extracts, and, on account of the smallness of the print, deferred doing so till longer days would allow me to read without candle-light, which I have long since given up.  But, alas! when the days lengthened, my eyesight departed, and for many months I could not read three minutes at a time.  You will be sorry to hear that this infirmity still hangs about me, and almost cuts me off from reading altogether.  But how are you, and how is your dear sister?  I long much, as we all do, to know.

For ourselves, this last year, owing to my sister’s dangerous illness, the effects of which are not yet got over, has been an anxious one and melancholy.  But no more of this.  My sister has probably told everything about the family; so that I may conclude with less scruple, by assuring you of my sincere and faithful affection for you and your dear sister.

WM. WORDSWORTH.[107]

68. Summer:  Mr. Quillinan:  Draining, &c.

LETTER TO G. HUNTLY GORDON, ESQ.

Rydal Mount, April 6. 1830.

MY DEAR MR. GORDON,

You are kind in noticing with thanks my rambling notes.[108]

We have had here a few days of delicious summer weather.

[107] Memoirs, ii. 223.

[108] On a proposed tour.

It appeared with the suddenness of a pantomimic trick, stayed longer than we had a right to expect, and was as rapidly succeeded by high wind, bitter cold, and winter snow, over hill and dale.

I am not surprised that you are so well pleased with Mr. Quillinan.  The more you see of him the better you will like him.  You ask what are my employments.  According to Dr. Johnson they are such as entitle me to high commendation, for I am not only making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before, but a dozen.  In plain language, I am draining a bit of spungy ground.[109] In the field where this goes on I am making a green terrace that commands a beautiful view of our two lakes, Rydal and Windermere, and more than two miles of intervening vale with the stream visible by glimpses flowing through it.  I shall have great pleasure in showing you this among the other returns which I hope one day to make for your kindness.

Adieu, yours,
W.W.[110]

69. Works of Webster, &c.:  Elder Poets:  Dr. Darwin:  ‘Excursion:’  Collins, &c.

LETTER TO REV.  ALEXANDER DYCE.

[No date, but Postmark, 1830.]

I am truly obliged, my dear Sir, by your valuable present of Webster’s Dramatic Works and the ’Specimens.’[111] Your publisher was right in insisting upon the whole of Webster, otherwise the book might have been superseded, either by an entire edition separately given to the world, or in some corpus of the dramatic writers.  The poetic genius of England, with the exception of Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and a very few more,