Wordsworth, like most generous young people of his day, was deeply stirred by sympathy with the French Revolution. At its outset he believed it would bring immeasurable blessings to mankind; tyranny, cruelty, and vice were, he believed, to be dismissed from the high places of the earth, and in their stead would reign justice, mercy, peace, and love. It is therefore not difficult to imagine with what agony of disappointment he saw, as he thought, all these high hopes falsified, and the light that had been lit by the Revolution quenched in blood and in a series of massacres more cruel and remorseless than any that had disgraced previous forms of government. For a time the belief in goodness and righteousness seemed shaken in him. To disbelieve in the power of goodness is infidelity; and from this gulf of infidelity Wordsworth was saved by his sister’s influence. This was the first memorable service she rendered to his moral nature. He was saved from becoming permanently soured and narrowed by the sunny radiance of his sister’s sympathy and by her unshaken faith that good is stronger than evil. The brother and sister now resolved to live together; and from that hour Dorothy’s whole life was given to enrich and solace that of her brother, and to help him to give utterance to those great thoughts and words which at last made the whole of England aware that the nation was possessed of another poet. Wordsworth was now twenty-five years of age; he had passed through his college career at Cambridge and had travelled abroad, and the time had come when it was not unnaturally expected of him that he should settle down to some business or profession that would provide him with an income. Very little had come to the family from inheritance, and parents and guardians are not generally disposed to look with lenient indulgence on a penniless young man of twenty-five who shows a disinclination to any steady work, and is suspected of an ambition to become a poet. Wordsworth’s uncles had been kind and generous guardians, but they could not have been pleased at what must have seemed to them at this time the dilatory, desultory life of their nephew. His sister, however, all the while gave him her warmest sympathy and support. Before any one else had dreamed of it, she recognised her brother’s genius; she not only believed that he would be a poet, but _knew_ that he _was_ a poet. She did not urge him, as a well-intentioned but less perceptive friend might have done, to become a lawyer, or a doctor, or what not; she made it possible, by joining her life to his, and nourishing his genius by the tribute she poured into it from her own, that he should have the quiet sympathetic surroundings without which his poetic imagination could not work.