It is true that “Poems of Places” are not meant to be photographs; and were they simply to reproduce the features of a particular district, and be an exact transcript of reality, they would be literary photographs, and not poems.  Poetry cannot, in the nature of things, be a mere register of phenomena appealing to the eye or the ear.  No imaginative writer, however, in the whole range of English Literature, is so peculiarly identified with locality as Wordsworth is; and there is not one on the roll of poets, the appreciation of whose writings is more aided by an intimate knowledge of the district in which he lived.  The wish to be able to identify his allusions to those places, which he so specially interpreted, is natural to every one who has ever felt the spell of his genius; and it is indispensable to all who would know the special charm of a region, which he described as “a national property,” and of which he, beyond 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