Some years ago in lecturing to the Royal Geographical Society I said that the Society ought to have given Wordsworth the Gold Medal. I meant that the poet by his vision had taught us more about the Lake District than any ordinary geographer had been able to see. With his finer sensibility he had been able to see deeper. He had been able to reveal to us truths about the district which no mere ordnance surveyor was able to disclose. He was a true discoverer--a geographical discoverer--a geographer of the highest type. He had helped us really to know and understand the district. Be it noted, too, that he did not, as some would think, put into the lakes and hills and valleys something from within himself which was not really in those natural features. The particular beauty that he saw there was there waiting to be revealed. The natural features aroused emotions in his sensitive soul, and his soul being aroused saw the beauty in them. If the district had been of billiard-table flatness, with no lakes, no hills, no valleys, then even he, with all his poetic feeling and imagination, could not have put into the district what it did not possess. The beauty that he saw was really there, only it required a poetic soul to discover and reveal it. The spirit of the poet put itself in touch with the spirit of the district and elicited from the district what was already in it. The spirit of Wordsworth and the spirit of the district acted and reacted upon one another and came into harmony with one another. And as he had the capacity for communicating to others what he himself had seen, we are now able to see in the Lakeland beauties which our forefathers had scarcely known. This is why I suggest to you that Natural Beauty should be considered as a legitimate part of Geography. And if you will look about you, you will note that Natural Beauty is having an increasing effect upon the movements of men. There is a very definite relationship between the Beauty of the Earth and her human inhabitants. The Poet Laureate builds his house on the top of Boar's Hill not because the soil is specially productive up there so that he may be able to grow food, for the soil is rather poor; not because water is easily available, for it is very difficult to get, as he found when his house took fire; not because of the climate, for the climate is just as good a hundred feet lower down; not because it is easily accessible to Oxford, for a big climb up the hill is entailed every time he returns from that city--not for any of these reasons did he build his house there, but because of the view which he obtains from that spot. It was Natural Beauty which drew, the Poet Laureate to Boar's Hill, as it was Natural Beauty which drew Tennyson to Blackdown to build Aldworth with a view all over the Surrey hills and the Sussex Downs.