lost in him, the prescient muse guided the hand of
Raisley Calvert while he wrote the poet's name in his will for a
legacy of L900. By the death of Calvert, in 1795, this timely help
came to Wordsworth at the turning-point of his life, and made it
honest for him to write poems that will never die, instead of
theatrical critiques as ephemeral as play-bills, or leaders that led
only to oblivion.

In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his sister took up their abode at
Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. Here nearly two years
were passed, chiefly in the study of poetry, and Wordsworth to some
extent recovered from the fierce disappointment of his political
dreams, and regained that equable tenor of mind which alone is
consistent with a healthy productiveness. Here Coleridge, who had
contrived to see something more in the _Descriptive Sketches_ than
the public had discovered there, first made his acquaintance. The
sympathy and appreciation of an intellect like Coleridge's supplied
him with that external motive to activity which is the chief use of
popularity, and justified to him his opinion of his own powers. It was
now that the tragedy of _The Borderers_ was for the most part written,
and that plan of the _Lyrical Ballads_ suggested which gave Wordsworth
a clue to lead him out of the metaphysical labyrinth in which he was
entangled. It was agreed between the two young friends, that
Wordsworth was to be a philosophic poet, and, by a good fortune
uncommon to such conspiracies, Nature had already consented to the
arrangement. In July 1797, the two Wordsworths removed to Allfoxden in
Somersetshire, that they might be near Coleridge, who in the meanwhile
had married and settled himself at Nether Stowey. In November _The
Borderers_ was finished, and Wordsworth went up to London with his
sister to offer it for the stage. The good Genius of the poet again
interposing, the play was decisively rejected, and Wordsworth went
back to Allfoxden, himself the hero of that first tragi-comedy so
common to young authors.

The play has fine passages, but is as unreal as _Jane Eyre_. It shares
with many of Wordsworth's narrative poems the defect of being written
to illustrate an abstract moral theory, so that the overbearing thesis
is continually thrusting the poetry to the wall. Applied to the drama,
such predestination makes all the personages puppets and disenables
them for being characters. Wordsworth seems to have felt this w