y, who speedily fell from
the heights of passion to the depths of languor and despondency. The
same quick using up of the power of enjoyment produces the too common
product of the _blase_ man and the cynic. Wordsworth early perceived
that all, even the richest, natures have but a very limited capacity of
uninterrupted enjoyment, and that nothing is easier than to exhaust this
capacity. Hence he set himself to husband it, to draw upon it sparingly,
to employ it only on the purest, most natural, and most enduring objects,
and not to speedily dismiss or throw them by and demand more, but to
detain them till they had yielded him their utmost. From this in part it
came that the commonest sights of earth and sky--a fine spring day, a
sunset, even a chance traveller met on a moor, any ordinary sorrow of
man's life--yielded to him an amount of imaginative interest
inconceivable to more mundane spirits. The simple healthiness and strict
frugality of his household life suited well, and must have greatly
assisted, that wholesome frugality of emotion which he exercised.

During those seven or eight Grasmere years, the spring of poetry which
burst forth at Alfoxden, and produced the first volume of 'Lyrical
Ballads,' flowed steadily on and found expression in other poems of like
quality and spirit,--'Hartleap Well,' 'The Brothers,' 'Michael,' which,
with others of the same order, written in Germany, appeared in the second
volume of 'Lyrical Ballads.' And after these two volumes had gone forth,
Grasmere still gave more of the same high order,--'The Daffodils,' 'The
Leech-Gatherer,' and above all the 'Ode on Immortality.' It was too the
conclusion of the 'Prelude,' and the beginning of the 'Excursion.' So
that it may be said that those Grasmere years, from 1800 to 1807, mark
the period when Wordsworth's genius was in its zenith. During all this
time, sister Dorothy was by his side, ministering to him, equally in body
and in mind--doing the part of household servant, and not less that of
prompter and inspirer of his highest songs.

But this life of theirs, retired and uneventful as it seems, was not
without its own incidents. Such was the homecoming of their younger
sailor-brother John, who, in the first year of their residence at
Grasmere--

'Under their cottage roof, had gladly come
From the wild sea a cherished visitant.'

He was, what his brother calls him, 'a silent poet,' and had the heart
and sense to feel th