One of the very finest of all Wordsworth’s letters--written to Coleridge four days after the settlement at Grasmere--details, with a graphic and truly poetic power, the wanderings of the sister and brother from Sockburn to their new home. It is too long, however, to quote here, and for a perusal of it the reader is referred to the Memoirs.[H] The poet lived at Grasmere with his sister for eight years.[I] “The cottage,” says Dr. Wordsworth, in which Wordsworth and his sister took up their abode, and which still retains the form it wore then, stands on the right hand, by the side of what was then the coach road, from Ambleside to Keswick, as it enters Grasmere, or, as that part of the village is called, “Town End.” The front of it faces the lake; behind is a small plot of orchard and garden-ground, in which there is a spring, and rocks; the enclosure shelves upward towards the woody sides of the mountain above it.--Many of his poems, as the reader will remember, are associated with this fair spot: “This spot of orchard ground is ours; My trees they are, my sister’s flowers.” In the first book of the “Recluse,” still unpublished, he thus expresses his feelings in settling in this house at Grasmere, and in looking down from the hills which embosom the lake. “On Nature’s invitation do I come, By reason sanctioned. Can the choice mislead, That made the calmest, fairest spot on earth, With all its unappropriated good, My own, and not mine only, for with me Entrenched--say rather peacefully embowered-- Under yon orchard, in yon humble cot, A younger orphan of a home extinct The only daughter of my parents, dwells; Aye, think on that, my heart, and cease to stir; Pause upon that, and let the breathing frame No longer breathe, but all be satisfied. O, if such silence be not thanks to God For what hath been bestowed, then where, where then, Shall gratitude find rest? Mine eyes did ne’er Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts, But either she, whom now I have, who now Divides with me that loved abode was there, Or not far off. Where’er my footsteps turned, Her voice was like a hidden bird that sung; The thought of her was like a flash of light Or an unseen companionship, a breath Or fragrance independent of the wind. In all my goings, in the new and old Of all my meditations, and in this Favourite of all, in this the most of all.... Embrace me then, ye hills, and close me in. Now in the clear and open day I feel Your guardianship; I take it to my heart; ’Tis like the solemn shelter of the night, But I would call thee beautiful; for mild, And soft, and gay, and beautiful thou art, Dear valley, having in thy face a smile, Though peaceful, full of gladness. Thou art pleased, Pleased with thy crags, and woody steeps, thy lake