SOURCE: An introduction to The Wordsworths and the Lakes: Home at Grasmere, Collins & Brown Limited, 1993, pp. 7-9.

In the following excerpt, Hughes-Hallett comments on the beginnings of the friendship between Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and De Quincey.

Soon after reaching Grasmere in Christmas week 1799 the young William Wordsworth expressed his feelings of joy in the poem 'Home at Grasmere.' . . . At Dove Cottage he and his sister Dorothy settled together into their small home, to them a paradise after years of separation from each other and of exile from the Lakes. 'Home' implied a return to their roots, to the countryside of their birth.

Here William was to compose the major body of his work. Surrounded by the lakes and valleys of his childhood, and cherished and encouraged by his beloved Dorothy, he could pursue that life of the imagination, the key to spiritual awareness, in which state, he...