"Dorothy Wordsworth started her Grasmere Journal when she was twenty-eight. It covers the years 1800 to 1803, when she and her brother were living at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, Westmorland. It was a simple, even a hard life, but one filled with an intense rapture which radiates from Dorothy's unselfconscious pages as it does from the magnificent poems William was writing at the same time. Though Dorothy said that "I should detest the idea of setting...