Literary Celebrities of the English Lake-District

A portrait of the place that made English Romanticism. The Lake District's misty fells and still waters became the crucible for a revolution in poetry, and Frederick Sessions traces the lives of the writers who found their voices there. We meet William Wordsworth, walking the hills with his sister Dorothy beside him, recording the seeds of Lyrical Ballads in her journal. Thomas De Quincey, the opium-eater, fleeing London's shadows for Grasmere's quiet. Robert Southey, the conscientious laureate. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, brilliant and fractured. And lesser figures too: the Smith brothers, the Bacon scholar James Spedding, Harriet Martineau. Written in 1907 when memory of this literary golden age still lived in the landscape, these essays capture a world where poetry rose from mountain paths and misty mornings. For readers who dream of the Romantic poets, who want to walk where Wordsworth walked and see what Coleridge saw, this is a luminous guide to the haunted, beautiful ground of English literature.