Dove Cottage is a house on the edge of Grasmere in the Lake District of England. It is best known as the home of the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth from December 1799 to May 1808, where they spent over eight years of "plain living, but high thinking". During this period, William wrote much of the poetry for which he is remembered today, including his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", "Ode to Duty", "My Heart Leaps Up" and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", together with parts of his autobiographical epic, The Prelude.
William Wordsworth married his wife Mary in 1802, and she and her sister joined the Wordsworths at Dove Cottage. The family quickly expanded, with the arrival of three children in four years, and the Wordsworths left Dove Cottage in 1808 to seek larger lodgings. The cottage was then occupied by Thomas de Quincey for a number of years, before being let to a succession of tenants.
The cottage was acquired by the Wordsworth Trust in 1890 and opened to the public in 1891. The house is a Grade 1 listed building, and remains largely unchanged from Wordsworth's day. It receives approximately 70,000 visitors a year.
Read more about Dove Cottage: Before Wordsworth, Wordsworth, After Wordsworth, Recent Times, Wordsworth Museum
Famous quotes containing the words dove and/or cottage:
“They were masculine toys. They were tall wishes. They were the ribs of the modern world.”
—Rita Dove (b. 1952)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)