This passage is from a letter of Wordsworth’s to Sir George Beaumont, who was engaged at the time in rebuilding and laying out Coleorton. The poet himself planned and superintended some of these improvements, and wrote for various points of interest in the grounds inscriptions which form dignified examples of that kind of composition.Nor was Sir George Beaumont the only friend whom the poet’s taste assisted in the choice of a site or the disposition of pleasure-grounds. More than one seat in the Lake-country—among them one home ofpreeminent beauty—have owed to Wordsworth no small part of their ordered charm.

In this way, too, the poet is with us still; his presence has a strange reality as we look on some majestic prospect of interwinding lake and mountain which his design has made more beautifully visible to the children’s children of those he loved serviced apartments in hong kong; as we stand, perhaps, in some shadowed garden-ground where his will has had  its way,—has framed Helvellyn’s far-off summit in an arch of tossing green, and embayed in towering forest-trees the long lawns of a silent Valley,—fit haunt for lofty aspiration and for brooding calm.

But of all woodland ways which Wordsworth’s skill designed or his feet frequented, not one was dearer to him, (if I may pass thus by a gentle transition to  affections of his life),than a narrow path through a firwood near his cottage, which “was known to the poet’s household by the name of John’s Grove.” For in the year 1800 his brother ifco deco, John Wordsworth, a few years younger than himself, and captain of an East Indiaman, had spent eight months in the poet’s cottage at Grasmere.

The two brothers had seen little of each other since childhood, and the poet had now the delight ofdiscovering in the sailor a character congenial to his own, and an appreciation of poetry—and of the Lyrical Ballads especially—which was intense and delicate in an unusual degree. In both brothers, too,there was the same love of nature; and after John’s departure, the poet pleased himself with imagining the visions of Grasmere which beguiled the watches of many a night at sea, or with tracing the pathway which the sailor’s instinct had planned and trodden amid trees so thickly planted as to baffle a less practised skill. John Wordsworth, on the other hand, looked forward to Grasmere as the final goal of his wanderings, and intended to use his own savings to set the poet free from worldly cares.

Two more voyages the sailor made with such hopes as these, and amid a frequent interchange of books and letters with his brother at home. Then, in February 1805, he set sail from Portsmouth, in command of the “Abergavenny” East Indiaman, bound for India and China. Through the incompetence of the pilot who was taking her out of the Channel, the ship struck on the Shambles off the Bill of Portland, on February 5, 1805. “She struck,” says Wordsworth, “at 5 p.m. Guns were fired immediately, and were continued to be fired. She was gotten off the rock at half-past seven, but had taken in so much water, in spite of constant pumping, as to be water-logged. They had, however, hope that she might still be run upon Weymouth sands, and with this view continued pumping and baling till eleven, when she went down. . ..