Subsequent portions of his vacations were spent in Wales, and Penrith, on the southern border of Cumberland. His mother’s relations resided at this latter town, and it was with them that his beloved sister Dorothy was placed when the poet’s family was broken up. It was the daughter of these relations also to whom the poet was married in after life. Her name was Mary Hutchinson; she was a schoolmate of the poet’s at Penrith, and an affectionate, intelligent, good wife she made him, during the forty-eight years of their wedded life. And now, during the holidays, these beautiful persons--viz. Dorothy and Mary, were his companions, as he roved amongst the scenery of Penrith.[E]” He mounted with them the Border Beacon, on the north-east of the town; and, on that eminence, now overgrown with fir trees, which intercept the view, but which was then free and open, and displayed a glorious panorama, he beheld the wide plain stretched far and near below, closed by the dark hills of Ullswater on the west, and by the dim ridges of Scotland on the north. The road from Penrith towards Appleby, on the south-east, passes, at about a mile’s distance, the romantic ruins of that “Monastic castle mid tall trees, Low standing by the margin of the stream,” where the river Lowther flows into the Emont, which descends from the lake of Ullswater through a beautiful and fertile valley, in which at the village of Sockbridge, some of Wordsworth’s ancestors lived, and where, at the church of Burton, some of them lie buried. That “monastic castle” is Brougham Castle, a noble and picturesque ruin. This was a favourite resort of the youthful poet and his sister. “Those mouldering towers Have seen us side by side, when having clomb The darksome windings of a broken stair, And crept along a ridge of fractured wall, Not without trembling, we in safety looked Forth, through some Gothic window’s open space, And gather’d with one mind a rich reward From the far stretching landscape, by the light Of morning beautified, or purple eve.” In aftertimes this castle was to be the subject of one of his noblest lyrical effusions. “The Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle.” “High in the breathless hall the minstrel sate, And Emont’s murmur mingled with the song.” A little beyond the castle, by the roadside, stands the Countess’ Pillar, a record of filial affection, and Christian charity to which also he has paid a poetical tribute; and the woods of Lowther, at a short distance on the south, were ever associated in his memory with the delightful days which he passed in his vacations at Penrith, and were afterwards the scene of intellectual enjoyment in the society of the noble family whose name they bear.”