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The Lake District, Pinnacle of Romantic Imagination

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Historically inhabited and visited by Romantic and Victorian poets, this place has acquired a promising oneiric character for whoever visits it.

Historically, the Lake District of England was shared by the Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire counties, but it is now entirely in modern Cumbria. This region has 20 principal lakes and hundreds of bodies of water called mere or wáter, which are fairly smaller in size. The entire region is surrounded by beautiful valleys and rocks, eroded plains, and oak and softwood forests which are all covered with moss, as if this was the very home fiction.

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But the Lake region is not only known for its bucolic beauty –– is also known for its association with the Romantic poets of the 19th century, also referred to as the Lake Poets. Many of them lived and mostly pensively walked through the surroundings as they left testimony in their work.

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William Wordsworth, who spent 60 years in the area, wrote ‘I Wandered Lonley as a Cloud’ inspired by the daffodils of the Ullswater Lake. Like him Coleridge, Southey and Thomas de Quincey (the main Lake Poets) lived and travelled over the Lakes writing poems that range from luminous to absolutely bleak and memorable. In addition to this group, many other writers and famous characters vacationed and visited the Lake Poets, among these Shelley, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Keats, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, Beatrix Potter and Ernest Hemingway.

There is something in the Lake District that has called so many geniuses forth to its lands, and has been recurrently embodied in their work. It has also earned a special place in the sphere of occultism. –– Aleister Crowley, like some kind of a second Loch Ness monster, climbed the rocks and crags of the Lakes over and over again to train his mind and to trust its own resources. Now the Lake District of England is not just a beautiful place but it is thoroughly meandered by the ghosts of all the literary minds that loved it once. A great place to visit with a book under the arm.

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