In 1795 Wordsworth and his sister moved from the Lake Region to
Dorsetshire, at the other end of England, likewise a country of great
natural beauty. Two years later came their change (of a few miles) to
Alfoxden, the association with Coleridge, and 'Lyrical Ballads,' containing
nineteen of Wordsworth's poems (above, page 267). After their winter in
Germany the Wordsworths settled permanently in their native Lake Region, at
first in 'Dove Cottage,' in the village of Grasmere. This simple little
stone house, buried, like all the others in the Lake Region, in brilliant
flowers, and opening from its second story onto the hillside garden where
Wordsworth composed much of his greatest poetry, is now the annual center
of pilgrimage for thousands of visitors, one of the chief literary shrines
of England and the world. Here Wordsworth lived frugally for several years;
then after intermediate changes he took up his final residence in a larger
house, Rydal Mount, a few miles away. In 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson,
who had been one of his childish schoolmates, a woman of a spirit as fine
as that of his sister, whom she now joined without a thought of jealousy in
a life of self-effacing devotion to the poet.

Wordsworth's poetic inspiration, less fickle than that of Coleridge,
continued with little abatement for a dozen years; but about 1815, as he
himself states in his fine but pathetic poem 'Composed upon an Evening of
Extraordinary Splendour,' it for the most part abandoned him. He continued,
however, to produce a great deal of verse, most of which his admirers would
much prefer to have had unwritten. The plain Anglo-Saxon yeoman strain
which was really the basis of his nature now asserted itself in the growing
conservatism of ideas which marked the last forty years of his life. His
early love of simplicity hardened into a rigid opposition not only to the
materialistic modern industrial system but to all change--the Reform Bill,
the reform of education, and in general all progressive political and
social movements. It was on this abandonment of his early liberal