Wansfell, this household has a favored lot
Living with liberty on thee to gaze--

a sonnet which contains, surely, two or three of the most magical lines
that Wordsworth ever wrote.

It is of course no purpose of these notes to give any fresh account of
Wordsworth at Rydal, or any exhaustive record of the relations between
the Wordsworths and Fox How, especially after the recent publication of
Professor Harper's fresh, interesting, though debatable biography. But
from the letters in my hands I glean a few things worth recording. Here,
for instance, is a passing picture of Matthew Arnold and Wordsworth in
the Fox How drawing-room together, in January, 1848, which I find in a
letter from my grandmother to my father:

Matt has been very much pleased, I think, by what he has seen of dear
old Wordsworth since he has been at home, and certainly he manages to
draw him out very well. The old man was here yesterday, and as he sat
on the stool in the corner beside the fire which you knew so well,
he talked of various subjects of interest, of Italian poetry, of
Coleridge, etc., etc.; and he looked and spoke with more vigor than
he has often done lately.

But the poet's health was failing. His daughter Dora's death in 1847 had
hit him terribly hard, and his sister's state--the helpless though
gentle insanity of the unique, the beloved Dorothy--weighed heavily on
his weakening strength. I find a touching picture of him in the
unpublished letter referred to on a previous page, written in this very
year--1848--to Dean Howson, as a young man, by his former pupil, the