William Wordsworth mentioned Turner`s `fine drawing` in his Guide to the Lakes. One can imagine his pleasure at recalling his experiences by retracing his footsteps through Turners engraving.

Writing to Coleridge in December 1799 he says;

"Twas bitter cold, the wind driving the snow behind us the the best style of a mountain storm. We soon reached an inn at a place called Hardraw, and descending from our vehicles, after warming ourselves by the cottage fire, we walked up the brookside to take a view of a third waterfall, . . . . .

We walked up to the fall; and what would I not give if I could convey to you the feelings and images which where communicated to me?

After cautiously sounding our way over stones of all colours and sizes, encased in the clearest water formed by the spray of the fall we found the rock, which had before appeared like a wall, extending itself over our heads like the ceiling of a huge cave, from the summit of which the water shot directly over our heads into a basin, and among the fragments wrinkled over with masses of ice as white as snow, or rather, as Dorothy said, like congealed froth. The water fell at least tens yards from us and we stood directly behind it."

About Wordsworth

The poet William Wordsworth was born in 1770. By the time of his death in 1850 he had produced some of English poetry’s greatest works and influenced future generations of poets.

Most of his life was spent in the Lake District. He was born in Cockermouth (a town in the northern Lakes); educated at Hawkshead Grammar school; and spent much of his adult life in Grasmere and Rydal, right in the heart of the Lake District. He died at Rydal Mount in 1850, and is buried, with his family, in Grasmere churchyard.

He was witness to great social, political and artistic change and his experiences and attitudes are reflected not only in his poetry, but also in letters and prose works. Place and family were also important to Wordsworth. This is clear in his abiding love of the Lake District and settled domestic life, celebrated in poems such as ‘Home at Grasmere’.