"After William Wordsworth reached his fiftieth year, his publications took new directions, which have been rejected or regarded as mysteries by later generations. This book examines the remarkable sets of poems arising from short journeys in Yorkshire, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, and from more substantial itineraries in Europe.

These are a record of a middle-aged and, later, old man actively 'wayfaring', as he expressed it, gathering impressions of places and people and turning them with poetic skill into sequences which, when examined, turn out to be statements of a poet's duty and England's destiny."--BOOK JACKET.