Thomas, born 16th June, 1806.
Catharine, born 6th September, 1808.
William, born 12th May, 1810.
Thomas and Catharine, died in their childhood; John and William are still living; and Dora, “My own Dora,” as the poet loved to call her, after a wedded life, more or less happy (she married Edward Quillinan, Esq.), she died in 1847, just three years before her venerable father.
Wordsworth was singularly fortunate in his family. There was no jars nor discords in the sacred temple of his home; but beauty, love, and all the virtues and the graces dwelt with him, and ministered to his happiness and repose. He loved his children with an intense affection; and sweet Dora, his best beloved, exercised an influence over him, more beautiful and harmonising perhaps, even than that which his sister exercised in his early life, and still continued to exercise, because it was deeper, and struck deeper into the very being of the poet. This child threw a sacred halo round his soul, and inspired one of the sweetest of his lyrics. Only a month after her birth he wrote:—
“Hast thou then survived
Mild offspring of infirm humanity?
.... Hail to thee!
Frail, feeble monthling.... On thy face
Smiles are beginning, like the beams of dawn,
To shoot, and circulate. Smiles have there been seen;
Tranquil assurances that heaven supports
The feeble motions of thy life, and cheers
Thy loveliness; or shall those smiles be called
Feelers of love, put forth as if to explore
This untried world, and to prepare thy way
Through a strait passage intricate and dim?”
In the autumn of the same year we find him writing the lines “The Kitten and the Falling Leaves,” suggested by the delight of his dear Dora at the pretty frolics of a kitten on the wall, playing with the leaves of autumn.
“Such a light of gladness breaks
Pretty kitten! from thy freaks;
Spreads with such a living grace,
O’er my little Dora’s face.”
then the poet resolves that he will have his glee out of life:—
“I will have my careless season,
Spite of melancholy reason;
Will walk thro’ life in such a way,
That, when time brings on decay,
Now and then, I may possess
Hours of perfect gladsomeness;
Keep the sprightly soul awake,
And have faculties to take,
Even from things by sorrow wrought,
Matter for a jocund thought;
Spite of care and spite of grief,
To gambol with life’s falling leaf.”