CHAPTER V.
MARRIAGE--SOCIETY--HIGHLAND TOUR.
With Wordsworth's settlement at Townend, Grasmere, in the closing
days of the last century, the external events of his life may be
said to come to an end. Even his marriage to Miss Mary Hutchinson,
of Penrith, on October 4, 1802, was not so much an importation into
his existence of new emotion, as a development and intensification of
feelings which had long been there. This marriage was the crowning
stroke of Wordsworth's felicity--the poetic recompense for his
steady advocacy of all simple and noble things. When he wished to
illustrate the true dignity and delicacy of rustic lives he was
always accustomed to refer to the Cumbrian folk. And now it seemed
that Cumberland requited him for his praises with her choicest boon;
found for him in the country town of Penrith, and from the small and
obscure circle of his connexions and acquaintance,--nay, from the
same dame's school in which he was taught to read,--a wife such as
neither rank nor young beauty nor glowing genius enabled his brother
bards to win.
Mrs. Wordsworth's poetic appreciativeness, manifest to all who knew
her, is attested by the poet's assertion that two of the best lines
in the poem of _The Daffodils_--
They flash, upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,--
were of her composition.
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