d. This was when she was elderly. For a long course of years, she
was a rich household blessing to all connected with her. She shared her
brother's peculiarity of investing trifles with solemnity, or rather,
of treating all occasions alike (at least in writing) with pedantic
elaboration; but she had the true poet's, combined with the true woman's
nature; and the fortunate man had, in wife and sister, the two best
friends of his life.

The Wordsworths were the originals of the Lake _coterie,_ as we have
seen. Born at Cockermouth, and a pupil at the Hawkeshead school,
Wordsworth was looking homewards when he settled in the District. The
others came in consequence. Coleridge brought his family to Greta Hall,
near Keswick; and with them came Mrs. Lovell, one of the three Misses
Fricker, of whom Coleridge and Southey had married two. Southey was
invited to visit Greta Hall, the year after the Wordsworths settled at
Grasmere; and thus they became acquainted. They had just met before, in
the South; but they had yet to learn to know each other; and there was
sufficient unlikeness between them to render this a work of some time
and pains. It was not long before Southey, instead of Coleridge, was
the lessee of Greta Hall; and soon after Coleridge took his departure,
leaving his wife and children, and also the Lovells, a charge upon
Southey, who had no more fortune than Coleridge, except in the
inexhaustible wealth of a heart, a will, and a conscience. Wordsworth
married in 1802; and then the two poets passed through their share of
the experience of human life, a few miles apart, meeting occasionally on
some mountain ridge or hidden dale, and in one another's houses, drawn
closer by their common joys and sorrows, but never approximating in
the quality of their genius, or in the stand-points from which they
respectively looked out upon human affairs. They had children, loved
them, and each lost some of them; and they felt tenderly for each other
when each little grave was opened. Southey, the most amiable of men in
domestic life, gentle, generous, serene, and playful, grew absolutely
ferocious about politics, as his articles in the "Quarterly Review"
showed all the world. Wordsworth, who had some of the irritability and
pettishness, mildly described by himself as "gentle stirrings of the
mind," which occasionally render great men ludicrously like children,
and who was, moreover, highly conservative after his early democratic
fever