ON 12 JULY 1833 Wordsworth set out from Rydal Mount on a tour of the islands that lie off the west coast of Cumberland and Scotland. In the company of his son John and his admirer Henry Crabb Robinson he visited the Isle of Man, and then went north to Staffa and Iona. Despite the remoteness of the situation, the three men were not so much solitary walkers as modern tourists, visiting Fingal's Cave, for instance, on a crowded steamboat. Returning after a fortnight, Wordsworth soon set off again, this time with his wife Mary. Turning a trip to Carlisle into a second tour, the couple came home on a road less travelled, following the valley of the river Eden to Ullswater, climbing the Kirkstone Pass, and arriving at Grasmere on 12 August. Two years later Wordsworth published a sequence of poems suggested by these northern journeys. The sequence, ‘Composed or Suggested During a Tour in the Summer of 1833’, was published in his 1835 collection Yarrow Revisited, a second edition of which appeared the next year, when Wordsworth took the opportunity to enlarge the sequence: the volume had been well received and Wordsworth revised it carefully to ensure that it would continue to be.1 Modern critics have not paid the sequence much attention, but that might tell us more about the typical biases of Romanticists than it does about Wordsworth's own sense of his poetic achievements. In 1835 and 1836 he was not – either in the public's or in his own mind – pre-eminently the poet of the Great Decade: the Lyrical Ballads, ‘Tintern Abbey’, the Immortality Ode, and others were certainly admired by some, but the popular acclaim he had long desired did not finally arrive until 1820, when his sonnets composed after a tour of the Duddon valley established his reputation.2 Those sonnets were published with his prose Guide through the whole District of the Lakes, which he had begun as a project combining topographical description with engravings, a format that had proved highly profitable for poets and artists such as Bloomfield and Turner. The Duddon valley, some reviewers had complained, was so obscure that Wordsworth had risked the public's indifference;3 but in 1835 and 1836 Wordsworth chose much better-known and even famous sightseeing destinations. As, again, he presented himself to readers as a commentator on their native land, he did so as someone whose moral and aesthetic responses might be fully shared, because his audience might visit, or might already have visited, the places he described.