The Art of Travel

V

On the Country and the City

1.

We left London by an afternoon train. I had arranged to meet M. below the departure board at Euston Station. Watching crowds step off the escalators and onto the concourse, I thought it miraculous that in the midst of so many people, I should ever be able to find her—as well as testimony to the strange particularities of desire that it should be precisely she whom I needed to find.

We travelled up the spine of England, and as night fell, there were intimations of countryside, though gradually all we could see was our own faces in windows that had turned into long black mirrors. Somewhere above Stoke-on-Trent I visited the buffet car, sensing once again, on my way through a succession of carriages that swayed as if I were drunk, the excitement caused by the prospect of eating something cooked in a moving train. The timer on the microwave gave off a chunky mechanical sound, like a detonator in an old war film, then rang a dainty bell to signal that it had finished with my hot dog—just as the train went over a level crossing, behind which I could make out the shadow of a group of cows.

We arrived at Oxenholme Station, subtitled ‘The Lake District', shortly before nine. Only a few others alighted with us, and we walked silently along the platform, our breaths visible in the night chill. Back inside the train, passengers were dozing or reading. The Lake District would, for them, be one stop among many, a place where they would look up from their books for a moment and take in the concrete pots arranged symmetrically along the platform, check the station clock and perhaps let out uninhibited yawns before the Glasgow train pulled off again into the darkness and they returned to a new paragraph.

The station was deserted, though it could not always have been thus, for unusually many of the signs were subtitled in Japanese. We had called from London to rent a car and found it at the end of a parking bay under a street lamp. The rental company had run out of the small models we had asked for, and had delivered instead a large burgundy family saloon that had a heady new-car smell to it, and an immaculate grey carpet across which the marks of a vacuum cleaner were still visible.

2.

The immediate motives for our journey were personal, but they might also be said to have belonged to a broader historical movement dating back to the second half of the eighteenth century, in which city dwellers began for the first time to travel in great numbers through the countryside in an attempt to restore health to their bodies and, more important, harmony to their souls. In the year 1700, 17 percent of the population of England and Wales lived in cities and towns. By 1850, 50 percent did, and by 1900, 75 percent.

We headed north towards the village of Troutbeck, a few miles above Lake Windermere. We had reserved a room at an inn called the Mortal Man, where two narrow beds with stained blankets had been pushed together. The landlord showed us the bathroom, warned us of the high phone charges, which he suspected (from our clothes and our hesitant manner at the reception desk) we would be unable to afford, and, as he took his leave, promised us three days of perfect weather and welcomed us to the Lake District.

We tried the television and found news from London but after a moment switched it off and opened the window instead. There was an owl hooting outside, and we thought of its strange existence, out there in the otherwise silent night.

I had come in part because of a poet. That evening in our room, I read another section of Wordsworth's Prelude. The cover of the paperback was illustrated with a portrait by Benjamin Haydon, which showed Wordsworth severe and aged. M. declared him an old toad and went to have a bath, though later, while standing by the window applying face cream, she recited several lines from a poem whose title she had forgotten, which she said had moved her perhaps more than anything else she had ever read:

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind

Ode, Intimations of Immortality

We went to bed, and I tried to read further, though it became hard to concentrate after I found a long blond hair caught on the headboard that belonged neither to M. nor to me and hinted at the many guests who had stayed in the Mortal Man before us, one of whom was perhaps now on another continent, unaware of having left a part of herself behind. We fell into fitful sleep to the sound of the owl outside.

3.

William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in the small town of Cocker-mouth on the northern edge of the Lake District. He spent, in his words, ‘half his boyhood in running wild among the Mountains' and aside from interludes in London and Cambridge and travels around Europe, lived his whole life in the Lake District, first in a modest two-storeyed stone dwelling, Dove Cottage in the village of Gras-mere, and then, as his fame increased, in a more substantial home in nearby Rydal.

And almost every day he went on a long walk in the mountains or along the lakeshore. He was unbothered by the rain that, as he admitted, tended to fall in the Lake District ‘with a vigour and perseverance that may remind the disappointed traveller of those deluges of rain which fall among the Abyssinian mountains for the annual supply of the Nile'. His acquaintance Thomas De Quincey would estimate that Wordsworth had walked between 175,000 and 180,000 miles over his lifetime—a statistic that was all the more remarkable, added De Quincey, considering his physique: ‘For Wordsworth was, upon the whole, not a well-made man. His legs were pointedly condemned by all the female connoisseurs in legs that I ever heard lecture upon the topic' Sadly, De Quincey continued, ‘the total effect of Wordsworth's person was always worst in a state of motion, for, according to the remark I have heard from many country people, “he walked like a cade”—a cade being some sort of insect which advances by an oblique motion.'

It was during his cadelike walks that Wordsworth derived the inspiration for many of his works, including ‘To a Butterfly', ‘To the Cuckoo', ‘To a Skylark', ‘To the Daisy' and ‘To the Small Celandine'—poems about natural phenomena that poets had hitherto looked at only casually or ritualistic ally, if at all, but that Wordsworth now declared to be the noblest subjects of his craft. On the sixteenth of March 1802—according to the journal of his sister, Dorothy, who kept a record of her sibling's movements around the Lake District—Wordsworth walked across a bridge at Brothers Water, a placid lake near Patterdale, and then sat down to write the following:

The cock is crowing

The stream is flowing

The small birds twitter,

The lake doth glitter…

There's joy in the mountains;

There's life in the fountains;

Small clouds are sailing,

Blue sky prevailing

A few weeks afterwards, the poet found himself moved to write by the beauty of a sparrow's nest:

Look, five blue eggs are gleaming there!

Few visions have I seen more fair,

Nor many prospects of delight

More pleasing than that simple sight!

He experienced the same need to express joy a few summers later on hearing the sound of a nightingale:

O Nightingale! thou surely art

A Creature of a fiery heart—…

Thou sing'st as if the God of wine

Had help'd thee to a Valentine.

These were not haphazard articulations of pleasure. Behind them lay a well-developed philosophy of nature, which—infusing all of Wordsworth's work—made an original and, in the history of Western thought, hugely influential claim about our requirements for happiness and the origins of our unhappiness. The poet proposed that nature—which he took to comprise, among other elements, birds, streams, daffodils and sheep—was an indispensable corrective to the psychological damage inflicted by life in the city.

The message met with vicious initial resistance. Lord Byron, reviewing Wordsworth's Poems in Two Volumes in 1807, was bewildered that a grown man could make such claims on behalf of flowers and animals: ‘What will any reader out of the nursery say to such namby-pamby… an imitation of such minstrelsy as soothed our cries in the cradle?' The editors of the Edinburgh Review concurred, declaring Wordsworth's poetry ‘a piece of babyish absurdity' and wondering whether it might not represent a deliberate attempt by the author to turn himself into a laughingstock: ‘It is possible that the sight of a garden spade or a sparrow's nest might really have suggested to Wordsworth a train of powerful impressions … but it is certain that to most minds, such associations will always appear forced, strained and unnatural. All the world laughs at ‘Elegiac Stanzas to a Suckling-Pig', ‘A Hymn on Washing-Day', ‘Sonnets to One's Grandmother', or ‘Pindaric Odes on Gooseberry-Pie'; and yet, it seems, it is not easy to convince Mr Wordsworth of this.'

Parodies of the poet's work soon began to circulate in the literary journals.

When I see a cloud,

I think out loud,

How lovely it is,

To see the sky like this ran one.

Was it a robin that I saw?

Was it a pigeon or a daw?

ran another.

Wordsworth was stoic. ‘Trouble not yourself upon the present reception of these poems,' he advised Lady Beaumont. ‘Of what moment is that when compared with what I trust is their destiny to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves.'

He was wrong only about how long it would take. ‘Up to 1820, the name of Wordsworth was trampled under foot,' explained De Quincey ‘From 1820 to 1830 it was militant; and from 1830 to 1835 it has been triumphant' Taste underwent a slow but radical transformation. The reading public gradually ceased guffawing and learnt to be charmed and even to recite by heart hymns to butterflies and sonnets on celandines. Wordsworth's poetry attracted tourists to the places that had inspired it. New hotels were opened in Windermere, Rydal and Grasmere. By 1845, it was estimated that there were more tourists in the Lake District than there were sheep. They prized glimpses of the cadeish creature in his garden in Rydal, and on hillsides and lakeshores sought out the sites whose power he had described in verse. On the death of Southey in 1843, Wordsworth was appointed England's poet laureate. Plans were drawn up by a group of well-wishers in London to have the Lake District renamed Wordsworthshire.

By the time of the poet's death at the age of eighty, in 1850 (by which year half of the population of England and Wales was urban), serious critical opinion seemed almost universally sympathetic to his suggestion that regular travel through nature was a necessary antidote to the evils of the city.

4.

Part of Wordsworth's complaint was directed towards the smoke, congestion, poverty and ugliness of cities, but clean-air bills and slum clearance would not by themselves have eradicated his critique. For it was the effect of cities on our souls, rather than on our health, that concerned him.

The poet accused cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and a desire to shine in the eyes of strangers. City dwellers had no perspective, he alleged, they were in thrall to what was spoken of in the street or at the dinner table. However well provided for, they had a relentless desire for new things, which they did not genuinely lack and on which their happiness did not depend. And in this crowded, anxious sphere, it seemed harder than it did on an isolated homestead to begin sincere relationships with others. ‘One thought baffled my understanding,' wrote Wordsworth of his residence in London: ‘How men lived even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still strangers, and knowing not each other's names.'

Myself afflicted by a few of these ills, I had, one evening several months before my journey to the Lake District, emerged from a gathering held in the centre of London, that ‘turbulent world/of men and things' (The Prelude). Walking away from the venue, envious and worried about my position, I found myself deriving unexpected

relief from the sight of a vast object overhead, which, in spite of the darkness, I attempted to photograph with a pocket camera—and which served to bring home to me, as rarely before, the redemptive power of natural forces with which so much of Wordsworth's poetry is concerned.

The cloud had floated over that part of the city only a few minutes before and, given the strong westerly wind, was not destined to remain above it long. The lights of surrounding offices lent to its edges an almost decadent fluorescent orange glow, making it look like a grave old man bedecked with party decorations, and yet its granite-grey centre testified to its origins in the slow interplay of air and sea. Soon it would be over the fields of Essex, then the marshes and oil refineries, before heading out over the mutinous North Sea waves.

Keeping my eyes fixed on the apparition while walking towards the bus stop, I felt my anxieties abate, and I turned over in my mind some lines the cadeish poet once composed in honour of a Welsh valley:

… [Nature] can so inform

The mind that is within us, so impress

With quietness and beauty, and so feed

With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,

Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life,

Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb

Our chearful faith that all which we behold

Is full of blessings.

Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

5.

In the summer of 1798, Wordsworth and his sister went on a walking holiday along the Wye Valley in Wales, where William had a moment of revelation about the power of nature that was to resonate through his poetry for the rest of his life. It was his second visit to the valley; he had walked along it five years before. In the intervening period he had endured a succession of unhappy experiences: he had spent time in London, a city he feared; altered his political views by reading Godwin; transformed his sense of a poet's mission through his friendship with Coleridge and travelled across a revolutionary France wrecked by Robespierre's Great Terror.

Back in Wye, Wordsworth found an elevated spot where he sat down under a sycamore tree, looked out across the valley and its river, cliffs, hedgerows and forests and was inspired to write perhaps his greatest poem. At least, ‘no poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this', he would later explain of ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tin-tern Abbey', which he subtitled ‘On revisiting the banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798', an ode to the restorative powers of nature.

Though absent long,

These forms of beauty have not been to me,

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet …

With tranquil restoration.

Philip James de Loutherbourg, The River Wye at Tintern Abbey, 1805

The dichotomy of town and country forms the backbone of the poem, with the latter repeatedly being invoked as a counter to the pernicious influence of the former:

how oft,

In darkness, and amid the many shapes

Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir

Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,

Have hung upon the beatings of my heart,

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee

O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,

How often has my spirit turned to thee!

This expression of gratitude was to recur in The Prelude, where the poet once more acknowledged his debt to nature for enabling him to dwell in the cities without succumbing to the base emotions that, he held, they habitually fostered:

If, mingling with the world, I am content

With my own modest pleasures, and have lived …

removed

From little enmities and low desires,

The gift is yours …

Ye winds and sounding cataracts! 'tis yours,

Ye mountains! thine, O Nature!

6.

Why? Why would proximity to a cataract, a mountain or any other form of nature render one any less likely to experience ‘enmities and low desires' than proximity to crowded streets?

The Lake District offered suggestions. M. and I rose early on our first morning and went down to the Mortal Man's breakfast room, which was painted pink and overlooked a luxuriant valley. It was raining heavily but the landlord assured us, before serving us porridge and informing us that eggs would cost extra, that this was but a passing shower. A tape recorder was playing Peruvian pipe music, interspersed with highlights of Handel's Messiah. Having eaten, we packed a rucksack and drove to the town of Ambleside, where we bought a few items to take with us on a walk: a compass, a waterproof map holder, water, chocolate and some sandwiches.

Little Ambleside had the bustle of a metropolis. Lorries were noisily unloading their goods outside shops, there were placards everywhere advertising restaurants and hotels, and though it was still early, the tea shops were full. On racks outside newsagents' stalls, the papers reported on the latest development in a political scandal in London.

A few miles northwest of the town, in the Great Langdale Valley, the atmosphere was transformed. For the first time since arriving in the Lake District, we were in deep countryside, where nature was more in evidence than humans. On either side of the path stood a number of oak trees. Each one grew far from the shadow of its neighbour, in fields so appetising to sheep as to have been eaten down to a perfect lawn. The oaks were of noble bearing: they did not trail their branches on the ground as willows are wont to do, nor did their leaves have the dishevelled appearance common to certain poplars, which can look from close up as though they have been awoken in the middle of the night and not had time to fix their hair. Instead they gathered their lower branches tightly under themselves, while their upper branches grew in small, orderly steps. The result was a rich green foliage in an almost perfect circle, like an archetypal tree drawn by a child.

The rain, which continued to fall confidently despite the promises of the landlord, gave us a sense of the mass of the oaks. From under their damp canopy, rain could be heard falling on forty thousand leaves, creating a harmonious pitter-patter that varied in pitch according to whether the water dripped onto a large or a small leaf, a high or a low one, one loaded with accumulated water or not. The trees themselves were an image of ordered complexity: the roots patiently drew nutrients from the soil, and the capillaries of the trunks sent water twenty-five metres upwards, each branch taking enough but not too much for the needs of its own leaves, each leaf in turn contributing to the maintenance of the whole. The trees were an image of patience, for they would sit out this rainy morning and the many that would follow it without complaint, adjusting themselves to the slow shift of the seasons, showing no ill temper in a storm, no desire to wander from their spot for an impetuous journey across to another valley—content to keep their many slender fingers deep in the clammy soil, metres from their central stems and far from those tallest leaves that held the rainwater in their palms.

Wordsworth enjoyed sitting beneath oaks, listening to the rain or watching sunbeams fracture across their leaves. What he saw as the patience and dignity of the trees seemed to him characteristic of nature's works, which were to be valued for holding up,

before the mind intoxicate

With present objects, and the busy dance

Of things that pass away, a temperate show

Of objects that endure.

Nature would, he proposed, dispose us to seek out in life and in one another ‘whate'er there is desirable and good'. An ‘image of right reason', nature would temper the crooked impulses of urban life.

If we are to accept (even in part) Wordsworth's argument, we may need to concede a prior principle holding that our identities are to a greater or lesser extent malleable, changing according to whom—and sometimes what—we are with. The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy. Thus A's obsession with status and hierarchy may—almost imperceptibly—lead B to worry about his own significance, even as A's jokes quietly rouse his hitherto submerged sense of the ridiculous. But move B to another environment, and his concerns will subtly shift in response to a new interlocutor.

What, then, may be expected to happen to a person's identity in the company of a cataract or a mountain, an oak tree or a celandine, objects that after all have no conscious concerns and so, it would seem, can neither encourage nor censor particular behaviours? And yet an inanimate object may, to come to the linchpin of Wordsworth's claim for the beneficial effects of nature, still work an influence on those around it. Natural scenes have the power to suggest certain values to us—oaks dignity, pines resolution, lakes calm—and therefore may, in unobtrusive ways, act as inspirations to virtue.

In a letter written to a young student in the summer of 1802, addressing the task of poetry, Wordsworth came close to specifying the values that he felt nature embodied: A great Poet… ought to a certain degree to rectify men's feelings… to render their feelings more sane, pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to Nature.'

In every natural landscape, Wordsworth found instances of such sanity, purity and permanence. Flowers, for example, were models of humility and meekness:

Sweet silent Creature!

That breath'st with me in sun and air,

Do thou, as thou art wont, repair

My heart with gladness, and a share

Of thy meek nature!

Animals, for their part, were paragons of stoicism. Wordsworth at one point became quite attached to a bluetit that even in the worst weather sang in the orchard above Dove Cottage. During their first, freezing winter there, the poet and his sister were inspired by a pair of swans that were also new to the area, and that endured the cold with greater patience than the Wordsworths.

An hour up the Langdale Valley, the rain having abated, M. and I hear a faint tseep, rapidly repeated, alternating with a louder tissip. Three meadow pipits are flying out of a patch of rough grass. A black-eared wheatear is looking pensive on a conifer branch, warming its pale sandy-buff feathers in the late-summer sun. Stirred by something, it takes off and circles the valley, releasing a rapid and high-pitched schwer, schwee, schwee-oo. The sound has no effect on a caterpillar that was walking strenuously across a rock, nor on the many sheep dotted across the valley floor.

One of the sheep ambles towards the path and looks curiously at his visitors. Humans and sheep stare at each other in wonder. After a moment, the sheep sinks into a reclining pose and takes a lazy mouthful of grass, which he chews on one side of his mouth, as if it were gum. What makes me me and him him? Another sheep approaches and lies down next to his companion, wool to wool, and for a second they exchange what appears to be a knowing, mildly amused glance.

A few meters ahead, from inside a deep-green bush that runs down to a stream comes a noise like the sound of a lethargic old man clearing his throat after a heavy lunch. It is followed by an incongruously frantic rustle, as though someone was rifling through a bed of leaves in an irritated search for a valuable possession. But on noticing that it has company, the creature falls silent—the tense silence of a child holding his or her breath at the back of a clothes cupboard during a game of hide-and-seek. Back in Ambleside, people are buying newspapers and eating scones, while out here, buried in a bush, is a thing, probably with fur and perhaps a tail, interested in eating berries or flies, scurrying in the foliage and grunting—and yet still, for all its oddities, a contemporary, a fellow sleeping and breathing creature alive on this singular planet in a universe otherwise made up chiefly of rocks and vapours and silence.

One of Wordsworth's poetic ambitions was to induce us to see the many animals living alongside us that we typically ignore, registering them only out of the corner of our eyes and feeling no appreciation for what they are up to and want: shadowy, generic presences such as the bird up on the steeple and the rustling creature in the bush. He invited his readers to abandon their usual perspectives and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with. A few days before travelling to the Lake District, I had happened upon a nineteenth-century book that discussed Wordsworth's interest in birds and in its preface hinted at the benefits of the alternative perspective they offered: ‘I am sure it would give much pleasure to many of the public if the local, daily and weekly press throughout this country would always record, not only the arrivals and departures of Lords, Ladies, M.P's and the great people of this land, but also the arrivals and departures of birds.' If we are pained by the values of the age or of the elite, it may be a source of relief for us to come upon reminders of the diversity of life on our planet, to hold in mind that alongside the business of the great people of the land, there are also pipits tseeping in meadows.

Looking back on Wordsworth's early poems, Coleridge would assert that their genius had been to ‘give the charm of novelty to things of every day and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude[,] we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.' Nature's ‘loveliness' might in turn, according to Wordsworth, encourage us to locate the good in ourselves. Two people standing on the edge of a rock overlooking a stream and a grand wooded valley might thus transform their relationship not just with nature but also, and just as significantly, with each other.

There are concerns that seem indecent when one is in the company of a cliff, and others to which cliffs naturally lend their assistance, their majesty encouraging the steady and high-minded in ourselves, their size teaching us to respect with good grace and an awed humility all that surpasses us. It is of course still possible to feel envy for a colleague before a mighty cataract, but if the Wordsworthian message is to be believed, it is a little more unlikely. Wordsworth argued that through a life spent in nature, his character

Asher Brown Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849

had been shaped to resist competition, envy and anxiety—and so he celebrated

… that first I looked

At Man through objects that were great or fair;

First communed with him by their help. And thus

Was founded a sure safeguard and defence

Against the weight of meanness, selfish cares,

Coarse manners, vulgar passions, that beat in

On all sides from the ordinary world

In which we traffic.

7.

M. and I were unable to stay long in the Lake District. Three days after our arrival, we were back on the London train, seated opposite a man who was making calls on his mobile phone in a vain search, as the carriage learnt during conversations extending across many fields and industrial cities, for someone called Jim, who owed him money.

Even if we allow how beneficial contact with nature may be, we recognize that its effects must surely be of limited duration. Three days in nature can scarcely be expected to work a psychological effect lasting longer than a few hours.

Wordsworth, however, was less pessimistic. In the autumn of 1790, the poet went on a walking tour of the Alps. He travelled from Geneva to the Vale of Chamouni, then crossed the Simplon Pass and descended through the Ravine of Gondo to Lake Maggiore. In a letter to his sister describing what he had seen, he wrote, ‘At this moment when many of these landscapes are floating before my mind, I feel a high enjoyment in reflecting that perhaps scarce a day of my life will pass in which I shall not derive some happiness from these images' (emphasis added).

This was no hyperbole. Decades later, the Alps would continue to live within him and to strengthen his spirit whenever he evoked them. Their survival led him to argue that we may see in nature certain scenes that will stay with us throughout our lives and offer us, every time they enter our consciousness, both a contrast to and relief from present difficulties. He termed such experiences in nature ‘spots of time':

There are in our existence spots of time,

That with distinct pre-eminence retain

A renovating virtue…

That penetrates, enables us to mount,

When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

This belief in small, critical moments in nature explains Wordsworth's unusually specific way of subtitling many of his poems. The subtitle of ‘Tintern Abbey', for example—'On revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798'—cites an exact day month and year to suggest that a few moments in the countryside overlooking a valley could number among the most significant and useful of one's life, and be as worthy of precise remembrance as a birthday or a wedding.

I, too, was granted a ‘spot of time'. It occurred in the late afternoon of the second day of our visit to the Lake District. M. and I were sitting on a bench near Ambleside eating chocolate bars. We had exchanged a few words about which kinds of chocolate bars we preferred. M. said she liked caramel-filled ones, I expressed a greater interest in the dry biscuity sort, and then we fell silent and I looked out across a field to a clump of trees by a stream. There were a host of different colours in the trees, sharp gradations of green, as if someone had fanned out samples from a colour chart. These trees gave off an impression of astonishing health and exuberance. They seemed not to care that the world was old and often sad. I was tempted to bury my face in them so as to be restored by their smell. It seemed extraordinary that nature could on its own, without any concern for the happiness of two people eating chocolate on a bench, have come up with a scene so utterly suited to a human sense of beauty and proportion.

My receptivity to the scene lasted only a minute. Thoughts of work then intruded, and M. suggested that we return to the inn so she could make a phone call. I was unaware of having fixed the scene in my memory until, one midafternoon in London, I was waiting in a traffic jam, oppressed by cares, and the trees came back to me, pushing aside a raft of meetings and unanswered correspondence and asserting themselves in my consciousness. I was carried away from the traffic and the crowds and returned to trees whose names I didn't know but which I could see as clearly as if they were standing before me. These trees provided a ledge against which I could rest my thoughts; they protected me from the eddies of anxiety and, in a small way that afternoon, contributed a reason to be alive.

At eleven o'clock in the morning on 15 April 1802, Wordsworth saw some daffodils along the western shore of Ullswater Lake, a few miles north of where M. and I stayed. There were some ten thousand of these flowers ‘dancing in the breeze', he wrote. The waves of the lake seemed to dance beside them, too, though the daffodils ‘outdid the sparkling waves in glee'. ‘What wealth the shew to me had brought', he explained of a moment that would become, for him, a spot of time:

For oft when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood.

They flash upon that inward eye …

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the Daffodils.

An unfortunate last line perhaps, open to Byronic accusations of being ‘namby-pamby', but nevertheless offering the consoling idea that in vacant or pensive moods, in traffic in the city's ‘turbulent world', we may also draw on images of our travels through nature, images of a group of trees or a spread of daffodils on the shores of a lake, and with their help, blunt a little the forces of ‘enmity and low desires'.

On Travelling in the Lake District,

14—18 September 2000