River Adda.

n150

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

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