William and Dorothy Wordsworth were children of John Wordsworth, a solicitor practising in the quiet town of Cockermouth and agent of the then Earl of Lonsdale. Dorothy, who was the only daughter, was about a year and nine months younger than William, and was born on Christmas Day, 1771.
Circumstances sad in themselves not unfrequently tend to the development of latent character in a child; and to the surroundings of their earliest years and the influences then beginning to work we must look for the first germs from which was to spring the future harvest.
The loss of their mother when Dorothy was about six years old was the first of a succession of troubles which struck the lives of this brother and sister. This mother had been the centre of their home, the pivot round which their young lives turned. As Wordsworth afterwards said:—
She was the heart
And hinge of all our learning and our loves.
The little Dorothy was an impetuous, warm-hearted child, tender and loving, with the need of a home for the affections of her deep nature. With the loss of her mother she seems to have turned with an abandon of love to the brother next in age to herself. He was her playmate. The old garden with the terrace walk on the banks of the Derwent was the scene of many childish rambles and confidences. In later years, the poet in a few exquisite lines recalls the ministry of those early years. The flit of the butterfly brings to mind the time of many a childish gambol, the chief remembrance of which was the thought how she
Feared to brush
The dust from off its wings.
There, also, was the Sparrow's Dwelling:
She looked at it, and seemed to fear it,