Towards the close of this year (1794) Wordsworth would probably have gone to London to take up the trade of a writer for the newspapers. From this however he was held back for a time by the duty of nursing his friend Raisley Calvert, who lay dying at Penrith. Early in 1795 the young man died, leaving to his friend, the young Poet, a legacy of £900. The world did not then hold Wordsworth for a poet, and had received with coldness his first attempt, ‘Descriptive Sketches and an Evening Walk,’ published two years before. But the dying youth had seen further than the world, and felt convinced that his friend, if he had leisure given him to put forth his powers, would do something which would make the world his debtor. With this view he bequeathed him the small sum above named. And seldom has such a bequest borne ampler fruit. ‘Upon the interest of the £900, £400 being laid out in annuity, with £200 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 have contrived to live seven years, nearly eight.’ So wrote Wordsworth in 1805 to his friend Sir George Beaumont. Thus at this juncture of the Poet’s fate, when to onlookers he must have seemed both outwardly and inwardly well-nigh bankrupt, Raisley Calvert’s bequest came to supply his material needs, and to his inward needs his sister became the best earthly minister. For his mind was ill at ease. The high hopes awakened in him by the French Revolution had been dashed, and his spirit, darkened and depressed, was on the verge of despair. He might have become such a man as he has pictured in the character of ‘The Solitary.’ But a good Providence brought his sister to his side and saved him. She discerned his real need and divined the remedy. By her cheerful society, fine tact, and vivid love for nature she turned him, depressed and bewildered, alike from the abstract speculations and the contemporary politics in which he had got immersed, and directed his thoughts towards truth of poetry, and the face of nature, and the healing that for him lay in these. ‘Then it was That the beloved sister in whose sight Those days were passed— Maintained for me a saving intercourse With my true self; for though bedimmed and changed Much, as it seemed, I was no further changed Than as a clouded or a waning moon: She whispered still that brightness would return, She, in the midst of all, preserved me still A Poet, made me seek beneath that name, And that alone, my office upon earth. By intercourse with her and wanderings together in delightful places of his native country, he was gradually led back ‘To those sweet counsels between head and heart Whence genuine knowledge grew.’