“Cottages of mountain stone
  Clustered like stars some few, but single most,
  And lurking dimly in their shy retreats,
  Or glancing at each other cheerful looks
  Like separated stars with clouds between.”

But it is foolish to let ourselves be fretted by the villa, the hotel, and the tourist.  We may well be above all this in a scene that is haunted by a great poetic shade.  The substantial features and elements of beauty still remain, the crags and woody steeps, the lake, “its one green island and its winding shores; the multitude of little rocky hills.”  Wordsworth was not the first poet to feel its fascination.  Gray visited the Lakes in the autumn of 1769, and coming into the vale of Grasmere from the north-west, declared it to be one of the sweetest landscapes that art ever attempted to imitate, an unsuspected paradise of peace and rusticity.  We cannot indeed compare the little crystal mere, set like a gem in the verdant circle of the hills, with the grandeur and glory of Lucerne, or the radiant gladness and expanse of Como:  yet it has an inspiration of its own, to delight, to soothe, to fortify, and to refresh.

  “What want we? have we not perpetual streams,
  Warm woods, and sunny hills, and fresh green fields,
  And mountains not less green, and flocks and herds,
  And thickets full of songsters, and the voice
  Of lordly birds, an unexpected sound
  Heard now and then from morn to latest eve,
  Admonishing the man who walks below
  Of solitude and silence in the sky. 
  These have we, and a thousand nooks of earth
  Have also these, but nowhere else is found,
  Nowhere (or is it fancy?) can be found
  The one sensation that is here;...’tis the sense
  Of majesty, and beauty, and repose,
  A blended holiness of earth and sky,
  Something that makes this individual spot,
  This small abiding-place of many men,
  A termination, and a last retreat,
  A centre, come from wheresoe’er you will,
  A whole without dependence or defect,
  Made for itself, and happy in itself,
  Perfect contentment, Unity entire.”

In the Grasmere vale Wordsworth lived for half a century, first in a little cottage at the northern corner of the lake, and then (1813) in a more commodious house at Rydal Mount at the southern end, on the road to Ambleside.  In 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson, of Penrith, and this completed the circle of his felicity.  Mary, he once said, was to his ear the most musical and most truly English in sound of all the names we have.  The name was of harmonious omen.  The two beautiful sonnets that he wrote on his wife’s portrait long years after, when “morning into noon had passed, noon into eve,” show how much her large heart and humble mind had done for the blessedness of his home.