If, again, a truth it were,
Then were truth as fancy fair;
But, which ever it might be,
''Twas a Paradise to me.'"
Of the "companions meet" referred to above it is evident that the first-named "of long-tried love and truth" is Miss Wordsworth; the second, Mrs. Wordsworth; and the third, Miss Dora Wordsworth, the poet's daughter, to whom some further reference should now be made.
At the time of the removal to Rydal Mount, in the spring of 1813, the family, in addition to the parents and Miss Wordsworth, consisted of three children, of whom the second—Dorothy, or Dora, born in 1804—was of the interesting age of nine years. She was named after her aunt, Miss Wordsworth; for, although her father would have preferred to have called her Mary, the name Dorothy, as he stated to Lady Beaumont, had been so long devoted in his own thoughts to the first daughter he might have, he could not break his promise to himself. By way of further distinguishing her from her aunt, Mr. Crabb Robinson used to call her Dorina. To this surviving daughter, as she grew up to womanhood, Wordsworth was passionately attached. Inheriting as she did, in no slight degree, the family genius, he seemed to see reproduced in her a harmonious blending of the characteristics and mental lineaments of his wife and sister, the two beings in the world whom he had most devotedly loved.
Wordsworth's later poems contain several allusions to Dora. In this place I will quote a stanza or two only, from one, entitled "The Triad," written in celebration of Edith Southey, Dora Wordsworth, and Sara Coleridge:—
"Open, ye thickets! let her fly,
Swift as a Thracian Nymph o'er field and height!
For She, to all but those who love her, shy,