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
William Wordsworth with Annette, Wordsworth married his childhood friend Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy continued to live with the couple and grew close to Mary. The following year Mary gave birth to the first of five children, three of whom predeceased her and William: Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical poem in three parts, which he intended to call "The Recluse". In 1798–99 he started an autobiographical poem, which he referred to as the "poem to Coleridge" and which he planned would serve as an appendix to a larger work called "The Recluse". In 1804 he began expanding