an impassioned courtship, by suiting himself to this high sexual pride with the humility of a lover, quite as little could have enjoyed the spectacle of such a pride, or have viewed it in any degree as an attraction, it would to him have been a pure vexation. Looking down even upon the lady of his heart, as upon the rest of the world, from the eminence of his own intellectual superiority,-viewing her, in fact, as a child-he would be much more disposed to regard any airs of feminine disdain she might assume, as the impertinence of girlish levity, than as the caprice of womanly pride; and much, I fear that, in any case of dispute, he would have called even his mistress, child! child!' and, perhaps, even (but this I do not say with the same certainty) might have bid her hold her tongue."

This sketch is mostly in harmony with those well known lines, which as illustrating a moral character we may introduce here:

"Ere with cold beads of midnight dews

Had mingled tears of thine,

I grieved, fond Youth! that thou should'st sue
To haughty Geraldine.

Immoveable by generous sighs,

She glories in a train

Who drag, beneath our native skies,

An oriental chain.

Pine not like them with arms across,

Forgetting in thy care

How the fast-rooted trees can toss

The humblest rivulet will take

Its own wild liberties;
And, every day, the imprisoned lake
Is flowing in the breeze.

Then, crouch no more on suppliant knee,

But scorn with scorn out-brave;

A Briton, even in love, should be

A subject, not a slave!"

The reader will remember that Miss Wordsworth continued with her brother during the whole of his life; her name becomes a part of the literary history of those truly wonderful coterie of men, who haunted in those days the English Lakes. The personal recollections given of her in De Quincey's Autobiographic sketches, are very full and very interesting; beyond these there are few with which we have any acquaintance; from all these we have said the reader will gather how ardent was her attachment to her brother, and her love of nature;—she was always ready for a ramble by his side. And through the future ages, which shall reverence his genuis, her name will be invariably associated with his. For in several of his more noble pieces he has indeed introduced her, not Laura with Petrach, nor Beatrice with Dante, nor the fair Geraldine with Surrey, are more really connected than is Wordsworth with his sister Dorothy. To him she was indeed Dorothea. Theodora the gift of God. His wife occupied herself with her matronly and maternal relations, but his sister travelled with him over the whole of our own or the other countries through which he travelled; it

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was a beautiful companionship, and throws much loveliness round Wordsworth's History; it adds an irresistible charm to his Poetry, and is the key to much of its tenderness and sweetness of thought and expression.

The following notice from De Quincey is one of the most interesting we have seen of the person to whom it refers, and we cannot resist the pleasure of quoting it.

"Immediately behind Mrs. Wordsworth moved a lady, shorter, slighter, and perhaps in all other respects as different from her in personal characteristics as could have been wished for the most effective contrast. Her face was of Egyptian brown;' rarely in a woman of English birth had I seen a more determinate gipsy tan. Her eyes were not soft, as Mrs. Wordsworth's, nor were they fierce or bold; but they were wild and startling, and hurried in their motion. Her manner was warm, and even ardent; her sensibility seemed constitutionally deep; and some subtle fire of impassioned intellect apparently burned within her, which, being alternately pushed forward into a conspicuous expression by the irrepressible instincts of her temperament, and then immediately checked, in obedience to the decorum of her sex and age, and her maidenly condition, gave to her whole demeanour, and to her conversation, an air of embarrassment, and even of self-conflict that was almost distressing to witness. Even her very utterance and enunciation often suffered in point of clearness and steadiness, from the agitation of her excessive organic sensibility. At times, the self-counteraction and self

and so determinately to stammer, that a stranger who should have seen her, and quitted her in that state of feeling, would have certainly set her down for one plagued with that infirmity of speech, as distressingly as Charles Lamb himself. This was Miss Wordsworth, the only sister of the poet-his 'Dorothy,' who naturally owed so much to the lifelong intercourse with her great brother in his most solitary and sequestered years, but on the other hand, to whom he has acknowledged obligations of the profoundest nature, and in particular this mighty one, through which we also, the admirers and worshippers of this great poet, are become equally her debtors-that, whereas the intellect of Wordsworth was, by its original tendency, too stern, too austere, too much enamoured of an ascetic harsh sublimity, she it was, the lady who paced by his side continually through sylvan and mountain tracks, in Highland glens, and in the dim recesses of German-charcoal burners, that first couched his eye of the sense of beauty, humanized him by the gentler charities, and engrafted, with her delicate female touch, those graces upon the ruder growth of his nature, which have since clothed the forest of his genius with a foliage corresponding in loveliness and beauty to the strength of its boughs and the massiness of its trunks.

"The pulses of light are not more quick or more inevitable in their flow and undulation, than were the answering and echoing movements of her sympathizing attention. Her knowledge of literature was irregular, and thoroughly unsystematic. She was content to be

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ignorant of many things; but what she knew, and had really mastered, lay where it could not be disturbedin the temple of her own most fervid heart."

Was not that a Golden Age of Poets, when, as at the earlier part of the present century they all were found frequently among these districts, and all in undress, all certain that they could walk, or boat, without being looked at; without the embarrassing chains on their freedom, so complimentary, yet so confining. We have, as we have said, no wish especially to find some Boswell to be our guide and our reporter through those days, yet surely we may wish that we had authentic intelligence from a few, if indeed the imagination be left not only more free now to see these men as they were, but at the same time to see their whole character softened and sublimed to a more just and accurate painting than the mere narrator could present to us. Grasmere and Windermere were the centres; Rydal as a village was scarcely in existence then; Bowness, a little jutting Peninsula, without its stately Hotels, and Cabs, and Shops, and Pier; and Ambleside a very humble village. Windermere did not in those days receive on her breast the images of paltry Castles, or even of less pretensive and more chaste and humble dwellings, but her banks were frequented by men, who, without a figure, were, or were to be, the monarchs of the world's thought and feeling, and fancy. There was Wilson, the Editor of Blackwood, so wild, so frolicsome, so true, soundhearted, and gentle; there was Scott, listening to criti