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.

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

Thomas Gray died two years after the 1769 publication of his Tour of the English Lakes. For more on Gray’s Tour, see the introductory essay.

Both the venerable Bede and local tradition hold that the seventh-century anchorite
St. Herbert chose this island on Derwentwater as the site for his hermitage.

More commonly known as Derwent Isle, this island’s alternate name can be traced to
the era when, prior to the sixteenth-century dissolution of the monasteries, it was
owned by the monks of Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire.