While teaching a study abroad course on Wordsworth I took two of the students up to the Troutbeck Churchyard. It was raining (of course), and cold: And we were on a mission to find the gravestone of Myles Atkinson, the ancestor of a colleague. For the students, it was, as was everything for them in Cumbria, a haunting and compelling adventure. We did not, as Wordsworth writes in his poem, bring along a book. Instead, we gave ourselves that day to 'idleness' — we walked in the rain down from Town End to the church, which was open — and empty of parishioners or other tourists. We admired the Burne-Jones/ William Morris window, we sat in the pews, we studied the architecture. And we warmed ourselves. And then braced for the rain again and the search for the grave.