Here is a view of Wordsworth's house--his home for almost 40 years. It is the sort of place that would please a lover of nature, and a fit surrounding for England's greatest nature poet. Wordsworth loved the outdoors. He saw beauty enough in a bed of daffodils to comfort his mind in sickness. The birds of the wood--the thrush, the cuckoo, the nightingale--furnished him music. He saw the lakes in their quiet and adored their calm. He wondered at the passing cloud and silent mysteries locked in the hills and forests. We owe more to Wordsworth for our love of the outdoors than to any other author. When a boy he liked to take long rambles alone, to sit and think in the woods away from people. He liked to follow the winding paths through the hills, or the road that had a stream for its comrade. He was not apoet of books: he wrote what he saw and felt when with Nature.

What American poets have loved and writeen about the outdoors? His home at Rydal Mount is backed by hills with Rydal Water, a little lake, near by. Rydal Water lies between Lake Grasmere and Lake Windermere. All these are in Westmoreland County in England. The whole section about here is called the Lake District. It is a county of mountains and lakes. For a long time in the early eighteenth hundreds it was the center of English poetry. Many noted authors took up their homes here. Today it is one of the places a lover of poetry and of natural beauty visits on a trip to England. Wordsworth did for this section what Burns and Scott did for Scott did for Scotland.