A renowned portrait painter and the first president of the Royal Academy, Reynolds
(1723-1792) was one of late-eighteenth-century Britain’s most influential aesthetic
theorists. Reynolds’s observation on the color of houses does not appear in any of
his published works, so it seems likely Wordsworth heard it anecdotally.

The first three lines of Wordsworth’s “Address to Kilchurn Castle, upon Loch Awe.”
Wordsworth began this poem during the tour of Scotland he took with his sister, Dorothy,
in 1803, but it wasn’t published until the 1827 version of his Poetical Works.

Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII.504.

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III.v, stanzas 39 and 40.

Holy of holies.

The ruler of the winds in Greek mythology.