“Hast thou then survived Mild offspring of infirm humanity? .... Hail to thee! Frail, feeble monthling.... On thy face Smiles are beginning, like the beams of dawn, To shoot, and circulate. Smiles have there been seen; Tranquil assurances that heaven supports The feeble motions of thy life, and cheers Thy loveliness; or shall those smiles be called Feelers of love, put forth as if to explore This untried world, and to prepare thy way Through a strait passage intricate and dim?” In the autumn of the same year we find him writing the lines “The Kitten and the Falling Leaves,” suggested by the delight of his dear Dora at the pretty frolics of a kitten on the wall, playing with the leaves of autumn. “Such a light of gladness breaks Pretty kitten! from thy freaks; Spreads with such a living grace, O’er my little Dora’s face.” then the poet resolves that he will have his glee out of life:-- “I will have my careless season, Spite of melancholy reason; Will walk thro’ life in such a way, That, when time brings on decay, Now and then, I may possess Hours of perfect gladsomeness; Keep the sprightly soul awake, And have faculties to take, Even from things by sorrow wrought, Matter for a jocund thought; Spite of care and spite of grief, To gambol with life’s falling leaf.” He likewise addresses “The Longest Day” to her; and what a contrast to the last poem! Instead of gambolling with the falling leaves, and making life a grand holiday, he exhorts his child, now grown older, to think of higher matters:-- “Summer ebbs; each day that follows Is a reflex from on high, Tending to the darksome hollows, Where the frosts of winter lie. Now, even now, e’er wrapped in slumber, Fix thine eyes upon the sea, That absorbs time, space, and number,-- Look thou to eternity!” And a little later, when the possibility of blindness came like a gloomy shadow to darken his more thoughtful moments; he anticipates the time when his own Dora shall guide his lonely steps. Poor Dora! she died of consumption, after trying, in vain, the warm south of Portugal. And yet she is not dead, and cannot die. In Dr. Wordsworth’s Memoirs, second volume, there is a fine portrait of her, and a sweet, mild, gentle, and spiritual girl she is; the eye singularly beautiful, and full of deep mystic fire. The poet has also drawn a portrait of her:-- “Open, ye thickets! let her fly, Swift as a Thracian nymph, o’er field or height! For she, to all but those who love her, shy, Would gladly vanish from a stranger’s sight; Tho’ where she is beloved, and loves Light as the wheeling butterfly she moves; Her happy spirit as a bird is free, That rifles blossoms on a tree, Turning them inside out, with rich audacity.”