Fortunately for literature, and for men, as the readers of literature, Raisley Calvert was born and died—and the “Excursion” was written. I would not, however, be thought to speak ungenerously of poor Calvert:—God forbid!—but still I cannot help thinking about Providence, and His dark, inscrutable ways how He smites one frail child to the grave that another may have leisure to sing songs.—The poet never forgets the bounty and generosity of the poor dead heart, now hushed to silence, but raises this monument to his memory:

“Calvert! it must not be unheard by them
Who may respect my name, that I to thee
Owe many years of early liberty.
This care was thine, when sickness did condemn
Thy youth to hopeless wasting, root and stem,
That I, if frugal and severe, might stray
Where’er I liked, and finally array
My temples with the Muse’s diadem.
Hence, if in freedom I have loved the truth,
If there be aught of pure, or good, or great,
In my past verse, or shall be in the lays
Of highest mood, which now I meditate,
It gladdens me, O worthy short-lived youth,
To think how much of this will be thy praise.”

In a letter which Wordsworth wrote to his dear friend, Sir George Beaumont, Bart., in the year 1806, we learn the manner in which the £900, bequeathed to him by Calvert, were invested. “Upon the interest of the £900, £400 being laid out in annuity, with £200,” says Wordsworth, “deducted from the principal, and £100, a legacy to my sister, and £100 more, which the “Lyrical Ballads” have brought me, my sister and I lived seven years—nearly eight.” And it is certain that this sister, who never left him from this time through his long life, exercised a beautiful and benign influence over the poet, softened the asperities of his character, and cheered him in his despondency. He thanks God that his “beloved sister,”

——“in whose sight
Those days were passed,”

maintained for him a saving intercourse with his true self. It was to her that he was indebted for many salutary admonitions; it was she who, in the midst of the clashing politics and noisy-throated revolutions of Europe, preserved him “still a poet,” and made “him seek beneath that name, and that alone, his office upon earth.”

In 1795, Wordsworth, accompanied by his sister, left Cumberland, for Racedown Lodge, near Cremkerne, in Dorsetshire. The country was delightful, and the house pleasantly situated, with a garden attached to it. They passed their time in reading, gardening, writing, and in translating Ariosto, and other Italian poets. We also find the poet making imitations of Juvenal’s Satires, copies of which he sent to his friend Wrangham, with a view to joint publication. They were never printed, however; and Wordsworth, in 1805, when he was urged by the same friend to allow them to appear, repudiated them altogether, and regretted that he had spent so much time in their composition, declaring that he had come to a “fixed resolution to steer clear,” now and for ever, of all personal satire. During this same year of ’95, he finished his poem on “Guilt and Sorrow,” and began his tragedy of “The Borderers,” which was completed before the close of the following year. It is a cumbrous affair, and will not act; but it contains some fine passages. It was first published in 1842, and was offered to Mr. Harris, the manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, through Mr. Knight, the actor, and was, as Wordsworth confesses, “judiciously returned, as not calculated for the stage.”

In the year 1797, Coleridge came to Racedown. Miss Wordsworth describes him in one of her letters as “a wonderful man;” his conversation teeming with “soul, mind, and spirit,”—three things very nearly related to each other, one would think. He is benevolent, too, good-tempered, and cheerful, like her dear brother William, and “interests himself much about every little trifle.” At first she thought him very plain—that is for about “three minutes” for he is “pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth; longish, loose growing, half-curling, rough black hair.” But he no sooner began to talk than she forgot his want of comeliness, his bad teeth, and wide mouth, and was entranced by the magic of his eloquence. “His eye,” she adds, “is large and full, not very dark, but grey; such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more of the ‘poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling,’ than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eye-brows, and an overhanging forehead.”

Such was the apparition of Coleridge, in Wordsworth’s house at Racedown. The poet himself was delighted with his visitor, and they were soon in deep conversation about literature, and their own several adventures, and proposed argosies on that great and shoreless deep.—Wordsworth read a new poem, which he had just written, called the “Ruined Cottage,”—and Coleridge praised it highly. Then they sat down to tea, and presently the latter “repeated two acts and a half of his tragedy, ‘Osoris.’”

The next morning, the “Borderers” was read, and passages from “twelve hundred lines of blank verse,—superior,” says Coleridge, in a letter to a friend, “I hesitate not to aver, to anything in our language which in any way resembles it.” “I speak with heart-felt sincerity, and I think combined judgment, when I tell you,” he elsewhere writes, “that I feel a little man by his side.”

Coleridge came several times to see his big man, after this; and the two poets grew so much attached to each other, and found such profitable advantages in each other’s conversation and literary judgments, that they resolved to dwell nearer to each other. Accordingly Wordsworth and his sister went to live at Alfoxden, near Stowey, where Coleridge was residing. This was in July, 1797,—and he describes his sojourn there as a very “pleasant and productive time of his life.” The house which Wordsworth occupied belonged to Mr. St. Aubyn, who was a minor,—and the condition of occupancy seems to have been, that the poet should keep the house in repair.