Attends the motions of the viewless winds, There, darkness makes abode, and all the host FROM DOROTHY WORDSWORTH TO MISS POLLARD (NOW MRS. MARSHALL) MILLHOUSE, September 2, 1795. I am going to live in Dorsetshire. . . . You know the pleasure I have always attached to the idea of home, a blessing which I have so early lost. . . . I think I told you that Mr Montagu had a little boy, who, as you will perceive, could not be very well taken care of, either in his father's chambers, or under the uncertain management of various friends of Mr M., with whom he has frequently stayed. . . . A daughter of Mr Tom Myers (a cousin of mine whom I daresay you have heard me mention) is coming over to England by the first ship, which is expected in about a week, to be educated. She is, I believe, about three or four years old, and T. Myers' brother, who has charge of her, has suggested that I should take her under my care. With these two children, and the produce of Raisley Calvert's legacy, we shall have an income of at least £70 or £80 per annum. William finds that he can get nine per cent. for the money upon the best security. He means to sink half of it upon my life, which will make me always comfortable and independent. . . . Living in the unsettled way in which my brother has hitherto lived in London is altogether unfavourable to mental exertion. He has had the offer of ten guineas for a work which has not taken up much time, and half the profits of a second edition if it should be called for. It is a little sum; but it is one step. . . . I am determined to work with resolution. It will greatly contribute to my happiness, and place me in such a situation that I shall be doing something. I shall have to join William at Bristol, and proceed thence in a chaise with Basil1 to Racedown. It is fifty miles. DOROTHY WORDSWORTH. 1 Basil Montagu, the "little boy" mentioned above. THE YEARS 1795 TO 1800 D RACEDOWN: ALFOXDEN INTRODUCTORY URING these years of storm and stress, when 80 few heard Wordsworth's voice aright, there was one man, Raisley Calvert, who recognized its power and resolved that it should have a chance to utter itself. On his death in 1795 it was found that he had left to Wordsworth a legacy of nine hundred pounds. Small as the sum seems, it was enough to justify his long-deferred dream of making a home for himself and his sister; for the first time liberty and leisure were at his command. Now began that life of plain living and high thinking, so congenial to the Wordsworths that they never afterwards departed greatly from it. It was almost an accident that determined their particular location. A local merchant of Bristol, Mr. Pinney, had a country house at Racedown, Dorsetshire, which he had given over to his son and which the son in turn now gave over to Wordsworth, with furniture, orchard, and gardens, free of rent, on condition that the young man might occasionally come down for a few weeks at a time. The garden, cultivated by 66 Wordsworth himself, supplied the principal food of the family, while £50 a year received for the board and teaching of the son of a London barrister supplemented the slender income. Here Wordsworth wrote Guilt and Sorrow," "The Borderers" and a number of short poems. It was a happy time for the long-separated brother and sister, and years afterward Dorothy wrote of it as "the place dearest to my recollections upon the whole surface of the island, the first home I ever had." But there are few traces of locality in the poems, beyond the description of the ruined cottage, and the general scenery of Book I of “The Excursion." Dorsetshire downs rise plainly to the eye when we read: "'T was summer, and the sun had mounted high; Through a pale stream; but all the northern downs A surface dappled o'er with shadows flung The real epoch-making event of these two years in Dorsetshire occurred when Coleridge came down from Bristol to visit them, in June, 1797. Wordsworth read to Coleridge" The Borderers," and Coleridge read to Wordsworth "Orsorio, a Tragedy," and they walked and talked and sat up far into the night in order to have more time for talk, and thus began the friendship which later meant so much in both lives. Brother and sister returned the visit in the following month at Coleridge's home in Nether-Stowey, among the |