Fortunately for literature, and for men, as the readers of literature, Raisley Calvert was born and died--and the “Excursion” was written. I would not, however, be thought to speak ungenerously of poor Calvert:--God forbid!--but still I cannot help thinking about Providence, and His dark, inscrutable ways how He smites one frail child to the grave that another may have leisure to sing songs.--The poet never forgets the bounty and generosity of the poor dead heart, now hushed to silence, but raises this monument to his memory: “Calvert! it must not be unheard by them Who may respect my name, that I to thee Owe many years of early liberty. This care was thine, when sickness did condemn Thy youth to hopeless wasting, root and stem, That I, if frugal and severe, might stray Where’er I liked, and finally array My temples with the Muse’s diadem. Hence, if in freedom I have loved the truth, If there be aught of pure, or good, or great, In my past verse, or shall be in the lays Of highest mood, which now I meditate, It gladdens me, O worthy short-lived youth, To think how much of this will be thy praise.” In a letter which Wordsworth wrote to his dear friend, Sir George Beaumont, Bart., in the year 1806, we learn the manner in which the £900, bequeathed to him by Calvert, were invested. “Upon the interest of the £900, £400 being laid out in annuity, with £200,” says Wordsworth, “deducted from the principal, and £100, a legacy to my sister, and £100 more, which the “Lyrical Ballads” have brought me, my sister and I lived seven years--nearly eight.” And it is certain that this sister, who never left him from this time through his long life, exercised a beautiful and benign influence over the poet, softened the asperities of his character, and cheered him in his despondency. He thanks God that his “beloved sister,” ----“in whose sight Those days were passed,” maintained for him a saving intercourse with his true self. It was to her that he was indebted for many salutary admonitions; it was she who, in the midst of the clashing politics and noisy-throated revolutions of Europe, preserved him “still a poet,” and made “him seek beneath that name, and that alone, his office upon earth.”