Their life was almost more simple than that of the dalesmen their neighbours.  “It is my opinion,” ran one of his oracular sayings to Sir George Beaumont, “that a man of letters, and indeed all public men of every pursuit, should be severely frugal.”  Means were found for supporting the modest home out of two or three small windfalls bequeathed by friends or relatives, and by the time that children had begun to come Wordsworth was raised to affluence by obtaining the post of distributor of stamps for Westmoreland and part of Cumberland.  His life was happily devoid of striking external incident.  Its essential part lay in meditation and composition.

He was surrounded by friends.  Southey had made a home for himself and his beloved library a few miles over the hills, at Keswick.  De Quincey, with his clever brains and shallow character, took up his abode in the cottage which Wordsworth had first lived in at Grasmere.  Coleridge, born the most golden genius of them all, came to and fro in those fruitless unhappy wanderings which consumed a life that once promised to be so rich in blessing and in glory.  In later years Dr. Arnold built a house at Fox How, attracted by the Wordsworths and the scenery; and other lesser lights came into the neighbourhood.  “Our intercourse with the Wordsworths,” Arnold wrote on the occasion of his first visit in 1832, “was one of the brightest spots of all; nothing could exceed their friendliness, and my almost daily walks with him were things not to be forgotten.  Once and once only we had a good fight about the Reform Bill during a walk up Greenhead Ghyll to see the unfinished sheep-fold, recorded in Michael.  But I am sure that our political disagreement did not at all interfere with our enjoyment of each other’s society; for I think that in the great principles of things we agreed very entirely.”  It ought to be possible, for that matter, for magnanimous men, even if they do not agree in the great principles of things, to keep pleasant terms with one another for more than one afternoon’s walk.  Many pilgrims came, and the poet seems to have received them with cheerful equanimity.  Emerson called upon him in 1833, and found him plain, elderly, whitehaired, not prepossessing.  “He led me out into his garden, and showed me the gravel walk in which thousands of his lines were composed.  He had just returned from Staffa, and within three days had made three sonnets on Fingal’s Cave, and was composing a fourth when he was called in to see me.  He said, ’If you are interested in my verses, perhaps you will like to hear these lines.’  I gladly assented, and he recollected himself for a few moments, and then stood forth and repeated, one after the other, the three entire sonnets with great animation.  This recitation was so unlooked for and surprising—­he, the old Wordsworth, standing apart, and reciting to me in a garden-walk, like a schoolboy declaiming—­that I at first was near to laugh; but recollecting myself,