--Bright sunshine; went out at 3 o'cl. The sea perfectly
calm blue, streaked with deeper colour by the clouds, and
tongues or points of sand; on our return of a gloomy red. The
sun gone down. The crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus. The sound
of the sea distinctly heard on the tops of the hills, which
we could never hear in summer. We attribute this partly to
the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to the absence of the
singing birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless noise which
lives in the summer air. The villages marked out by beautiful
beds of smoke. The turf fading into the mountain road."

She handles words, phrases, like notes or chords of music, and never
gets her landscape by direct description. One more picture and I must
leave it:

"26.-- ... Walked to the top of a high hill to see a
fortification. Again sat down to feed upon the prospect; a
magnificent scene, _curiously_ spread out for even minute
inspection though so extensive that the mind is afraid to
calculate its bounds...."

Coleridge was with them most days, or they with him. Here is a curious
point to note. Dorothy records:

"March 7th.--William and I drank tea at Coleridge's. Observed
nothing particularly interesting.... One only leaf upon the
top of a tree--the sole remaining leaf--danced round and round
like a rag blown by the wind."

And Coleridge has in _Christabel_:

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

William, Dorothy, and Coleridge went to Hamburg at the end of that
year, but in 1800 the brother and sister were in Grasmere; and the
journal which opens with May 14, at once betrays the great passion of
Dorothy's life:

"William and John set off into Yorkshire after dinner at
half-past two o'clock, cold pork in their pockets. I left them
at the turning of the Low-Wood bay under the trees. My heart
was so full I could hardly speak to W., when I gave him a
farewell kiss. I sate a long time upon a stone at the margin
of the lake, and after a flood of tears my heart was easier.
The lake looked to me, I know not why, dull and melancholy,
and the weltering on the shore seemed a heavy sound.... I
resolved to write a journal of the time till W. and J. return,
and I set about keeping my resolve, beca