button to main menu  Eleventh Exhibition, p.12
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page 12:-
The year I arrived here I made a number of pencil drawings, and surveyed with much attention this store-house of my future labours; - I had never seen Wast Water, and made an excursion to that romantic region, with a friend, in the November of that year; but though the mountain tops were hid in clouds, the scene exhibited a vastness and grandeur, highly gratifying to the feeling mind; we waited some time in expectation of seeing more, but our wish was not gratified, and we returned for that night to Eskdale, not without a mixed feeling of pleasure and disappointment: since that time I have often visited Wastdale, and seen it under many desirable circumstances of effect.
In 1801, with excessive labour and anxiety of mind, I travelled this extensive cluster of mountains in almost every possible variety of direction, and collected in pencil many hundred outlines from which a selection was made and finished drawings were produced from that selection, for the purpose of forming my first exhibition, which was opened in the middle of the summer, 1802.
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