her favourite brother: and in this gifted woman Wordsworth found a
gentler and sunnier likeness of himself; he found a love which never
wearied, and a sympathy fervid without blindness, whose suggestions
lay so directly in his mind's natural course that they seemed to
spring from the same individuality, and to form at once a portion of
his inmost being. The opening of this new era of domestic happiness
demands a separate chapter.




CHAPTER III.


MISS WORDSWORTH--LYRICAL BALLADS--SETTLEMENT AT GRASMERE.

From among many letters of Miss Wordsworth's to a beloved friend,
(Miss Jane Pollard, afterwards Mrs. Marshall, of Hallsteads), which
have been kindly placed at my disposal, I may without impropriety
quote a few passages which illustrate the character and the
affection of brother and sister alike. And first, in a letter
(Forncett, February 1792), comparing her brothers Christopher and
William, she says: "Christopher is steady and sincere in his
attachments. William has both these virtues in an eminent degree,
and a sort of violence of affection, if I may so term it, which
demonstrates itself every moment of the day, when the objects of his
affection are present with him, in a thousand almost imperceptible
attentions to their wishes, in a sort of restless watchfulness which
I know not how to describe, a tenderness that never sleeps, and at
the same time such a delicacy of manner as I have observed in few men."