This chapter investigates the formal and generic experimentation of four late poems that rework the concerns of the Lyrical Ballads for the new contexts – public and private – of the late 1820s, 1830s and 1840s. Several intertwined themes run through my discussion: Wordsworth’s efforts to set his new poems in a circle of writers and readers, substituting for the old Grasmere circle but more socially conventional; his critical response to the tales and romances of Scott and Hemans; his renewed interest in people, especially women, who, by virtue of dwelling at or beyond society’s borders, communicate with or embody the world of death, and the feminism of this interest and the limitations of this feminism.

In the aftermath of China’s traumatic Cultural Revolution, Western travelers have searched for the remnants of Chan (Zen) Buddhism. Gretel Ehrlich’s Questions of Heaven documents her unhappy tour of sacred mountains and other religious sites and practices in Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces and her search for traditional arts and music. George Crane’s Bones of the Master depicts a pilgrimage with an exiled Chan monk to find the bones of his spiritual mentor and build a stupa to honor him. Bill Porter’s Road to Heaven recounts his search for Chinese hermits who seem to have abandoned every attachment to a social self. Porter’s Zen Baggage documents a pilgrimage to sites connected to the first six patriarchs of Chan Buddhism and his attempts to discard “baggage,” that is, attachments. Because of Chan’s suspicion of talk about oneself and because these authors focus more on documenting conditions in China than on self-disclosure, they are guarded or discreet about how their journeys affected them. Yet each shows how a Chinese journey initiated a transformed sense of self.

The Carmelites were an unique religious Order: the only contemplative Order to owe their foundation entirely to the Crusader States. They were formed in the early thirteenth century from a group of solitaries and hermits who had gathered for safety on Mt Camel, near the new capital of the kingdom of Jerusalem at Acre, and absorbed into a new community by Albert, patriarch of Jerusalem. Their aim was the pursuit of a penitent life in a small regulated community in a fixed location without the burden of property ownership. By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, they had made the transition to being mendicants, and although Mt Carmel remained the spiritual heart of the Order, they had founded houses in the West as well. This chapter examines the origins of the community and the process of transition, situating the Carmelites alongside other models of reform in the Crusader States.