Birth Anniversary: William Wordsworth — April 7, 1770

William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cumbria. In July 1798, on a walking tour along the River Wye with his sister Dorothy, he passed the ruins of Tintern Abbey and wrote, days later, the poem that carries its name — lines about a landscape returned to after five years, and about what stays in the mind of a place once visited. The abbey, stripped of its roof since the Dissolution, gave English poetry one of its most quoted returns.