Wordsworth here echoes Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: “Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, / Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
/ Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile, / The short and simple annals of the
poor” (29–32). Wordsworth expresses sentiments similar to those presented here in
his Essays Upon Epitaphs (written in 1809 and 1810, at about the same time as the letterpress for Select Views).

The religion (or holiness) of the place. Wordsworth probably expects readers to ingest
this phrase on analogy with “genius loci.” In any case, his primary comparison is
between the ethos of the little churches he has described and the “religion” of local
nature itself.

“The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another”—a quotation from Horace’s
Epistles, Book II, epistle ii, l. 55.

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.

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.

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.

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.