n155

Seathwaite (Borrowdale) is the wettest inhabited place in England, receiving approximately
140 inches of rain per year. As the local guide leading Dorothy’s party remarked,
they were fortunate to have a clear day with spectacular views.

n154

The account that follows does not draw, as Wordsworth seems to imply, from one of
his own letters, but instead from one of Dorothy’s, which she wrote to William Johnson
in October 1818. This letter, which Dorothy copied into one of her notebooks, recorded
her recent excursion up Scafell Pike with her friend Mary Barker and three others.

n153

Working from manuscripts in the Wordsworth Library, Owen and Smyser published this
incomplete work as an appendix to the Guide (“Appendix II: An Unpublished Tour”) in their 1974 edition of Wordsworth’s prose.

n150

Wordsworth visited the Alps in 1790 with his friend Robert Jones and in 1820 with
Mary Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and several friends.

n149

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.

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