Wordsworth and Southey

April 7, 1840

FR is in Kirk Ella happily at work in the infant school she has established there. Her sister Lucy lives not far from Wordsworth who has been admired by FR ever since he published "Lyrical Ballads" in 1798.

"My sister is at Ambleside, plotting to interest the patriarch Wordsworth for me and my writings. A friend of ours is going to marry a relation of his, so I feel as if it were possible. She tells me Southey is 'in a state of hopeless imbecility'—how sad! I had always believed that the exercised intellect was long-lived; in general I think it is so nevertheless."

In 1847, seven years after writing this letter, FR visited the Lakes District. Sadly for someone who so loved poetry, most of the poets and literary men connected to the Lakes District were dead: Coleridge, Southey, Hazlitt, Lamb, DeQuincy, Arnold, Ruskin, Carlysle, Shelley, Keats, Scott. Only Wordsworth remained.

That November FR finally obtained the introduction to Wordsworth and an invitation to dine at Rydal Mount. The evening seems to have pleased both WW and FR. The next year FR relocated to Keswick, where she remained the rest of her life.

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