This plot of orchard-ground is ours:
My trees they are, my sister's flowers.
When Coleridge was in Germany, he wrote to them a long letter in hexameters, in which were these lines:
William, my head and my heart! dear William and dear Dorothea! You have all in each other; but I am lonely, and want you.
At another time, the same man, so beloved by them both, writes to a common friend in the following strain: "Wordsworth and his exquisite sister are with me. Sue is a woman, indeed, in mind I mean, and in heart. In every motion, her innocent soul out-beams so brightly that who saw her would say, "Guilt is a thing impossible with her." Her information is various; her eye, watchful in minutest observation of nature; and her taste, a perfect electrometer." Referring to the period of his opening manhood, and the sanguine hopes kindled by the dawn of the French Revolution, Wordsworth says,
When every day brought with it some new sense
Of exquisite regard for common things,
And all the earth was budding with these gifts
Of more refined humanity, thy breath,
Dear sister, was a kind of gentler string,
That went before my step.
She lived with him, indoors and out of doors. She weaned him from the embittering brawl of politics, and warded away the sourness and despair, which, at one time, seriously threatened to possess him. In the "Prelude," he makes this touching acknowledgment:
Then it was,
Thanks to the bounteous Giver of all good,
That the beloved sister, in whose sight
Those days were passed,…
Maintained for me a saving intercourse
With my true self.
Daily, for so many years, they went "stepping westward" in company. His eldest daughter his most darling child, whose radiant apparition he imagined had come for him as he was dying, and cried, "Is that Dore" bore the dear sister's name. Several of her poems were printed with his. In addition to the well-known poem, "To My Sister," the "Descriptive Sketches" and "An Evening Walk" were addressed to her. And numerous incidental tributes, woven into his chief works, will, better than any magic spice or nard, perfume her memory, and keep it fresh as long as his own has name and breath to live among men.
Mine eyes did ne'er
Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind
Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts,
But either she, whom now I have, who now
Divides with me that loved abode, was there,
Or not far off. Where'er my footsteps turned,
Her voice was like a hidden bird that sang.
The thought of her was like a flash of light,
Or an unseen companionship, a breath
Or fragrance independent of the wind.
The perverse pride of Byron, the vices to which he yielded, the bad things in his writings, the sectarian obloquy which pursued him, have veiled from popular apprehension some of the sweet and noble qualities of his heart. Notwithstanding his perverse lower impulses, he was one of the most princely and magical of the immortal lords of fame. So far from there being any lack of permanent value and power in his verse, any falling from his established rank, the most authoritative critics, more generally today than ever before, acknowledge him to be the greatest lyric poet that ever lived. One can hardly help being awed at the thought of the genius and fascination of the young man whom the gifted and fastidious Shelley called