and well at
all times. He learned to love the poor child as his partner in
wretchedness. He made also one other friend, a girl of the streets,
named Ann, who was kind to him, and whom he remembered with gratitude to
the end of his life. He says of her:--

"This person was a young woman, and one of that unhappy class who
subsist upon the wages of prostitution. . . . Yet, no! let me not
class thee, O noble-minded Ann, with that order of women; let me
find, if it be possible, some gentler name to designate the
condition of her to whose bounty and compassion--ministering to my
necessities when all the world had forsaken me--I owe it that I am
at this time alive. . . . She was not as old as myself. . . . O
youthful benefactress! how often in succeeding years, standing in
solitary places and thinking of thee with grief of heart and
perfect love,--how often have I wished that, as in ancient times
the curse of a father was believed to have a supernatural power,
and to pursue its object with a fatal necessity of
self-fulfilment,--even so the benediction of a heart oppressed with
gratitude might have a like prerogative,--might have power given it
from above to chase, to haunt, to waylay, to overtake, to pursue
thee into the central darkness of a London brothel, or (if it were
possible) into the darkness of the grave, there to awaken thee with
an authentic message of peace and forgiveness and final
reconciliation!"

The youthful wanderer was finally discovered by his friends, and placed
by his wish at Oxford, where about a year after, in 1804, he began the
occasional use of opium. He did this merely as a means of pleasure at
first, like the drinking of wine, and took it only at stated intervals
for a period of eight years. He seemed to experience no harm from its
use in this way; but a very severe neuralgic affection of the stomach
(caused, it is supposed, by his privations in London primarily)
developed itself at the end of that time, and he resorted to the
habitual use of opium as a relief from pain.

He was married in 1816 to Miss Margaret Simpson, and lived with her in a
cottage at Grasmere. Of this wife, with whom he lived for twenty-one
years, he thus writes:--

"But watching by my pillow, or defrauding herself of sleep to bear
me company through the heavy watches of the night, sat my Electra;
for thou, beloved