Wordsworth, WILLIAM: 1770-1850. Descended from an old north-country stock, dwelling in Yorkshire and Westmorland, Wordsworth was born 7th April 1770 at Cockernouth, on the Derwent, 'fairest of all rivers,' within sight of the mountains among which were to be his home his happiness and his grave. There and at Penrith, (where Mary Hutchinson, his beloved wife to be, was his schoolmate), the child's first years went by, perhaps with little control, for his parents died early: stiff, moody, and violent in temper as he describes himself; the tough, stern dalesman's nature which, softened and elevated, passed into the strong truthful self-dependence, the high invincible moral courage, the plainness of phrase which often rendered him misunderstood in later life. Sent to school (1778) at Hawkshead, a singularly picturesque village over Esthwaite Lake, he enjoyed healthy freedom, not, we may believe, without 'the silent thoughts that search for steadfast light,' both in studies and sports: exchanged, (1787-91), for far less congenial days at St John's, Cambridge. Here he read widely without plan or academic purpose, yet meditating much, and with a vague but firm hope that his life would leave some achievement 'which pure hearts should reverence.'
In 1790 Wordsworth visited France and Switzerland: France again in 1791-92. Journeys in fact, with him as with Tennyson, were the most salient events in the poet's quiet outward career. But Wordsworth's two visits to France, besides supplying him with a crowd of motives for song, proved the great determining experience of his life, though in a bent opposite to that which they then seemed to give. The France of 1790, in the genial stage of intoxication with the first draughts of liberty, the 'sublime senselessness of joy,' filled him with enthusiasm: and even the excesses of 1792, (when he barely escaped death in that fatal September), left his republicanism dominant. But the spell of that Masque of Anarchy, soon exchanged for tyranny by invariable sequence, gradually and sadly passed: he recognised that nations must 'stand on the ancient ways' if they are to advance safely; by process of the 'years that bring the philosophic mind,' exchanging the love of the false liberty for that of the true. In Dean Church's fine phrase, the trial and the struggle he went through 'annealed his mind to its highest temper.' And henceforth a passionate devotion to England, felt 'as a lover or a child,' and deep as Shakespeare's or Tennyson's, possessed him:
Ah! not for emerald fields alone,
With ambient streams more pure and bright
Than fabled Cytherea's zone
Glittering before the Thunderer's sight,
Is to my heart of hearts endeared
The ground where we were born and reared!
Two poems in 'heroic' metre were Wordsworth's first step towards publicity (1793): the Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, written 1787-92; the latter reflecting his Swiss and earlier French experiences. 'Seldom, if ever,' Coleridge wrote (1817) 'was the emergence of an original poetic genius more evidently announced.' But this and the next two years, whilst the darkness gathered deeper over France, were a time of restlessness and misery to Wordsworth: he was passing through the throes of personal poverty, of mental disillusion and renaissance. In 1795 Calvert, a young friend, left him £900, a sum which to Wordsworth was competence. Encouraged thus, and by the presence of his loved and gifted sister Dorothy, 'sister of his soul,' he now consciously 'found himself,' taking poetry alone as 'his office upon earth.' Settling at Racedown near Cawkern (1796), Wordsworth first saw the great Coleridge, another critical moment in his poetic development: moving, (1797), for Coleridge's neighbourhood, to Alfoxden by the Quantocks. That beautiful district, and a tour by the Wye, bore fruit in his Lyrical Ballads (1798): republished, with a second volume (1800). After some months in North Germany, he moved to the fair region he was so splendidly to make his own, settling first (1799) at Grasmere.
These happy fertile years (1798-1808) were crowned with happiness by marriage, a perfect marriage, (1802), with Mary Hutchinson, known from childhood: another of the striking parallels between Wordsworth and Tennyson. In 1805 he finished the autobiographical Prelude, deferred for publication during his lifetime: 1807 gave us two fresh volumes, recording many experiences of life, many of his most memorable poems:—of which, hereafter. Some of his most perfect work was then due also to the Scotch journey of 1803 in his sister's inspiring company.
Few events remain for notice. 1814 and 1832 saw more visits to Scotland; the last noteworthy as the farewell to Walter Scott. Though working on very different lines, respect and love united these two great writers: and we may here name among Wordsworth's friends Coleridge, Lamb, Southey, Rogers, Sir George Beaumont, Lord Lowther, his own brothers, (John, to his great grief, drowned 1805); with several noble-natured and gifted ladies. Many he overlived: but the loss which, though wounding him most, he met with perfect resignation, was the death of his daughter Dora (1847). In 1814, (to conclude our brief bibliography), appeared The Excursion: 1815, the White Doe: 1819 and 1820 the Duddon sonnets and other pieces. 1820 and 1837 mark visits to Italy, deeply enjoyed and utilised in verse, 1822, 1842: in 1835 came Yarrow Revisited and Sonnets to Liberty and Order.
Some popularity, long deferred, some honours, meanwhile awaited the poet whose career, (to take a figure from Coleridge), had so far outstripped his critics that he seemed dwarfed in their eyes. In 1839 Oxford, amidst deep applause, gave him the Doctorate. Most precious, however, in Words- worth's mind was the heart-felt and noble welcome received from Keble; a poet of whose first work he spoke 'with love and delight,' whilst characteristically and justly dwelling upon its inaccuracy or want of finish in diction: 'I like the volume so much, that, if I was the author, I think I should never rest till I had nearly rewritten it.'—Here let us quote a few of Wordsworth's recorded remarks upon some of his brethren in art. Speaking of his admiration for Chaucer, he adds his profound reverence 'for him as an instrument in the hands of Providence for spreading the light of literature through his native land.' 'I admire Dryden's talents and genius highly, but his is not a poetical genius.' 'Milton was an aristocrat in the truest sense of the word.' His blank verse, like Tennyson, he held was framed from the Vergilian hexameter; Paradise Regained, 'the most perfect in execution of anything by Milton: that and the Merchant of Venice, in language almost faultless.' 'Ariosto is not always sincere, Spenser always so.' Two remarks on Goethe go deep: 'He had not sufficiently clear moral perceptions to make him anything but an artificial writer;' and that one recorded and endorsed by Matthew Arnold, 'Goethe's poetry was not inevitable enough.' If Coleridge had not, in Germany, received the bent to 'metaphysical theology, he would have been the greatest, the most abiding poet of his age.' Profoundly as Wordsworth was impressed and influenced in style by Burns, he candidly notes that the Scots wha hae 'is poor as a lyric.' 'I don't like to say all this: but, as a poet, Scott cannot live, for he has never in verse written anything addressed to the immortal part of man.' He notices (1827) the faultiness of Byron's language; adding 'Shelley is one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style.' 'Horace is my great favourite, I love him dearly.' 'First read the ancient classical authors, then come to us; and you will be able to judge for yourself which of us is worth reading.' 'Very few books,' let us here add from De Quincey, 'sufficed him; he was careless habitually of all the current literature, or indeed of any literature that could not be considered as enshrining the very ideal, capital, and elementary grandeur of the human intellect.'
In 1842 he resigned the office of distributor of stamps for Westmorland, which he had held for thirty years, and which was worth £400; and received a civil pension of £300. In 1843 he succeeded Southey in the Laureateship, an office raised in dignity by 'him that utter'd nothing base.' Of him Wordsworth writes (July 1, 1845), 'I saw Tennyson when I was in London several times. He is decidedly the first of our living poets, and I hope will live to give the world still better things.' An almost unbroken felicity attended the last half of Wordsworth's life. 'What he gave to others, and what he most desired for himself,' says a friend, 'was love.' He felt for his friends and family, neighbours and dependents, for children, for the poor, that intense tenderness which his poetry expresses towards what, by a narrow phrase, we call Nature: till, with such Euthanasia as human life allows, 'old, yet unchill'd by age,' on April 23, 1850, the great soul made his calm and Christian transit to the spiritual world on which his thoughts had been long devoutly fixed. He had overlived the chilling want of sympathy which original genius never fails to arouse among commonplace minds; he had outlived the mis-estimation of some nobler spirits, and the overpartiality of indiscriminating worshippers; his work for his countrymen, wherever scattered over the world, was at length fairly judged, and found to rank in quality with the best to which England has given birth; and he now rests from his labours in the quiet churchyard of Grasmere, among neighbours and kinsmen, within the bosom of the hills he loved so heartily, and the Rotha running at his feet with a music not sweeter than his own.
Turning from the Man to the Poet: In our limited space we propose now to set forth Wordsworth's own views upon his art, and his aims: his chief characteristics: certain fallacies current regarding his work: with some notice of the poems as they mark the stages of his life and art. And we shall here rely greatly upon the criticisms which in the maturity of his and his friend's powers, Coleridge published in his Biographia Literaria, 1817.
To the second issue of his Lyrical Ballads (1800) Wordsworth added a Preface with an Appendix, the study of which, and of a somewhat later Essay, combined with Coleridge's analysis, we venture to press upon all readers who love Poetry wisely, as forming (despite certain doubtful propositions), the best suggestive outline of an Art of Poetry known to the writer. (Aristotle's treatise has reached us in a state too imperfect, and is too exclusively Hellenic in its range to be here in question.) Yet in the forefront of the Preface, Wordsworth laid himself fairly open to hostile criticism by bringing forward as the guiding principle of his poetry a too dogmatic insistence upon 'incidents and situations from common life, tracing in them . . . the primary laws of our nature,' to be related or described 'throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men.' The persons were 'generally' chosen from the labouring ranks, because 'our elementary feelings' are amongst them most simply shown, are capable of most forcible representation, and are 'incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.' Hence also the language of these men, somewhat 'purified,' was used; being, from natural circumstances, simpler and truer: 'a more permanent, and far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by the poets:' and he argues further that between the language of prose and poetry, (metre excepted), no definite barrier lies; 'poetic diction,' (probably with special reference to 18th-century writers), being carefully excluded from the poems before us.
This theory, as exemplified in the Ballads, raised a storm and shout of derision from the critics of the day, which long impeded Wordsworth's popular reception. And doubtless, although phrases occur which really limit the main argument, yet as Coleridge showed in his masterly analysis, Wordsworth assumed, 'in terms at once too large and too exclusive, his predilection for a style the most remote possible from the false and showy splendour which he wished to explode;' seeming, at first sight, to confine truth and simplicity of feeling and language to 'unsophisticated' man, and the incidents hence chosen: he over-stated both the poetic possibilities of the speech of common life, and the importance of the conventional diction of the day.
Yet both in his own age and since critics exaggerated Wordsworth's positions. His final claim is only that by following his method, genuine poetry of permanent interest and moral value would be produced. And in fact it is but a small proportion of his poems, and those of early date, which are any way thus injured in effect. The general theory of poetical art fills most of the essays; and herein lies their great and lasting value. Pleasure, immediate, pure, durable, exquisite, but not exclusive of painful scenes, he lays down and brilliantly vindicates as always essential to Poetry: 'excitement in co-existence with an overbalance of pleasure:' whilst the worthiest objects of the art are 'the external universe, the moral and religious sentiments of Man, his natural affections, and his acquired passions.' Thus Poetry to Wordsworth is 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge': man and his environment are essentially adapted to each other; there is a kind of interplay between him and nature. Hence, in strict accordance with the common voice of the great poets of all ages, he says of himself 'I wish always to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing'; or, as he expressed it, his purpose was 'to console the afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous: this is their office.'
This constant dealing with life, as Arnold has remarked, this 'energetic and profound treatment of moral ideas, is what distinguishes the English poetry,' and eminently that of Wordsworth. Yet in art, as in human life, narrow is the way to excellence. Surgit amari aliquid: even with the most poetical poet, the high lesson tends to become dominant over beauty; the moral supersedes pleasure. Wordsworth, to notice here his defects, has hence much that is simply didactic: his intense imaginative gift, his vivid sense of unity, saved him from the prosaic: the lion's grasp is hardly ever wanting: yet a certain heaviness often alloys his longer poems, whether those of meditative reasoning or of narration. In simple metres he has stateliness, he has exquisite sweetness: but he cannot compete with the effortless variety, the ethereal grace of Shelley's short lyrics; with Keats in the splendid wealth, the magnificent music of his odes. Not only is his style curiously unequal, but he had no consciousness of lapse: was at times diffuse and overminute in details: in common with almost every modern European poet, he wrote too liberally. He has images too lofty for the subject: 'not always graceful in the play of fancy,' says Coleridge: and especially in some early lyrics, is bald and even clumsy.
Yet some of these defects are near akin to great merits: and the mass of work equally admirable in art and precious in substance, which Wordsworth's eighty years have left us, distinctly places him, (if I may express my entire concurrence with Arnold's judgment), next, in sequence of time, to Milton. Other poets of his period may have been equally gifted; but he was allowed to gather in his whole harvest. Specially we may note his austere, logical, accurate purity and noble plainness in diction, 'impassioned, lofty, and sustained:' with the corresponding 'weight and sanity of the sentiments,' won not from books but fresh from the soul: frequent ingenious happiness of phrase, the curiosa felicitas of his favourite Horace: perfect truth, perfect modesty of painting, in his descriptions and images from nature:—so keenly noted and so numerous that, as Tennyson once remarked, 'he always seems to have been before one in observation.' Rising now to the inner spirit of the work, Wordsworth eminently was a merciful judge of his fellow-creatures, with the deepest inborn feeling for the poor, always tender to the ignorant and the erring, grieving 'for the overthrow of the soul's beauty.' Hence he abounds in 'a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man. Such he is, and so he writes,' said Coleridge: who then challenges pre-eminently for him 'the gift of Imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word.' In this 'he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton, and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own.'
On this singular imaginative power a few words must be added. As a child, Wordsworth's vivid mind unconsciously reproduced the famous ideal philosophy of Berkeley. 'I was often unable,' he writes, 'to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or a tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality:—And, shadowy and transient as these strange influences of the childish imagination necessarily were, they lay at the root of that peculiarly spiritual tone with which Wordsworth always looked on the world. When this 'visionary gleam' passed from the yet unconscious poet's eyes, the same imaginative faculty, taking a new but analogous form, presented the world to him as itself actually interfused with living power:
He felt the sentiment of Being spread,
O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still;—
The presences of Nature in the sky
And on the earth: the Visions of the hills,
And Souls of lonely places.
Or again, when as a boy he was bird-chasing, —moon and stars
Were shining o'er my head. I was alone,
And seemed to be a trouble to the peace
That dwelt among them.
Or once more, with profounder force still, we find him unhesitatingly speaking of
The Being that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves:—
The Omnipresence of God was surely never more deeply felt, or expressed more deeply.
This brief attempt to catalogue the gifts of exceptional genius is inevitably tentative; but Wordsworth has himself set forth his poetical aim in verse and prose: and high as the aim was, it is not too much to say that he came near as human limitations allow toward accomplishing it. Great force in thought, great power of imagination,—these, by natural law, are the primary elements whence all great poetry has sprung. The fountain of verse can never rise to a higher height,—can indeed never absolutely equal the height,—of the well-head of the poet's own nature. The workman is ever greater than the work. But those two capital gifts, like the elements of chemistry, are combined in various proportions to form the substance of the song: and in Wordsworth's case their union indubitably places him amongst the most spiritual, the most ideal, in the noble army of singers. Very unequal is his poetry; yet, everywhere, as if by natural necessity, even the lowliest themes are lifted to their loftiest meaning. It was his function 'to breathe Grandeur upon the very humblest face Of human life:—
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet's dream, in their degree, are constantly present.
This nobly meditative mood at once elevates and limits his range. 'Of all poets,' says Dean Church, 'Wordsworth made himself most avowedly the subject of his own thinking.' In the great partition between Objective and Subjective, he counts among the latter. Yet herein we find one of his most conspicuous and delightful characteristics. His subjectivity is itself objective. Speaking for himself, Wordsworth will be found to speak for all of us: it is the common human mind which he perpetually interprets. As if they had never been thought before, he gives back our own thoughts with an exquisiteness and a distinctness all his own:
I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning.
Lines like these or descriptions of the same quality occur perpetually, and once read, are unforgettable.
If it be a vulgar error that ascribes egoism to Wordsworth's lofty meditative independence, no less is it palpably incorrect to hold him pre-eminently the poet of Nature. The wealth of his landscape, whether in fine details or in larger pictures, (closely analogous to the work of his great contemporary, J. M. W. Turner), is indeed inexhaustible; the delicate accuracy, the 'eye always upon the object,' never absent; and he is ever mindful that the 'forms Of Nature have a passion in themselves, that intermingles with those works of man To which she summons him.' Yet men, 'as they are men within themselves,' are his true theme: heroes and sufferers in lowly life; great characters of all ages; actors in the stormy scenes of war and politics during his youth. 'There is,' as he wrote of his poems, 'scarcely one which does not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment, or to some general principle, or law of thought or of our intellectual constitution.' 'He deals with life,' as Arnold puts it; 'and his greatness lies in his dealing with it so powerfully.'
Another, and at first sight a more tenable, error is that Wordsworth's later poetry falls greatly below the earlier: a common narrowness of human judgment from which Scott and other great writers have suffered. The undeniably fuller freshness of his first maturity, which is strongly marked in Wordsworth, seems to have blinded readers to the larger aim, the deeper sentiment, the sweeter truth, of work, perhaps less complete in art, less decorated, whilst essentially loftier. The Sublime, in a word, can never gain the popularity of the Beautiful.
It remains to complete, so far as possible, this imperfect sketch by a rapid view of the poetry itself in its main aspects. Four such may be noted.
I. The two early descriptive poems, in some degree, by diction and metre, remind us that they belong to the 18th century. Their style, as Coleridge observed, is powerful, but at times knotty and contorted; the images crowded to obscurity. Yet splendid lines occur, as when he represents the soul holding 'communion high' with God,
There, where the peal of swelling torrents fills
The sky-roofed temple of the eternal hills.
The Guilt and Sorrow, (1793-94), in its gloom recalls that darkened period of Wordsworth's life: but in the Nay, Traveller, (1795), we see already his exquisite inimitable touch in painting character and landscape. Wordsworth's single tragedy, The Borderers, follows. Action and variety are here too much suppressed in favour of analysis, as in other well-known instances of a poet's unpractised attempt in what is really another art than his own.
II. The four volumes of Ballads and Poems, between 1798-1800 and 1807, with the Prelude, form unquestionably the most important, the most charming body of Wordsworth's work. Among these are many poems in which admirable simplicity of feeling is joined to the happiest language and metre:—poems which, in their noble plainness deserve the fine praise of Matthew Arnold; 'Nature herself seems to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.' Such are the simple tales from lowly life, pathetic or meditative, (Ruth, Lucy Gray, the Reaper, the Highland Girl): tender love-poems, (Three years, A slumber, She was a phantom of delight): narratives or meditations in his very highest and purest manner, (Tintern, The Brothers, Michael): the lovely series of bird-pictures: many sonnets supreme in our sonnet-literature: ending with the Ode on Immortality, which a just judgment places also supreme among our reflective lyrics. The true balance between substance and art is here dominant: very few are the poems faulty from over-rusticity or over-elaborate language.
III. The Excursion, (1814), wherein the didactic element asserts itself too freely; the White Doe, (1815), idealism pure and exquisite in itself, yet, we must hold, pushed too far; two Odes on the Peace, somewhat overstrained and unlyrical, may open this stage of Wordsworth's mature life. But presently the poet, perhaps induced by the education which he was giving to his eldest son, broke new ground in the Laodamia, Dion, Trajan's Pillar: poems which have a unique character from the high spiritualism of their treatment. And with these may be joined the six odes to Lyeoris, September and May: lovely at once in sunset glow, calm depth of feeling, and metrical skill. Here too fall the Duddon sonnets, Wordsworth's latest important study of the soul of landscape.
IV. The Ecclesiastical Sonnets, a singular monument of skilful historical narrative in that difficult form, though dating from 1820, may lead us to the poems of Wordsworth's genial old age. Here, whilst a serener pensiveness, a larger scope, is shown, and earlier faults of style avoided, we feel that the subjects are often less vividly conceived and handled. Yet here also not a few short pieces occur, even to the poet's last years, so felicitous in thought and rendering as to show that the mighty hand had not lost its ancient cunning.
Wordsworth's dearly loved and honoured wife had fifty years before given his name to a lofty peak near Grasmere; and the lines he dedicated to it may fitly figure both the poetry and the tenour of his later years.
There is an Eminence,—of these our hills
The last that parleys with the setting sun;
We can behold it from our orchard-seat;
And, when at evening we pursue our walk
Along the public way, this Peak, so high
Above us, and so distant in its height,
Is visible, and often seems to send
Its own deep quiet to restore our hearts.
Or, as the final motto to his life and work, we may take the words of his only eminent follower in poetry, and say with the author of the Christian Year,—Ad sanctiora erigit.
The chief editions of Wordsworth's poetry were the author's editions published by Moxon (6 vols. 1836-37, and 1849-50; 1 vol. 1845), the library edition edited by Professor Knight (8 vols. 1882-86), that in one volume by John Morley (1888), and the Aldine edition by Professor Dowden (7 vols. 1893). Among selections are those of F. T. Palgrave (1865), Matthew Arnold (1879), and that of the Wordsworth Society, edited by Professor Knight (1888). The prose works were collected by Dr A. B. Grosart (3 vols. 1876). The chief Lives are by his nephew [Bishop] Christopher Wordsworth (2 vols. 1851); F. W. H. Myers, in 'English Men of Letters' (1880); J. M. Sutherland (1887); Elizabeth Wordsworth (1891); and that by Professor Knight (3 vols. 1889). The most important criticisms are those of Coleridge, De Quincey, George Brimley, Sir H. Taylor, Bagehot, Clough, M. Arnold, Stopford Brooke, Lowell, Masson, E. Dowden, R. H. Hutton, Shairp, Aubrey de Vere, Leslie Stephen, Dean Church, and Swinburne. The Wordsworth Society's Proceedings fill eight parts (1880-88), but perhaps its best fruit was the volume entitled Wordsworthiana (1889). See also De Quincey's Recollections of Lake Poets, J. S. Cottle's Early Recollections of Coleridge (2 vols. 1837), Memorials of Coleorton (2 vols. 1887), H. Crabb Robinson's Diary (3 vols. 1869), Dorothy Wordsworth's Tour in Scotland (1874), and Dorothy Wordsworth, by Edmund Lee (1886); Professor Knight's Through the Wordsworth Country (1887), The Lake District (1878), and his edition of Wordsworth's prose works (1897); Emile Legouis, La Jeunesse de William Wordsworth, tracing the marked influence of William Godwin (1896). See also the articles COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY, WILSON (JOHN), and LAKE DISTRICT.
DOROTHY WORDSWORTH, only sister of the poet, was born at Cockermouth on Christmas Day 1771. She set up housekeeping with her brother in the autumn of 1795 at Racedown Lodge in Dorsetshire, next at Alfoxden for a year (1797-98), enduring a noble poverty, then spent six months with him in Germany, and lived afterwards with him until the end at Grasmere and at Rydal Mount. His marriage in 1802 only widened the circle of her love. Her Journals kept at Alfoxden and Grasmere, and the records of her journeys in Scotland, the Isle of Man, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy, reveal a mind as subtly sensitive to nature as the poet's own, and an exquisiteness of expression, which, if he equalled, he never surpassed. Of her own choice she never married, but gave herself entirely for her brother, toiled and planned for him, and walked with him amongst the mountains beyond her strength to help him to see everything that could be turned to poetic use. She made herself a part not only of his life but of his imagination. But she had her reward in a love that never wavered, and that remains enshrined in some of the noblest verse in English literature. Hardly beautiful, bright-eyed and brown as a gypsy, she had a sweetness of nature, an intense sensibility to impressions, and a glowing heart that laid a spell on Coleridge, De Quincey, Charles Lamb, Crabb Robinson, and all who knew her. She had for some years shown signs of growing weakness, when in 1832 she had an attack of brain-fever from which she never entirely recovered. All hope of recovery was gone by 1836, yet she outlived her brother, and lingered till 25th January 1855. She was laid at the right side of his grave in Grasmere churchyard.
See the Lives of William Wordsworth; Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals, edited by Prof. Knight (2 vols. 1897); and Edmund Lee's study (1886; new ed. 1894).