Their slender means were augmented about this time by a legacy which rendered it possible for the brother and sister to have a little cottage home together. Here, at Racedown, in Dorsetshire, Wordsworth first began seriously to devote himself to poetry. Their means were so small that the utmost economy was necessary; but Dorothy cheerfully undertook all the household work of cleaning, cooking, making, and mending. She was not one of those who think there is any degradation, either to man or woman, in manual labour. While she was busied with household cares, her brother often worked in their garden; when their digging and cooking were accomplished, they read Italian authors together, or took long walks through the beautiful country in which they had fixed their abode. It must not be thought that Miss Wordsworth was nothing more to her brother than an energetic, economical housekeeper; she was in feeling almost as much a poet as he was. She had the same intense sympathy with nature, the same observant eye and loving heart for all the various moods of the beautiful outside world. She had also much of her brother’s power of expression, and the same felicity in description. It has been said of her, “Her journals are Wordsworth in prose, just as his poems are Dorothy in verse.” Wordsworth said of his brother John that he was “a silent poet,” and “a poet in everything but words,” meaning that he was a poet in feeling and sympathy; but something more than this can be said of Dorothy; she was a prose poet, who might have become a true poet, if she had not felt that she had another vocation. She was her brother’s inspirer and critic, and what she wrote herself proves that she was worthy to be both. Some passages of her diary are almost identical in thought and observation with subjects that Wordsworth has crystallised in immortal verse. On 30th July 1802 we have, for example, in the prose of Dorothy’s journal, part of what Wordsworth has given to us in the sonnets on Westminster Bridge and Calais sands. “Left London between five and six o’clock of the morning, outside the Dover coach. A beautiful morning. The City, St. Paul’s, with the river, a multitude of little boats, made a beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge; the houses not overhung by their clouds of smoke, were spread out endlessly; yet the sun shone so brightly, with such a pure light, that there was something like the purity of one of Nature’s own grand spectacles. Arrived at Calais at four in the morning of 31st July. Delightful walks in the evenings, seeing far off in the west the coast of England like a cloud, crested with Dover Castle, the evening star, and the glory of the sky. The reflections in the water were more beautiful than the sky itself; purple waves brighter than precious stones for ever melting away on the sands.” Whoever will compare this with the two sonnets beginning “Earth has not anything to show more