William Cronon argues that “Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing theenvironment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home” (16). Whathappens, then, when Lord Byron says of Childe Harold, “Where rose the mountains, there to him werefriends; / Where roll’d the ocean, thereon was his home”? What kind of “home” do Childe Harold andthe speaker find in doing exactly what Cronon recommends against, traveling into a “sublime” nature inresponding to “the siren call of escape” (12)?
