use I will not quarrel
with myself, and because I shall give William pleasure by it
when he comes again...."

"Because I will not quarrel with myself!" She is full of such
illuminations. Here is another:

"Sunday, June 1st.--After tea went to Ambleside round the
lakes. A very fine warm evening. Upon the side of Loughrigg
_my heart dissolved in what I saw_."

Now here is her account of a country funeral which she reads into, or
out of, the countryside:

"Wednesday, 3rd Sept.-- ... a funeral at John Dawson's.... I
was affected to tears while we stood in the house, the coffin
lying before me. There were no near kindred, no children.
When we got out of the dark house the sun was shining, and
the prospect looked as divinely beautiful as I ever saw it.
It seemed more sacred than I had ever seen it, _and yet more
allied to human life_. I thought she was going to a quiet
spot, and I could not help weeping very much...."

The italics are mine. William was pleased to call her weeping "nervous
blubbering."

And then we come to 1802, the great last year of a twin life; the
last year of the five in which those two had lived as one soul and
one heart. They were at Dove Cottage, on something under L150 a year.
Poems were thronging thick about them; they were living intensely.
John was alive. Mary Hutchinson was at Sockburn. Coleridge was still
Coleridge, not the bemused and futile mystic he was to become. As for
Dorothy, she lives a thing enskied, floating from ecstasy to ecstasy.
It is the third of March, and William is to go to London. "Before we
had quite finished breakfast Calvert's man brought the horses for
Wm. We had a deal to do, pens to make, poems to be put in order for
writing, to settle for the press, pack up.... Since he left me at
half-past eleven (it is now two) I have been putting the drawers in
order, laid by his clothes, which he had thrown here and there and
everywhere, filed two months' newspapers, and got my dinner, two
boiled eggs and two apple tarts.... The robins are singing sweetly.
Now for my walk. I _will_ be busy. I _will_ look well, and be well
when he comes back to me. O the Darling! Here is one of his bitter
apples, I can hardly find it in my heart to throw it into the
fire.... I walked round the two lakes, crossed the stepping-stones at
Rydalefoot. Sate down where we always sit. I was full of thought of my
darling. Blessings on him." Where els