able
utterances. Depicting her influence on him, he thanks God, and says,

The blessing of my later years
Was with me when a boy.
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.

They took a cottage at Grasmere, where they lived by themselves until
William's marriage; nor were they parted then.

This plot of orchard-ground is ours:
My trees they are, my sister's flowers.

When Coleridge was in Germany, he wrote to them a long letter in
hexameters, in which were these lines:

William, my head and my heart! dear William and dear Dorothea! You
have all in each other; but I am lonely, and want you.

At another time, the same man, so beloved by them both, writes to a
common friend in the following strain: "Wordsworth and his exquisite
sister are with me. Sue is a woman, indeed, in mind I mean, and in
heart. In every motion, her innocent soul out-beams so brightly that
who saw her would say, "Guilt is a thing impossible with her." Her
information is various; her eye, watchful in minutest observation of
nature; and her taste, a perfect electrometer." Referring to the
period of his opening manhood, and the sanguine hopes kindled by the
dawn of the French Revolution, Wordsworth says,

When every day brought with it some new sense
Of exquisite regard for common things,
And all the earth was budding with these gifts
Of more refined humanity, thy breath,
Dear sister, was a kind of gentler string,
That went before my step.

She lived with him, indoors and out of doors. She weaned him from the
embittering brawl of politics, and warded away the sourness and
despair, which, at one time, seriously threatened to possess him. In
the "Prelude," he makes this touching acknowledgment:

Then it was,
Thanks to the bounteous Giver of all good,
That the beloved sister, in whose sight
Those days were passed,...
Maintained for me a saving intercourse
With my true self.

Daily, for so many years, they went "stepping westward" in company.
His eldest daughter his most darling child, whose radiant apparition
he imagined had come for him as he was dying, and cried, "Is that
Dore" bore the dear sister's name. Several of her poems were printed
with his. In addition to the well-known poem, "To My Sister," the
"Descriptive Sketches" and "An Evening Walk" were addressed to her.
And numerous incidental tributes, woven into his chief works, will,