his presence has a strange reality as we look on some majestic
prospect of interwinding lake and mountain which his design has made
more beautifully visible to the children's children of those he loved;
as we stand, perhaps, in some shadowed garden-ground where his will
has had its way,--has framed Helvellyn's far-off summit in an arch
of tossing green, and embayed in towering forest-trees the long
lawns of a silent Valley,--fit haunt for lofty aspiration and for
brooding calm.

But of all woodland ways which Wordsworth's skill designed or his
feet frequented, not one was dearer to him, (if I may pass thus by a
gentle transition to another of the strong affections of his life),
than a narrow path through a firwood near his cottage, which
"was known to the poet's household by the name of John's Grove." For
in the year 1800 his brother, John Wordsworth, a few years younger
than himself, and captain of an East Indiaman, had spent eight
months in the poet's cottage at Grasmere. The two brothers had seen
little of each other since childhood, and the poet had now the
delight of discovering in the sailor a character congenial to his own,
and an appreciation of poetry--and of the _Lyrical Ballads_
especially--which was intense and delicate in an unusual degree. In
both brothers, too, there was the same love of nature; and after
John's departure, the poet pleased himself with imagining the
visions of Grasmere which beguiled the watches of many a night at sea,
or with tracing the pathway which the sailor's instinct had planned
and trodden amid trees so thickly planted as to baffle a less
practised skill. John Wordsworth, on the other hand, looked forward
to Grasmere as the final goal of his wanderings, and intended to use
his own savings to set the poet free from worldly cares.