illness of his wife cast the shadow of a
terrible cloud over his house, and for long periods it was deprived of a
mother, and he of a companion. Yet amid these sore anxieties and heavy
depressions he never lost either his fortitude or, what is much rarer
than fortitude, that delicate and watchful consideration for others
which is one of the most endearing of human characteristics. When he was
twenty years younger, he had written of himself to one of his sisters
(January 14, 1830):--

Nature never cut me out for a happy man, for my
mind is so constituted as to create difficulties and sorrows
where I do not find them, and to strive with and overcome
them when I meet them. I am never so happy as
in times of difficulty and danger and excitement, and I
am afraid my line of life will furnish me with but few of
these times, so that I shall remain in the ground like the
seed of a strong plant, which has never found the soil or
the atmosphere necessary for its germination.

The judgment was not an unjust one, and the apprehension that life would
bring too few difficulties was superfluous, as most of us find it to be.
When the difficulties came, he confronted them with patient stoicism.
His passionate love of natural beauty was solace and nourishment to him
during the fifteen years of his sojourn in that taking, happy region of
silver lake and green mountain slope. He had many congenial neighbours.
Of Wordsworth he saw little. The poet was, in external manner and habit,
too much of the peasant for Greg's intellectual fastidiousness. He
called on one occasion at Rydal Mount, and Wordsworth, who had been
regravelling his little garden-walks, would talk of nothing but gravel,
its various qualities, and their respective virtues. The fine and subtle
understanding of Hartley Coleridge, his lively fancy, his literature,
his easy play of mind, made him a more sympathetic companion for a man
of letters than his great neighbour. Of him Mr. Greg saw a good deal
until his death in 1849.[6] Southey was still lingering at Greta Hall;
but it was death in life. He cherished and fondled the books in his
beloved library as if they had been children, and moved mechanically to
and fro in that mournful 'dream from which the sufferer can neither wake
nor be awakened.' Southey's example might, perhaps, have been a warning
to the new-comer how difficult it is to preserve a clear, healthy, and
serviceable faculty of thinking about pub