round. From
a host of examples that naturally rush to mind we may instance, almost
at random, the cases of Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Robert Louis
Stevenson. In the days of his restless youth, when Wordsworth was in
danger of entangling himself in the military and political tumults of
the time, it was his sister who recalled him to his desk and pointed
him along the road that led to destiny. 'It is,' Miss Masson remarks,
'in moments such as this that men, especially those who feed on their
feelings, become desperate, and think and do desperate acts. It was at
this critical moment for Wordsworth that his sister Dorothy stepped
into his life and saved him.' 'She soothed his mind,' the same writer
says again, banished from it both contemporary politics and religious
doubts, and infused instead love of beauty and dependence on faith, and
so she re-awoke craving for poetic expression.'

She, in the midst of all, preserved him still
A poet; made him seek beneath that name,
And that alone, his office upon earth.

Poor Dorothy! She accompanied her brother on more than half his
wanderings; she pointed out to him more than half the loveliness that
is embalmed in his verses; she suggested to him half his themes. As
the poet himself confessed:

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.

Yes, the world owes more than it will ever know to first mates as loyal
and true and helpful as Dorothy Wordsworth. The skipper stands on the
bridge and gets all the glory, but only he and the first mate know how
much was due to the figure in the background. Think, too, of that
bright spring day, nearly fifty years ago now, when a lady, driving
through Hyde Park to see the beauty of the crocuses and the snowdrops,
was seen to lurch suddenly forward in her carriage, and a moment after
was found to be dead. 'It was a loss unspeakable in its intensity for
Carlyle,' Mr. Maclean Watt says in his monograph. 'This woman was one
of the bravest and brightest influences in his life, though, perhaps,
it was entirely true that he was not aware of his indebtedness until
the Veil of Silence fell between.' The skipper never is aware of his
indebtedness to the first mate; that is an essential feature of the
relationship. It is the glory of the first mate that he works without
thought of recognition or reward; glad if he can keep the