I thought that, possibly, he had his sister in his thoughts. Yet "lofty" was hardly the right word. Miss Wordsworth was too ardent and fiery a creature to maintain the reserve essential to dignity; and dignity was the last thing one thought of in the presence of one so natural, so fervent in her feelings, and so embarrassed in their utterance--sometimes, also, in the attempt to check them. It must not, however, be supposed that there was any silliness or weakness of enthusiasm about her. She was under the continual restraint of severe good sense, though liberated from that false shame which, in so many persons, accompanies all expressions of natural emotion; and she had too long enjoyed the ennobling conversation of her brother, and his admirable comments on the poets, which they read in common, to fail in any essential point of logic or propriety of thought. Accordingly, her letters, though the most careless and un-elaborate--nay, the most hurried that can be imagined--are models of good sense and just feeling. In short, beyond any person I have known in this world, Miss Wordsworth was the creature of impulse; but, as a woman most thoroughly virtuous and well-principled, as one who could not fail to be kept right by her own excellent heart, and as an intellectual creature from her cradle, with much of her illustrious brother's peculiarity of mind--finally, as one who had been, in effect, educated and trained by that very brother--she won the sympathy and the respectful regard of every man worthy to approach her. Properly, and in a spirit of prophecy, was she named _Dorothy_; in its Greek meaning,[121] _gift of God_, well did this name prefigure the relation in which she stood to Wordsworth, the mission with which she was charged--to wait upon him as the tenderest and most faithful of domestics; to love him as a sister; to sympathize with him as a confidante; to counsel him; to cheer him and sustain him by the natural expression of her feelings--so quick, so ardent, so unaffected--upon the probable effect of whatever thoughts or images he might conceive; finally, and above all other ministrations, to ingraft, by her sexual sense of beauty, upon his masculine austerity that delicacy and those graces which else (according to the grateful acknowledgments of his own maturest retrospect) it never could have had:-- "The blessing of my later years with me when I was a boy: She gave me hopes, she gave me fears, A heart the fountain of sweet tears, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And love, and thought, and joy."