Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journal is a document of shared life at Dove Cottage. But it was begun as response to, and way coping with, absence. The first entry the journal, for 14 May 1800, records that Wordsworth’s1 brothers William John (the latter whom present cottage from January to September 1800 help set up their home) had off on trip Yorkshire. stayed behind and, mournful parting with...

William Cowper’s ‘fearless’ ‘confession’ is situated, in The Task (1784), as an introduction to the free operations of the fancy that make up the poem’s influential ‘brown study’ episode. Having ‘a soul that does not always think’ serves, in the passage that follows, not as an inhibition so much as an opportunity for the poet’s mind to do much more than think. The ‘ludicrous and wild’ conjuring...