ond all other men, may be said to have effected the
literary "conveyance" to posterity.

But it has been asked--and will doubtless be asked again--what is the
use of a minute identification of all these places? Is not the general
fact that Wordsworth described this district of mountain, vale, and
mere, sufficient, without any further attempt at localisation? The
question is more important, and has wider bearings, than appears upon
the surface.

It must be admitted, on the one hand, that the discovery of the precise
point in every local allusion is not necessary to an understanding or
appreciation of the Poems. But, it must be remembered, on the other
hand, that Wordsworth was never contented with simply copying what he
saw in Nature. Of the 'Evening Walk'--written in his eighteenth year--he
says that the plan of the poem

"has not been confined to a particular walk or an individual place; a
proof (of which I was unconscious at the time) of my unwillingness to
submit the poetic spirit to the chains of fact and real circumstance.
The country is idealised rather than described in any one of its local
aspects."[13]

Again, he says of the 'Lines written while Sailing in a Boat at Evening':

"It was during a solitary walk on the banks of the Cam that I was
first struck with this appearance, and applied it to my own feelings
in the manner here expressed, changing the scene to the Thames, near
Windsor"; [14]

and of 'Guilt and Sorrow', he said,

"To obviate some distraction in the minds of those who are well
acquainted with Salisbury Plain, it may be proper to say, that of the
features described as belonging to it, one or two are taken from other
desolate parts of England." [15]

In 'The Excursion' he passes from Langdale to Grasmere, over to
Patterdale, back to Grasmere, and again to Hawes Water, without warning;
and even in the case of the "Duddon Sonnets" he introduces a description
taken direct from Rydal. Mr. Aubrey de Vere tells of a conversation he
had with Wordsworth, in which he vehemently condemned the
ultra-realistic poet, who goes to Nature with

"pencil and note-book, and jots down whatever strikes him most,"
adding, "Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms!
He should have left his pencil and note-book at home; fixed his eye as
he walked with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and
taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy