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.

The ruler of the winds in Greek mythology.

Wordsworth quotes from Thomas West’s The Antiquities of Furness (1774).

From Wordsworth’s sonnet, “The Monument Commonly Called Long Meg and her Daughter,
near the River Eden,” composed 1821 and first published in A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes (the first stand-alone edition of the Guide and the third edition overall, 1822). A revised version later appeared in Yarrow Revisited as one of the 1833 itinerary poems.

I.e., Thomas West. Wordsworth once again quotes West’s Antiquities of Furness (1774), as he clarifies two pages later. This is by far the longest direct quotation
in the Guide, further suggesting Wordsworth’s regard for West.

Wordsworth loosely quotes The History and Antiquities of the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland by Joseph Nicolson and Richard Burn (2 vols, 1777), vol. 1, p. 498.

Like other editors before us, we cannot locate the source for this quotation. It seems
likely that Wordsworth is recalling West’s history of the bloomeries in The Antiquities of Furness.

Presented in various sources during Wordsworth’s lifetime as a fragment of the unfinished
Recluse, these lines are now most commonly known as part of “Home at Grasmere.” They were
composed in 1800 and eventually published as “On Nature’s Invitation do I Come” in
1851. Several subsequent nineteenth-century guidebook writers quoted these lines.