,
etc. The letters of a nation ought to be paid for as an article of
national expense. Well! but I did not take up this paper to flourish
away in splenetic politics. A gentleman resident here, his name Calvert,
an idle, good-hearted, and ingenious man, has a great desire to commence
fellow-student with me and Wordsworth in chemistry. He is an intimate
friend of Wordsworth's, and he has proposed to W. to take a house which
he (Calvert) has nearly built, called Windy Brow, in a delicious
situation, scarce half a mile from Greta Hall, the residence of S. T.
Coleridge, Esq., and so for him (Calvert) to live with them, 'i.e.',
Wordsworth and his sister. In this case he means to build a little
laboratory, etc. Wordsworth has not quite decided, but is strongly
inclined to adopt the scheme, because he and his sister have before
lived with Calvert on the same footing, and are much attached to him:
because my health is so precarious and so much injured by wet, and his
health, too, is like little potatoes, no great things, and therefore
Grasmere ("thirteen" miles from Keswick) is too great a distance for us
to enjoy each other's society, without inconvenience, as much as it
would be profitable for us both: and likewise because he feels it more
necessary for him to have some intellectual pursuit less closely
connected with deep passion than poetry, and is of course desirous, too,
not to be so wholly ignorant of knowledge so exceedingly important.
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