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,
That was the best, to that she was attuned
By her benign simplicity of life.
Birds in the bower, and lambs in the green field,
Could they have known her, would have loved; methought
Her very presence such a sweetness breathed,
That flowers, and trees, and even the silent hills,
And everything she looked on, should have had
An intimation how she bore herself
Towards