Having brought down the history of Wordsworth to the time of his marriage, I am reminded by that event to mention the singular good fortune, in all points of worldly prosperity, which has accompanied him through life. His marriage--the capital event of life--was fortunate, and inaugurated a long succession of other prosperities. He has himself described, in his "Leech-Gatherer,"[118] the fears that at one time, or at least in some occasional moments of his life, haunted him, lest at some period or other he might be reserved for poverty. "Cold, pain, and hunger, and all fleshly ills," occurred to his boding apprehension, and "mighty poets in their misery dead." [118] Now entitled _Resolution and Independence_.--M. "He thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in its pride; Of him who walked in glory and in joy Following his plough along the mountain-side." And, at starting on his career of life, certainly no man had plainer reasons for anticipating the worst evils that have ever persecuted poets, excepting only two reasons which might warrant him in hoping better; and these two were--his great prudence, and the temperance of his daily life. He could not be betrayed into foolish engagements; he could not be betrayed into expensive habits. Profusion and extravagance had no hold over him, by any one passion or taste. He was not luxurious in anything; was not vain or even careful of external appearances (not, at least, since he had left Cambridge, and visited a mighty nation in civil convulsions); was not even in the article of books expensive. Very few books sufficed him; he was careless habitually of all the current literature, or indeed of any literature that could not be considered as enshrining the very ideal, capital, and elementary grandeur of the human intellect. In this extreme limitation of his literary sensibilities he was as much assisted by that accident of his own intellectual condition--viz. extreme, intense, unparalleled _onesidedness_ (_einseitigkeit_)--as by any peculiar sanity of feeling. Thousands of books that have given rapturous delight to millions of ingenuous minds for Wordsworth were absolutely a dead letter--closed and sealed up from his sensibilities and his powers of appreciation, not less than colours from a blind man's eye. Even the few books which his peculiar mind had made indispensable to him were not in such a sense indispensable as they would have been to a man of more sedentary habits. He lived in the open air, and the enormity of pleasure which both he and his sister drew from the common appearances of nature and their everlasting variety--variety so infinite that, if no one leaf of a tree or shrub ever exactly resembled another in all its filaments and their arrangement, still less did any one day ever repeat another in all its pleasurable elements. This pleasure was to him in the stead of many libraries:--