Lake Poets was mostly a prose writer and did not particularly subscribe to the Wordsworthian vision of the Lakes. Southey, like Wordsworth, started out on the republican left, but, by the time the threat from Napoleon had dwindled, he had become the embodiment of a Tory extolling the virtues of nation and patriotism, and using the Lakes as a touchstone, and as "the symbol of the nation's covenant with God." Letitia Elizabeth Landon's sketch, "Grasmere Lake, A Sketch by a Cockney", in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1834, is a spoof on the Lake Poets, whom she admired (especially Wordsworth) but regarded
Samuel Taylor Coleridge he ate from a teacup. His marital problems, nightmares, illnesses, increased opium dependency, tensions with Wordsworth, and a lack of confidence in his poetic powers fuelled the composition of "Dejection: An Ode" and an intensification of his philosophical studies. In 1802, Coleridge took a nine-day walking holiday in the fells of the Lake District. Coleridge is credited with the first recorded descent of Scafell to Mickledore via Broad Stand, although this was more due to his getting lost than a keenness for mountaineering. In 1804, he travelled to Sicily and Malta, working for a time as Acting Public Secretary of