be for a moment forgotten that Southey worked double-tides to make up for Coleridge’s idleness.  While Coleridge was dreaming and discoursing, Southey was toiling to maintain Coleridge’s wife and children.  He had no time and no attention to spare for wandering about and making himself at home with the neighbors.  This practice came naturally to Wordsworth; and a kind and valued neighbor he was to all the peasants round.  Many a time I have seen him in the road, in Scotch bonnet and green spectacles, with a dozen children at his heels and holding his cloak, while he cut ash-sticks for them from the hedge, hearing all they had to say or talking to them.  Southey, on the other hand, took his constitutional walk at a fixed hour, often reading as he went.  Two families depended on him; and his duty of daily labor was not only distinctive, but exclusive.  He was always at work at home, while Coleridge was doing nothing but talking, and Wordsworth was abroad, without thinking whether he was at work or play.  Seen from the stand-point of conscience and of moral generosity, Southey’s was the noblest life of the three; and Coleridge’s was, of course, nought.  I own, however, that, considering the tendency of the time to make literature a trade, or at least a profession, I cannot help feeling Wordsworth’s to have been the most privileged life of them all.  He had not work enough to do; and his mode of life encouraged an excess of egoism:  but he bore all the necessary retribution of this in his latter years; and the whole career leaves an impression of an airy freedom and a natural course of contemplation, combined with social interest and action, more healthy than the existence of either the delinquent or the exemplary comrade with whom he was associated in the public view.

I have left my neighbors waiting long on the margin of Grasmere.  That was before I was born; but I could almost fancy I had seen them there.

I observed that Wordsworth’s report of their trip was very unlike Coleridge’s.  When his sister had left them, he wrote to her, describing scenes by brief precise touches which draw the picture that Coleridge blurs with grand phrases.  Moreover, Wordsworth tells sister Dorothy that John will give him forty pounds to buy a bit of land by the lake, where they may build a cottage to live in henceforth.  He says, also, that there is a small house vacant near the spot.—­They took that house; and thus the Wordsworths became “Lakers.”  They entered that well-known cottage at Grasmere on the shortest day (St. Thomas’s) of 1799.  Many years afterwards, Dorothy wrote of the aspect of Grasmere on her arrival that winter evening,—­the pale orange lights on the lake, and the reflection of the mountains and the island in the still waters.  She had wandered about the world in an unsettled way; and now she had cast anchor for life,—­not in that house, but within view of that valley.