For many years Wordsworth's sister
Dorothy was a melancholy charge. Mrs. Wordsworth was wont to warn any
rash enthusiasts for mountain-walking by the spectacle before them. The
adoring sister would never fail her brother; and she destroyed her
health, and then her reason, by exhausting walks and wrong remedies for
the consequences. Forty miles in a day was not a singular feat of
Dorothy's. During the long years of this devoted creature's helplessness
she was tended with admirable cheerfulness and good sense. Thousands of
lake tourists must remember the locked garden-gate when Miss Wordsworth
was taking the air, and the garden-chair going round and round the
terrace, with the emaciated little woman in it, who occasionally called
out to strangers and amused them with her clever sayings. She outlived
the beloved Dora, Wordsworth's only surviving daughter.
After the lingering illness of that daughter (Mrs. Quillinan), the
mother encountered the dreariest portion, probably, of her life. Her
aged husband used to spend the long Winter evenings in grief and
tears--week after week, month after month. Neither of them had eyes for
reading. He could not be comforted. She, who carried as tender a
maternal heart as ever beat, had to bear her own grief and his too. She
grew whiter and smaller, so as to be greatly changed in a few months;
but this was the only expression of what she endured, and he did not
discover it. When he, too, left her, it was seen how disinterested had
been her trouble.
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