Here Wordsworth lived before anything he wrote was published in book form:  here his best work was done, and here Dorothy—­splendid, sympathetic Dorothy—–­was inspiration, critic, friend.  But who inspired Dorothy?  Coleridge perhaps more than all others, and we know somewhat of their relationship as told in Dorothy’s diary.  There is a little Wordsworth Library in Dove Cottage, and I sat at the window of “De Quincey’s room” and read for an hour.  Says Dorothy: 

“Sat until four o’clock reading dear Coleridge’s letters.”

“We paced the garden until moonrise at one o’clock—­we three, brother, Coleridge and I.”  “I read Spenser to him aloud and then we had a midnight tea.”

Here in this little, terraced garden, behind the stone cottage with its low ceilings and wide window-seats and little, diamond panes, she in her misery wrote: 

“Oh, the pity of it all!  Yet there is recompense; every sight reminds me of Coleridge, dear, dear fellow; of our walks and talks by day and night; of all the bright and witty, and sad sweet things of which we spoke and read.  I was melancholy and could not talk, and at last I eased my heart by weeping.”

Alas, too often there is competition between brother and sister, then follow misunderstandings; but here the brotherly and sisterly love stands out clear and strong after these hundred years have passed, and we contemplate it with delight.  Was ever woman more honestly and better praised than Dorothy?

    “The blessings of my later years
      Were with me when I was a boy. 
    She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
    And humble cares and gentle fears,
    A heart! the fountain of sweet tears,
      And love and thought and joy. 
    And she hath smiles to earth unknown,
    Smiles that with motion of their own
      Do spread and sink and rise;
    That come and go with endless play,
    And ever as they pass away
       Are hidden in her eyes.”

And so in a dozen or more poems, we see Dorothy reflected.  She was the steel on which he tried his flint.  Everything he wrote was read to her, then she read it alone, balancing the sentences in the delicate scales of her womanly judgment.  “Heart of my heart, is this well done?” When she said, “This will do,” it was no matter who said otherwise.

Back of the house on the rising hillside is the little garden.  Hewn out of the solid rock is “Dorothy’s seat.”  There I rested while Mrs. Dixon discoursed of poet lore, and told me of how, many times, Coleridge and Dorothy had sat in the same seat and watched the stars.

Then I drank from “the well,” which is more properly a spring; the stones that curb it were placed in their present position by the hand that wrote “The Prelude.”  Above the garden is the orchard, where the green linnet still sings, for the birds never grow old.

There, too, are the circling swallows; and in a snug little alcove of the cottage you can read “The Butterfly” from a first edition; and then you can go sit in the orchard, white with blossoms, and see the butterflies that suggested the poem.  And if your eye is good you can discover down by the lakeside the daffodils, and listen the while to the cuckoo call.