IN THE PLACE OF THE OTHER

The author of the unpublished “Home at Grasmere”, with its intensely expressed desire to be enfolded and nurtured by a protective natural and social space, was otherwise not much in the habit of describing himself as at home in his world. Even though he spent much time walking up and down in his garden or close by his house – not to speak of sitting around reading books or sleeping late – his poetic persona is that of a long-distance wanderer across the hills and along the public roads, a figure of exemplary loneliness whose isolation rendered meaningful and critical every human encounter he experienced. Here he is not a cosseted genius surrounded by adoring women ready to cook his dinner, wash his clothes, take down his every line and fragment and copy them over and over, but a compulsive and constant traveler through the world. He was indeed an intrepid walker capable of keeping going for hours and even days and of covering considerable distances: De Quincey seriocomically estimated that Wordsworth might have walked 180,000 miles during his lifetime and declared him to have found in walking the stimulus to the animal spirits that others sought in alcohol.