Guide to the Lakes prose-poem about light, shapes, and textures, about movement and stillness ... It is a paean to a way of life, but also a lament for the inevitability of its passing ... What holds this diversity together is the voice of complete authority, compounded from experience, intense observation, thought, and love. Wordsworth was born in the Lake District and spent much of his life living there. Wordsworth and his friends Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge became known as Lake Poets not only because they lived in this area but also because its landscapes and people inspired their work. By 1810,
Frost at Midnight expresses his hope that his child, Hartley Coleridge, will experience a life connected to nature as represented by features typical of the Lake District, which Coleridge in common with other Lake Poets revered. This is similar to what Coleridge's friend William Wordsworth does with the narrator of "Tintern Abbey", a poem composed later that year. Many of the feelings of the narrator for his child are connected to Coleridge's sonnet "To a Friend Who Asked, How I Felt When the Nurse Presented My Infant to Me". The ideas about nature in "This Lime-Tree Bower" are transformed into the basis for