Shelley, walking as a boy through his ‘starlight wood’, looking for ghosts and filled with ‘hopes of high talk with the departed dead’, found nothing in reply. Nothing reverberated. The ghosts were silent. But he felt something else non-human: the springtime breezes bringing a sense of the marvellousness of life itself. And so in that instant (or so he says) his mind changed. No more seeking after gothic horrors or pining for the worst; no more listening to the dead. Instead, ‘the spirit of beauty’ descended on him, illuminated him, shaping his life, becoming his goddess, the only force he could imagine that ‘could free/ This world from its dark slavery’.

Fiona Sampson’s account of ten shortish walks, mostly in the southern half of England, are in pursuit of that spirit of Romanticism. She is a poet and scholar, with some of the astringency that comes with both disciplines, so the book is no casual stroll through the Lake District. ‘Romanticism isn’t a cultural artefact,’ she writes. ‘It’s a way for thought to move.’ She is taking her own mind for a walk and, although there is quite a lot about keys, cars, satnavs, dogs and arriving late at rental cottages, the essence is intellectual and fully freighted. The cast list is long and international and the method shifting, subtle and demanding.

A visit to the Quantocks, for example, where in the late 1790s the Wordsworths and Coleridge went walking day after day and night after night, composing the poems that went into the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, turns out to be only obliquely about them and the hills. Their walks, as Coleridge later described them, in ‘which moonlight or sunset was diffused over a known and familiar landscape’, became the foundations of a frame-busting poetry that attended both to ‘the truth of nature’ and ‘the colours of the imagination’ – the raw material, surely, of an exploration of the ‘Romantic countryside’?

But it is not in their company that Sampson walks there. Visiting Nether Stowey, she begins with the Brownings in Florence, turning to Shelley in his illness in Venice and the portrait of him made in Rome, now in London, (with his ‘ever-so-faintly phallic quill’ and ‘Aussie Rules footballer mullet’), and on to T.S. Eliot, Philip Massinger, the Jacobean dramatist, and back to Browning. Then come Blake, Byron, Dickens, ‘the favelas of the developing world’, Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont, the Shelley ménage again, the Brownings again, Marina Tsvetaeva, Freud, Schubert, a remembered gamekeeper called Johnny, the Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Byron again… and on and on. All these figures are linked in the essay-walk by their interest in food. But Sampson omits one of the great Romantics-and-food scenes set in the Quantocks, when the young William Hazlitt watched in awe as Wordsworth (in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons) ‘made havoc of the half of a Cheshire cheese on the table’ while dissing the luxury of Robert Southey’s life.

Coleridge and Wordsworth are mentioned elsewhere, but in the Quantocks chapter merely in passing. The only continuity is in the writer’s mind. You have to jump when she jumps and reconnect when she resumes a scene left several pages earlier. It can make one impatient for a certain wholeness: what about these writers, engaging with this country then? What was the interaction of mind and place? Why did it matter? How were they in these places? How much, actually, of our way of seeing is still shaped by their way of seeing? The spirit of Richard Holmes, the most generous of topographers and biographers, whose Footsteps is the masterpiece of this genre, hovers courteously in the background.

Given the multiplicity of Sampson’s subject matter and the dispersed approach, it becomes difficult to know exactly what the book means to say. It is replete with expertise on music, poetry, botany and even geology. It drops moments of lyricism and observation: ‘A kid on a paper round, with asymmetric sack slung low’; water crowfoot in ‘long mermaid strands’; ‘the first earthy smells of the year… faint as autosuggestion’; how it feels wrong when walking in the dark ‘to break the membrane of the summer night with talk’.

But you long for a sense of dwelling. So much of Romanticism was, in its youthful and vital way, dynamically embedded in the actualities of the world that it is almost impossible to represent its spirit by the kind of intellectualised account that brings a distance between what was lived and how it is described. Sampson quotes Ruskin:

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in the world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way… To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one.

She calls this statement part of ‘the picturesque tradition’. But the whole point of it, and in fact the still reverberating value of Romanticism, is its resolve to step beyond the picturesque, out of the frame, into what might be called the actualist, the illuminating power of the vividly alive.