It was by the accident, so to speak, of her early friendship with Wordsworth’s sister, that her life became involved with the poetic element which her mind would hardly have sought for itself in another position.  She was the incarnation of good sense, as applied to the concerns of the every-day world.  In as far as her marriage and course of life tended to infuse a new elevation into her views of things, it was a blessing; and, on the other hand, in as far as it infected her with the spirit of exclusiveness, which was the grand defect of the group in its own place, it was hurtful; but that very exclusiveness was less an evil than an amusement, after all.  It was rather a serious matter to hear the poet’s denunciation of the railway, and to read his well-known sonnets on the desecration of the Lake region by the unhallowed presence of commonplace strangers; and it was truly painful to observe how the scornful and grudging mood spread among the young, who thought they were agreeing with Wordsworth in claiming the vales and lakes as a natural property for their enlightened selves.  But it was so unlike Mrs. Wordsworth, with her kindly, cheery, generous turn, to say that a green field, with buttercups, would answer all the purposes of Lancashire operatives, and that they did not know what to do with themselves when they came among the mountains, that the innocent insolence could do no harm.  It became a fixed sentiment when she alone survived to uphold it, and one demonstration of it amused the whole neighborhood in a good-natured way.  “People from Birthwaite” were the bugbear—­Birthwaite being the end of the railway.  In the Summer of 1857, Mrs. Wordsworth’s companion told her (she being then blind) that there were some strangers in the garden—­two or three boys on the mount, looking at the view.  “Boys from Birthwaite,” said the old lady, in the well-known tone, which conveyed that nothing good could come from Birthwaite.  When the strangers were gone, it appeared that they were the Prince of Wales and his companions.  Making allowance for prejudices, neither few nor small, but easily dissolved when reason and kindliness had opportunity to work, she was a truly wise woman, equal to all occasions of action, and supplying other persons’ needs and deficiencies.

In the “Memoirs of Wordsworth” it is stated that she was the original of

    “She was a phantom of delight;”

and some things in the next few pages look like it; but for the greater part of the poet’s life it was certainly believed by some, who ought to know, that that wonderful description related to another who flitted before his imagination in earlier days than those in which he discovered the aptitude of Mary Hutchinson to his own needs.  The last stanza is very like her; and her husband’s sonnet to the painter of her portrait, in old age, discloses to us how the first stanza might be also, in days beyond the ken of the existing generation.