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.

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.

Ll. 39-40 of Wordsworth’s ode “The Pass of Kirkstone.” The complete poem appears at
the end of the Guide.

Latin: “He who distinguishes well, teaches well.” This anonymous adage was widely
repeated, especially in legal and philosophical contexts, in Wordsworth’s age.

Sheep in the Lake District tend to give birth (or “yean”) between mid-April and mid-May.

The 1810 edition is more definitive, claiming that nightingales are never found as
far north as the Lake District. As De Selincourt points out, if Wordsworth revised
this passage because he believed he had observed a nightingale in Cumbria between
1810 and 1820, he must have been mistaken, as all ornithological studies suggest the
bird never journeys this far north.

Thomas West.

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.