bequeathed him the small sum above named. And seldom has such a bequest borne ampler fruit. ‘Upon the interest of the £900, £400 being laid out in annuity, with £200 deducted from the principal, and £100 a legacy to my sister, and £100 more which “The Lyrical Ballads” have brought me, my sister and I have contrived to live seven years, nearly eight.’ So wrote Wordsworth in 1805 to his friend Sir George Beaumont. Thus at this juncture of the Poet’s fate, when to onlookers he must have seemed both outwardly and inwardly well-nigh bankrupt, Raisley Calvert’s bequest came to supply his material needs, and to his inward needs his sister became the best earthly minister. For his mind was ill at ease. The high hopes awakened in him by the French Revolution had been dashed, and his spirit, darkened and depressed, was on the verge of despair. He might have become such a man as he has pictured in the character of ‘The Solitary.’ But a good Providence brought his sister to his side and saved him. She discerned his real need and divined the remedy. By her cheerful society, fine tact, and vivid love for nature she turned him, depressed and bewildered, alike from the abstract speculations and the contemporary politics in which he had got immersed, and directed his thoughts towards truth of poetry, and the face of nature, and the healing that for him lay in these.
‘Then it was
That the beloved sister in whose sight
Those days were passed—
Maintained for me a saving intercourse
With my true self; for though bedimmed and changed
Much, as it seemed, I was no further changed
Than as a clouded or a waning moon:
She whispered still that brightness would return,
She, in the midst of all, preserved me still
A Poet, made me seek beneath that name,
And that alone, my office upon earth.
By intercourse with her and wanderings together in delightful places of his native country, he was gradually led back
‘To those sweet counsels between head and heart
Whence genuine knowledge grew.’
The brother and sister, having thus cast in their lots together, settled at Racedown Lodge in Dorsetshire in the autumn of 1795. They had there a pleasant house, with a good garden, and around them charming walks and a delightful country looking out on the distant sea. The place was very retired, with little or no society, and the post only once a week. But of employment there was no lack. The brother now settled steadily to poetic work; the sister engaged in household duties and reading, and then when work was over, there were endless walks and wanderings. Long years afterwards Miss Wordsworth spoke of Racedown as the place she looked back to with most affection. ‘It was,’ she said, ‘the first home I had.’
The poems which Wordsworth there composed were not among his best—‘The Borderers,’ ‘Guilt or Sorrow,’ and others. He was yet only groping to find his true subjects and his own proper manner. But there was one piece there composed which will stand comparison with any tale he ever wrote. It was ‘The Ruined Cottage,’ which, under the title of the ‘Story of Margaret,’ he afterwards incorporated in the first Book of ‘The Excursion.’ It was when they had been nearly two years at Racedown that they received a guest who was destined to exercise more influence on the self-contained Wordsworth than any other man ever did. This was S. T. Coleridge. One can imagine how he would talk, interrupted only by their mutually reading aloud their respective Tragedies, both of which are now well-nigh forgotten, and by Wordsworth reading his ‘Ruined Cottage,’ which is not forgotten. Miss Wordsworth describes S. T. C., as he then was, in words that are well known. And he describes her thus, in words less known—‘She is a woman indeed, in mind I mean, and in heart; for her person is such that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty, but her manners are simple, ardent, impressive. In every motion her innocent soul out-beams so brightly, that who saw her would say, “Guilt was a thing impossible with her.” Her information various, her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature, and her taste a perfect electrometer.’
The result of this meeting of the two poets was that the Wordsworths shifted their abode from Racedown to Alfoxden, near Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire, to be near Coleridge. Alfoxden was a large furnished mansion, which the brother and sister had to themselves. ‘We are three miles from Stowey, the then abode of Coleridge,’ writes the sister, ‘and two miles from the sea. Wherever we turn we have woods, smooth downs, and valleys, with small brooks running down them, through green meadows, hardly ever intersected with hedgerows, but scattered over with trees. The hills that cradle these valleys are either covered with fern and bilberries, or oak woods, which are cut for charcoal. Walks extend for miles over the hill-tops, the great beauty of which is their wild simplicity—they are perfectly smooth, without rocks.’ It was in this neighbourhood, as the two poets loitered in the silvan combs or walked along the smooth Quantock hill-tops, looking seaward, with the ‘sole sister,’ the companion of their walks, that they struck each from the other his finest tones. It was with both of them the heyday of poetic creation. In these walks it was that Coleridge, with slight hints from Wordsworth, first chaunted the vision of the Ancient Mariner, and then alone, ‘The rueful woes of Lady Christabel.’ This, too, was the birthday of some of the finest of the Lyrical Ballads, of ‘We are seven,’ ‘Simon Lee,’ ‘Expostulation and Reply,’ and ‘The Tables Turned,’ ‘It is the first mild day in March,’ and ‘I heard a thousand blended notes.’ Coleridge never knew again such a season of poetic creation, and Wordsworth’s tardier, if stronger, nature, received from contact with Coleridge that quickening impulse which it needed, and which it retained during all its most creative years.
But if Coleridge, with his occasional intercourse and wonderful talk, did much for Wordsworth, his sister, by her continual companionship, did far more. After the great revulsion from the excesses of the French Revolution, she was with him a continually sanative influence. That whole period, which ranged from 1795 till his settling at Grasmere at the opening of the next century, and of which the residence at Racedown and Alfoxden formed a large part, was the healing time of his spirit. And in that healing time she was the chief human minister. Somewhere in the ‘Prelude’ he tells that in early youth there was a too great sternness of spirit about him, a high but too severe moral ideal by which he judged men and things, insensible to gentler and humbler influences. He compares his soul to a high, bare craig, without any crannies in which flowers may lurk, untouched by the mellowing influences of sun and shower. His sister came with her softening influence, and sowed in it the needed flowers, and touched it with mellowing colours:
‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares and delicate fears,
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears
And love, and thought and joy.’
Elsewhere in the ‘Prelude’ he describes how at one time his soul had got too much under the dominion of the eye, so that he kept comparing scene with scene, instead of enjoying each for itself—craving new forms, novelties of colour or proportion, and insensible to the spirit of each place and the affections which each awakens. In contrast with this temporary mood of his own he turns to one of another temper:—
‘I knew a maid,
A young enthusiast who escaped these bonds,
Her eye was not the mistress of her heart,
She welcomed what was given, and craved no more;
Whate’er the scene presented to her view,
