| Romantic Circles

n150

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:

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.

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.

n147

The Aegean peninsula on which Athens is located.

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.

n145

Located in the Lombardy region of northern Italy, the town of Bellagio has panoramic views of Lake Como. Photo: Raminus Falcon, Wikimedia Commons.

n144

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

n143

As Owen and Smyser note, this passage almost certainly alludes to J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), who painted a series of Alpine landscapes after returning to England from Switzerland in 1802. Wordsworth might also have been thinking of Philip James de Loutherbourg (1740-1812), the German-born but London-based painter of Avalanche in the Alps (1803). Illustration: De Loutherbourg’s Avalanche in the Alps (Wikimedia Commons).

n142

Wordsworth’s contention here is generally true, in part because most landscape paintings
by these “ancient masters” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were set in
classical or Biblical lands. Titian (1488/1490-1576) was born in the village of Pieve
di Cavore in the Italian Alps and lived much of his life in nearby Venice. Nicolas
Poussin (1594-1665) and his brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet (self-styled “Gaspard Poussin”)
(1615-1675) lived primarily in Paris and Rome, respectively, and spent little to no
time in the Alps (although Nicolas did paint Hannibal Crossing the Alps in 1625-1627). The French painter Claude Lorrain (1600-1682) visited Tyrol and Bavaria
in his twenties but was generally more drawn to beautiful or picturesque settings
than sublime landscapes like the Alps. The minor Italian painters Pellegrino Tibaldi
(1527-1596) and Bernardino Luini (c. 1482-1532) both resided in Milan, which is located
at the southern base of the Alps.

n141

Scafell Pike, the tallest peak in the Lake District—or, for that matter, all of England—is
3,209 feet high. The tallest peak in the Alps, Mont Blanc, is 15,781 feet high.