Peter Laver's poem ‘Placing Sensitivities’ neatly sidesteps a demand for self-revelation by asserting that the sights, sounds and bodily sensations experienced by anyone who lives in the Lake District are (or should be) as powerful and varied as any possible human contacts. The poem does not deny the vividness of personal feelings, but seems to externalise them into a natural vitality which absorbs them, while conversely also absorbing the poet's vivid perceptions of his surroundings into the poignantly suggested intensity of his heart's emotions.

Such a reciprocity of perceived and externalised inner sensations, of joys received from the beauty of the landscape and landscape features discovered to be objective correlatives for the poet's own emotions, can be sensed in the notebooks and occasional letters in which Coleridge records his discovery of the Lakeland landscape and (in particular) his solitary experiences of the infinitely varied terrain of the high fells. Coleridge's moods might vary: cries of joy and thankful ejaculations to nature could modulate into the gloomy thought that ‘into a discoverer I have sunk from an inventor’, for, as Kathleen Coburn remarks, one cannot but notice ‘his association of observed natural phenomena with his own bodily and emotional states’; but on the whole the tone of his fell-walking prose between 1799 and 1802 is exultant.