up the prospectus of a
periodical of strictly republican principles, to be called The
_Philanthropist_. At this stage, at the age of twenty-four, Wordsworth
seemed to his friends a very hopeless and impracticable young man.

But all the time from his boyhood upward a great purpose had been
growing and maturing in his mind. Nature was little more than a
picture-gallery to him; the pleasures of the eye had all but absolute
dominion; and he

"Roamed from hill to hill, from rock to rock,
Still craving combinations of new forms,
New pleasures, wide empire for the sight,
Proud of her own endowments, and rejoiced
To lay the inner faculties asleep."

But, though he had not yet found his distinctive aim as a poet, he was
inwardly bent, all the time that his relatives saw in him only a
wayward and unpromising aversion to work in any regular line, upon
poetry as "his office upon earth."

In this determination he was strengthened by his sister Dorothy, who
with rare devotion consecrated her life henceforward to his service. A
timely legacy enabled them to carry their purpose into effect. A
friend of his, whom he had nursed in a last illness, Raisley Calvert,
son of the steward of the Duke of Norfolk, who had large estates in
Cumberland, died early in 1795, leaving him a legacy of L900. And here
it may be well to notice how opportunely, as De Quincey half-ruefully
remarked, money always fell in to Wordsworth, enabling him to pursue
his poetic career without distraction. Calvert's bequest came to him
when he was on the point of concluding an engagement as a journalist
in London. On it and other small resources he and his sister, thanks
to her frugal management, contrived to live for nearly eight years. By
the end of that time Lord Lonsdale, who owed Wordsworth's father a
large sum for professional services, and had steadily refused to pay
it, died, and his successor paid the debt with interest. His wife,
Mary Hutchinson, whom he married in 1802, brought him some fortune;
and in 1813, when, in spite of his plain living, his family began to
press upon his income, he was appointed stamp-distributor for
Westmoreland, with an income of L500, afterward nearly doubled by the
increase of his district. By this succession of timely godsends,
Wordsworth, though he did not escape some periods of sharp anxiety,
was saved from the necessity of turning aside from his vocation.

To return, however, to the course of his life from