In 1799 Wordsworth established himself at Grasmere, in Westmoreland, his sister remaining--as she always did--a beloved inmate of his home. In 1802 he married, most fortunately, a woman who was always sympathetic and kindly, as well as an excellent and devoted mother of the children born to them;[10] moreover, she was exceptionally endowed to stimulate and give range to his poetic ambitions. Between Grasmere or its neighborhood, and the better-known home of Rydal Mount, the poet passed the remainder of his life. There were, indeed, frequent interludes of travel--to Scotland, to Leicestershire, to Southern England, to Ireland, and the Continent--from all which places he came back with an unabated love for the lakes and mountains which bounded his home. Never did there live a more exalted lover of {341} Nature; and specially for those scenes of Nature which cradled him in infancy and which cheered his manhood. Without being largely experienced in the devices of gardening craft, he yet gave frequent and profitable advice to those among his friends who were building up homes in the surrounding lake district; and the Beaumont family of Leicestershire show with pride a winter garden at Coleorton, which is an evergreen remembrancer of the poet's skill and taste. He resented all undue interference with natural surfaces; his art was the larger art of winning one to the reasonableness and beauty of nature's own purposes. Not a resident in the neighborhood of Ambleside but knew his gaunt figure stalking up and down the hills; yet not counted over-affable; the villagers report him--"distant, vera distant. As for his habits he had none--niver knew him wi' a pot i' his hand or a pipe i' his mouth." And another says--"As for fishing, he hadn't a bit of fish in him, hadn't Wordsworth--not a bit o' fish in him!"[11] This sounds strangely to one familiar {342} with _Lines to gold and silver fish in a glass globe_. Certainly he did not love babble nor little persiflage; he had neither the art to coin it nor the humor to redeem it. But he was capable of sensible, heavily-charged talk, even upon practical themes, showing a capacity for, and a habit of, consecutive and logical thinking. Often reading and discoursing on poets and their work, but chary of any exuberance of praise; if ever cynical, tending that way under such provocation. Not indisposed--for small cause--to recite from Wordsworth (as Emerson tells us in the story of his first visit to Rydal Mount); but reciting well, and putting large, dashing movement into the verse--as of faraway rebounding water-falls. His egotism, though not easily kept under, was not riotously exacting or audacious; one could see at the bottom of it--not the little vanities of a flibbertigibbet, but respect and reverence for his inborn seership and for his long priesthood at the altar of the Muses.