him. In 1802 he
made a short visit to France, in company with Miss Wordsworth, and
soon after his return to England was married to Mary Hutchinson, on
the 4th of October of the same year. Of the good fortune of this
marriage no other proof is needed than the purity and serenity of his
poems, and its record is to be sought nowhere else.

On the 18th of June, 1803, his first child, John, was born, and on the
14th of August of the same year he set out with his sister on a foot
journey into Scotland. Coleridge was their companion during a part of
this excursion, of which Miss Wordsworth kept a full diary. In
Scotland he made the acquaintance of Scott, who recited to him a part
of the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, then in manuscript. The travellers
returned to Grasmere on the 25th of September. It was during this
year that Wordsworth's intimacy with the excellent Sir George
Beaumont began. Sir George was an amateur painter of considerable
merit, and his friendship was undoubtedly of service to Wordsworth in
making him familiar with the laws of a sister art and thus
contributing to enlarge the sympathies of his criticism, the tendency
of which was toward too great exclusiveness. Sir George Beaumont,
dying in 1827, did not forgo his regard for the poet, but contrived to
hold his affection in mortmain by the legacy of an annuity of L100, to
defray the charges of a yearly journey.

In March 1805, the poet's brother, John, lost his life by the
shipwreck of the _Abergavenny_ East-Indiaman, of which he was captain.
He was a man of great purity and integrity, and sacrificed himself to
his sense of duty by refusing to leave the ship till it was impossible
to save him. Wordsworth was deeply attached to him, and felt such
grief at his death as only solitary natures like his are capable of,
though mitigated by a sense of the heroism which was the cause of it.
The need of mental activity as affording an outlet to intense emotion
may account for the great productiveness of this and the following
year. He now completed _The Prelude_, wrote _The Waggoner_, and
increased the number of his smaller poems enough to fill two volumes,
which were published in 1807.

This collection, which contained some of the most beautiful of his
shorter pieces, and among others the incomparable _Odes_ to Duty and
on Immortality, did not reach a second edition till 1815. The
reviewers had another laugh, and rival poets pillaged while they
scoffed, particularly