feelings which had long been there. This marriage was the crowning
stroke of Wordsworth's felicity--the poetic recompense for his
steady advocacy of all simple and noble things. When he wished to
illustrate the true dignity and delicacy of rustic lives he was
always accustomed to refer to the Cumbrian folk. And now it seemed
that Cumberland requited him for his praises with her choicest boon;
found for him in the country town of Penrith, and from the small and
obscure circle of his connexions and acquaintance,--nay, from the
same dame's school in which he was taught to read,--a wife such as
neither rank nor young beauty nor glowing genius enabled his brother
bards to win.

Mrs. Wordsworth's poetic appreciativeness, manifest to all who knew
her, is attested by the poet's assertion that two of the best lines
in the poem of _The Daffodils_--

They flash, upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,--

were of her composition. And in all other matters, from the highest
to the lowest, she was to him a true helpmate, a companion "dearer
far than life and light are dear," and able "in his steep march to
uphold him to the end." Devoted to her husband, she nevertheless
welcomed not only without jealousy but with delight the household
companionship through life of the sister who formed so large an
element in his being. Admiring the poet's genius to the full, and
following the workings of his mind with a sympathy that never tired,
she nevertheless was able to discern, and with unobtrusive care to
hide or avert, those errors of manner into which retirement and
sell-absorption will betray even the gentlest spirit. It speaks,