Now and then I stole a glance at the gentle lady, the poet’s wife, as she sat knitting silently by the fireside.  This, then, was the Mary whom in 1802 he had brought home to be his loving companion through so many years.  I could not help remembering too, as we all sat there together, that when children they had “practised reading and spelling under the same old dame at Penrith,” and that they had always been lovers.  There sat the woman, now gray-haired and bent, to whom the poet had addressed those undying poems, “She was a phantom of delight,” “Let other bards of angels sing,” “Yes, thou art fair,” and “O, dearer far than life and light are dear.”  I recalled, too, the “Lines written after Thirty-six Years of Wedded Life,” commemorating her whose

    “Morn into noon did pass, noon into eve,
    And the old day was welcome as the young,
    As welcome, and as beautiful,—­in sooth
    More beautiful, as being a thing more holy.”

When she raised her eyes to his, which I noticed she did frequently, they seemed overflowing with tenderness.

When I rose to go, for I felt that I must not intrude longer on one for whom I had such reverence, Wordsworth said, “I must show you my library, and some tributes that have been sent to me from the friends of my verse.”  His son John now came in, and we all proceeded to a large room in front of the house, containing his books.  Seeing that I had an interest in such things, he seemed to take a real pleasure in showing me the presentation copies of works by distinguished authors.  We read together, from many a well-worn old volume, notes in the handwriting of Coleridge and Charles Lamb.  I thought he did not praise easily those whose names are indissolubly connected with his own in the history of literature.  It was languid praise, at least, and I observed he hesitated for mild terms which he could apply to names almost as great as his own.  I believe a duplicate of the portrait which Inman had painted for Reed hung in the room; at any rate a picture of himself was there, and he seemed to regard it with veneration as we stood before it.  As we moved about the apartment, Mrs. Wordsworth quietly followed us, and listened as eagerly as I did to everything her husband had to say.  Her spare little figure flitted about noiselessly, pausing as we paused, and always walking slowly behind us as we went from object to object in the room.  John Wordsworth, too, seemed deeply interested to watch and listen to his father.  “And now,” said Wordsworth, “I must show you one of my latest presents.”  Leading us up to a corner of the room, we all stood before a beautiful statuette which a young sculptor had just sent to him, illustrating a passage in “The Excursion.”  Turning to me, Wordsworth asked, “Do you know the meaning of this figure?” I saw at a glance that it was

    “A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
    Of inland ground, applying to his ear
    The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell,”