other about eight years old, at play, chasing a butterfly. They were wild figures; the hat of the elder was wreathed round with yellow flowers; the younger, whose hat was only a rimless crown, had stuck it round with laurel leaves. They continued play till I drew very near, and then they addressed me with the begging cant and the whining voice of sorrow. I said, 'I served your mother this morning,' (the boys were so like the woman who had called at our door that I could not be mistaken.) 'O,' says the elder, 'you could not serve my mother, for she's dead, and my father's on at the next town, he's a potter.' I persisted in my assertion, and that I would give them nothing. Says the elder, 'Tom, let's away,' and away they flew like lightning. They had however sauntered so long in their road that they did not reach Ambleside before me, and I saw them go up to Matthew Harrison's house with their wallet upon their eldest brother's shoulder, and creeping with a beggar's complaining foot. On my return from Ambleside I met, in the street, the mother driving her asses, in the two panniers on one of which were the two little children, whom she was chiding and threatening with a wand which she used, to drive on her asses, while the little things hung in wantonness over the pannier's edge. The woman had told me in the morning that she was of Scotland, which her accent fully proved, and that she had lived (I think) ut Wigtown, that they could not keep a house and so they travelled. After tea I read W. the account I had written of the little boy belonging to the tall woman:

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and an unlucky thing it was, for he could not escape from those very words. Next morning at breakfast he wrote the poem To a Butterfly. The thought came upon him as we were talking about the pleasure we both always felt at the sight of a butterfly. I told him that I used in my childhood to chase them, but was afraid of brushing the dust off their wings."

"April 15.-We set off after dinner from Eusemere, Mr. Clarkson's wind furious. Lake (Ullswater) rough. When we were in the woods below Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few Daffodils close to the water side. As we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw there was a long belt of them along the shore. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about them some rested their heads on these stones as on a pillow; the rest tossed, and reeled, and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, they looked so gay and glancing."

If now the reader refers to the four poems-Alice Fell-The Beggars-The Butterfly-and especially the Poem, the Daffodils, he will instantly see the kind of benefit conferred by his sister.

Thus far how much the life of Wordsworth has resembled the life of Milton-up to the age of 35 Milton was a traveller and wanderer among the nations of Europe, and through some parts of his own land-he had moved to and fro apparently in aimless existence, and in his own country appeared uncertain where to find a

him by the hand, to give tenderness to his sterner moods; to guide his eye to the softening unity of things-from the world of men and objects his only retreat was to the world of books-he alternated his life between these two, and thus many of those fountains and lakes of softer soothings in his soul were dried up, and he sank into a comparatively stern and cheerless man, and when he married, he married uncongenially, not the little playmate of his infancy-the object of a long choice and admiration, but a woman who came from quite another hemisphere to that on which he had passed his days, unsympathising with his pursuits, his studies, his feelings, and perhaps alarmed by his vacant moods-it is no wonder that his verses rise like mighty cliffs, and that his beauties and tendernesses seem much more like the mossy lichen upon the rock, than the vein of beauty tracking its way within. How can we doubt that we are to seek in the homes of the Poets for most of the ruling principles which have governed their genius, or moulded their verse.

Never was bard so surrounded by good, true, and beautiful women, at that period of his life when he might have perhaps lapsed into the darker sternness of brooding and clouded thought, we have seen how his Sister accompanied him in all his travels-walked with him, talked with him, was silent with him, wrote for him, thought for him, seems indeed to have lived for him; then a Wife, the worthy and sympathising partner of his aspirations, frequently of his journeys; and then as years declined, the two were reproduced in

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one, his dear Dora, his Daughter. All these influences must have been felt by him every day; whenever was bard so favoured before? Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Pope, Byron, Campbell-not one enjoyed such happiness, and we question whether one of all we have mentioned was capable of so much enjoyment-whether one among them could have treated woman with so much mental and moral deference, he was not polite or amiable, he was more, he was tender and manly. It is usually true, "the measure we mete is measured out to us again." In the language of our author,

"Those who have little to confer,
Find little to receive."

And it must infallibly be the law that when we case ourselves in a lofty and impervious reserve, forbidding the outgoings of tenderness, we by that same act close the pores of our moral nature against the admission of the healthy atmosphere too.

On returning from France one of the first places in which Mr. Wordsworth settled for some time was a place called Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire, with his sister. His life here, as the reader will be aware was the case with most of his life, had much the appearance of desultoriness; the country was lovely, his sister writes with enthusiasm of it, and of her travels over it; they spent their time in reading (the house itself was well stocked with books) and in gardeningthe place was quite retired, having little or no Society,

in the life of our Poet by many circumstances, the most important of which perhaps was that here he became acquainted with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These two men were destined to exert no little reactive influence on each other's lives and minds. Miss Wordsworth gives a very interesting description of him and of his first visit.

"At first," she says, "I thought him very plain, that is for about three minutes-he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth; longish, loose growing, half curling, rough black hair; but if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and 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 phrensy rolling,' than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead."

The friends were mutually delighted with each other. Coleridge writing to a friend at this time declares that he feels himself but a very little man by the side of Wordsworth, while of Miss Wordsworth he writes, "She is a woman indeed in mind and in heart, for her person is such that if you expected to see a pretty woman you would think her ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman you would think her pretty, but her manners are simple, ardent, impressive; in every motion her innocent soul out-beams so brightly that who saw her would say Guilt was a thing impossible