We have dwelt thus long on Wordsworth’s first characteristic publication, because it expresses so well the nature of his own mind, and because it gave an original impulse to poetical literature. These Lyrical Ballads were published in the summer of 1798, and though they attracted no general attention corresponding to their original merit, they exercised great influence upon all the young minds who were afterward to influence the age. In September, 1798, in company with Coleridge, he visited Germany, and on his return he settled at Grasmere, in Westmoreland; a spot so well known to all readers of his poetry, and where he continued to reside for fifteen years. In 1803 he married a Miss Mary Hutchinson, of Penrith. Neither was wealthy, their joint income being but £100 a year. Of his wife we know little, except that she was of small stature and gentle manners, and was loved by her husband with that still, deep devotion characteristic of his affections. He refers to her, in a poem written in his old age, as She who dwells with me, whom I have loved With such communion, that no place on earth Can ever be a solitude to me. Between 1803 and 1807, when a second volume of Lyrical Ballads was published, he wrote many of the most beautiful and sublime poems in his whole works. To this period belong “The Memorials of a Tour in Scotland,” (1803,) containing “The Solitary Reaper,” “The Highland Girl,” “Ellen Irwin,” “Rob Roy’s Grave,” and other exquisite and glowing impersonations—his grand sonnets dedicated to “National Independence and Liberty”—“The Horn of Egremont Castle,” “Heart-Leap Well,” “Character of a Happy Warrior,” “A Poet’s Epitaph,” “Vandracour and Julia,” the “Ode to Duty,” and, above all, the sublime “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Childhood,” which appears not to have been struck off at one beat, but to have been composed at various periods between the years 1803 and 1806.