one work, and that work was
done. To some it may seem a commonplace one,--to live in and for her
brother, to do by him a sister's duty. With original powers which, had
she chosen to set up on her own account, might have won for her high
literary fame, she was content to forget herself, to merge all her gifts
and all her interests in those of her brother. She thus made him other
and higher than he could have been had he stood alone, and enabled him to
render better service to the world than without her ministry he could
have done. With this she was well content. It is sad to think that when
the world at last knew him for what he was, the great original poet of
this century, she who had helped to make him so was almost past rejoicing
in it. It is said that during those latter years he never spoke of her
without his voice being sensibly softened and saddened. The return of
the day when they two first came to Grasmere was to him a solemn
anniversary. But though so enfeebled, she still lived on, and survived
her brother by nearly five years. Her death took place at Rydal Mount in
January 1855, at the age of eighty-three. And now, beside her brother
and his wife and others of that household, she rests in the green
Grasmere churchyard, with the clear waters of Rotha murmuring by.

To return to the Journal. As we read it, let us bear always in mind that
it was not meant for us, for the world, or 'the general reader,' but to
be listened to by a small family circle, gathered round the winter fire.
We should therefore remember that in reading it we are, as it were,
allowed, after seventy years, to overhear what was not primarily meant
for our ears at all. This will account for a fulness and minuteness of
detail which to unsympathetic persons may perhaps appear tedious. But
the writer was telling her story, not for unsympathetic persons, not for
'general readers,' much less for literary critics, but for 'the household
hearts that were her own,' on whose sympathy she could reckon, even down
to the minutest circumstances of this journey. And so there is no
attempt at fine or sensational writing, as we now call it, no attempt at
that modern artifice which they call word-painting. But there is the
most absolute sincerity, the most perfect fidelity to her own experience,
the most single-minded endeavour to set down precisely the things they
saw and heard and felt, just as they saw and felt and heard them, while
moving on