After the settlement of Wordsworth and his sister at Grasmere, this brother, who was in the service of the East India Company, had paid them a prolonged visit, extending over eight months. The fraternal ties were then renewed and strengthened, cemented as they became by mature sympathies. A kinship of thought and feeling, added to warm natural affections, bound together these three poetic souls in mutual love more than usually devoted. Captain Wordsworth recognised his brother's genius and greatness of soul, and felt assured that the time would arrive when they would be widely acknowledged. Writing of him to Miss Wordsworth, Coleridge says:—"Your brother John is one of you—a man who hath solitary usings of his own intellect, deep in feeling, with a subtle tact, and swift instinct of true beauty." Himself so thoroughly in harmony with his brother's pursuits, and an ardent lover of the beautiful in Nature, as well as in life, he became, as Wordsworth says, "a silent poet," and was known among those of his own craft as "The Philosopher." Captain Wordsworth had so identified himself in heart with his brother's pursuits, and had become so enamoured of the life led by him and their sister in this quiet and beautiful vale, "far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife," that he had formed the idea, if prospered during a few voyages, of settling at Grasmere, and adding his worldly store to theirs, in the hope of thus enabling Wordsworth to devote his attention to his muse, unfettered by anxious thoughts of a monetary character. With this loving object before him, he had made a voyage in the year 1801 without success. Again, in the spring of 1803, he sailed with the same hope in his heart, but only on this occasion also to return, without having in any degree been able to further its realisation.
In the meantime, money which had been long withheld from the Wordsworths by the former Earl of Lonsdale, had been honourably paid by his successor. Although the main object which Captain Wordsworth had in view in his former expeditions thus no longer existed, he decided once more to brave the fortunes of the deep. Being, in the year 1804, appointed to the command of the East Indiaman, Abergavenny, bound for the East, he sailed from Portsmouth, in the early part of 1805, upon a voyage on which many hopes were built. We are informed that on this occasion the value of the cargo (including specie) was £270,000, and that there were on board 402 persons. Not only did Captain Wordsworth take with him the share which had come to him of the money paid by the Earl of Lonsdale, but also £1,200 belonging to his brother William and his sister. The bright hopes were, however, doomed to end in the saddest of disaster. Owing to the incompetence of a pilot, the ship struck off the Bill of Portland on the 5th February, 1805. Captain Wordsworth died, as he had lived, cheerfully doing his duty. Though he might have saved his own life, he bravely remained at his post to the last, and perished with most of the crew.
Writing of the sad occurrence to Sir George Beaumont shortly after, Wordsworth says:—"My poor sister and my wife, who loved him almost as we did (for he was one of the most amiable of men) are in miserable affliction, which I do all in my power to alleviate; but, Heaven knows, I want consolation myself. I can say nothing higher of my ever-dear brother than that he was worthy of his sister, who is now weeping beside me, and of the friendship of Coleridge; meek, affectionate, silently enthusiastic, loving all quiet things, and a poet in everything but words." In a postscript he adds:—"I shall do all in my power to sustain my sister under her sorrow, which is, and long will be, bitter and poignant. We did not love him as a brother merely, but as a man of original mind, and an honour to all about him. Oh! dear friend, forgive me for talking thus. We have had no tidings from Coleridge. I tremble for the moment when he is to hear of my brother's death; it will distress him to the heart,—and his poor body cannot bear sorrow. He loved my brother, and he knows how we at Grasmere loved him."
The friendship between the Wordsworths and Charles and Mary Lamb, formed during the Nether Stowey period, had continued, and they had been regular correspondents. Shortly after the sad death of her brother Miss Wordsworth had, in the fulness of her heart, written to Miss Lamb. Although the response to the communication is well known it should find a place here. Miss Lamb's reply shows how well qualified she was to sympathise in her friend's sufferings. She had, indeed, been taught in the same school. She says:—"I thank you, my kind friend, for your most comfortable letter; till I saw your own handwriting I could not persuade myself that I should do well to write to you, though I have often attempted it; but I always left off dissatisfied with what I had written, and feeling that I was doing an improper thing to intrude upon your sorrow. I wished to tell you that you would one day feel the kind of peaceful state of mind, and sweet memory of the dead, which you so happily describe as now almost begun; but I felt that it was improper and most grating to the feelings of the afflicted to say to them that the memory of their affliction would in time become a constant part, not only of their dream, but of their most wakeful sense of happiness. That you would see every object with and through your lost brother, and that that would at last become a real and everlasting source of comfort to you I felt, and well knew from my own experience in sorrow; but till you yourself began to feel this I didn't dare tell you so; but I send you some poor lines, which I wrote under this conviction of mind, and before I heard Coleridge was returning home. I will transcribe them now before I finish my letter, lest a false shame prevent me then, for I know they are much worse than they ought to be, written as they were with strong feeling and on such a subject; every line seems to me to be borrowed; but I had no better way of expressing my thoughts, and I never have the power of altering or amending anything I have once laid aside with dissatisfaction:—
"'Why is he wandering on the sea?
Coleridge should now with Wordsworth be.
By slow degrees he'd steal away
Their woe and gently bring a ray
(So happily he'd time relief)
Of comfort from their very grief.