st of living in such a place (as the Lake
District), was its making one unwilling to go. It is too beautiful to
let one be ready to leave it. Within a few years the beloved daughter
was gone, and then the aged husband, and then the son-in-law, and then
the devoted friend, Mr. Wordsworth's publisher, Mr. Moxon, who paid his
duty occasionally by the side of her chair; then she became blind and
deaf. Still her cheerfulness was indomitable. No doubt, she would in
reality have been "willing to go," whenever called upon, throughout her
long life; but she liked life to the end. By her disinterestedness of
nature, by her fortitude of spirit, and her constitutional elasticity
and activity, she was qualified for the honor of surviving her
household--nursing and burying them, and bearing the bereavement which
they were vicariously spared. She did it wisely, tenderly, bravely, and
cheerfully; and then she will be remembered accordingly by all who
witnessed the spectacle.

It was by the accident, so to speak, of her early friendship with
Wordsworth's sister, that her life became involved with the poetic
element which her mind would hardly have sought for itself in another
position. She was the incarnation of good sense, as applied to the
concerns of the every-day world. In as far as her marriage and course of
life tended to infuse a new elevation into her views of things, it was a
blessing; and, on the other hand, in as far as it infected her with the
spirit of exclusiveness, which was the grand defect of the group in its
own place, it was hurtful; but that very exclusiveness was less an evil
than an amusement, after all. It was rather a serious matter to hear the
poet's denunciation of the railway, and to read his well-known sonnets
on the desecration of the Lake region by the unhallowed presence of
commonplace strangers; and it was truly painful to observe how the
scornful and grudging mood spread among the young, who thought they were
agreeing with Wordsworth in claiming the vales and lakes as a natural
property for their enlightened selves. But it was so unlike Mrs.
Wordsworth, with her kindly, cheery, generous turn, to say that a green
field, with buttercups, would answer all the purposes of Lancashire
operatives, and that they did not know what to do with themselves when
they came among the mountains, that the innocent insolence could do no
harm. It became a fixed sentiment when she alone survived to uphold it,
and one demonst