Chapter 16

of all your bodily strength to support you under so sad a loss. But, how much is there to be thankful for in every part of Lord Lonsdale's life to its close! How gently was he dealt with in his last moments! and with what fortitude and Christian resignation did he bear such pains as attended his decline, and prepared the way for his quiet dissolution! Of my own feelings upon this loss I shall content myself with saying, that as long as I retain consciousness I shall cherish the memory of your father, for his inestimable worth, and as one who honoured me with his friendship, and who was to myself and my children the best benefactor. The sympathy which I now offer, dear Lady Frederick, is shared by my wife and my daughter, and my son William; and will be also participated in by my elder son, when he hears of the sad event.

[201] Lord Lonsdale's death.

I wrote to Dr. Jackson[202] to inquire whether the funeral was to be strictly private, and learnt from him that it is to be so; otherwise I should not have deprived myself of the melancholy satisfaction of attending. Accept, dear Lady Frederick, my best wishes; and be assured of my prayers for your support; and believe me,

Your very affectionate friend, WM. WORDSWORTH.[203]

[202] The respected Rector of Lowther, and Chancellor of the Diocese.

[203] _Memoirs_, ii. 407-8.

138. _Birthday in America and at Home: Church Poetry_.

LETTER TO PROFESSOR REED.

1844.

In your last letter you speak so feelingly of the manner in which my birthday (April 7) has been noticed, both privately in your country, and somewhat publicly in my own neighbourhood, that I cannot forbear adding a word or two upon the subject. It would have delighted you to see the assemblage in front of our house, some dancing upon the gravel platform, old and young, as described in Goldsmith's travels; and others, children, I mean, chasing each other upon the little plot of lawn to which you descend by steps from the platform. We had music of our own preparing; and two sets of casual itinerants, Italians and Germans, came in successively, and enlivened the festivity. There were present upwards of 300 children, and about 150 adults of both sexes and all ages, the children in their best attire, and of that happy and, I may say, beautiful race, which is spread over this highly-favoured portion of England. The tables were tastefully arranged in the open air[204]--oranges and gingerbread in piles decorated with evergreens and Spring flowers; and all partook of tea, the young in the open air, and the old within doors. I must own I wish that little commemorations of this kind were more common among us. It is melancholy to think how little that portion of the community which is quite at ease in their circumstances have to do in a _social_ way with the humbler classes. They purchase commodities of them, or they employ them as labourers, or they visit them in charity for the sake of supplying their most urgent wants by alms-giving. But this, alas, is far from enough; one would wish to see the rich mingle with the poor as much as may be upon a footing of fraternal equality. The old feudal dependencies and relations are almost gone from England, and nothing has yet come adequately to supply their place. There are tendencies of the right kind here and there, but they are rather accidental than aught that is established in general manners. Why should not great land-owners look for a substitute for what is lost of feudal paternity in the higher principles of christianised humanity and humble-minded brotherhood? And why should not this extend to those vast communities which crowd so many parts of England under one head, in the different sorts of manufacture, which, for the want of it, are too often the pests of the social state? We are, however, improving, and I trust that the example set by some mill-owners will not fail to influence others.

[204] The fÍte was given by Miss Fenwick, then at Rydal.

It gave me pleasure to be told that Mr. Keble's Dedication of his 'Praelectiones' had fallen in your way, and that you had been struck by it.[205]

[205] See _Memoirs_, c. xlv.

It is not for me to say how far I am entitled to the honour which he has done me, but I can sincerely say that it has been the main scope of my writings to do what he says I have accomplished. And where could I find a more trustworthy judge?

What you advise in respect to a separate publication of my Church Poetry, I have often turned in my own mind; but I have really done so little in that way compared with the magnitude of the subject, that I have not courage to venture on such a publication. Besides, it would not, I fear, pay its expenses. The Sonnets were so published upon the recommendation of a deceased nephew of mine, one of the first scholars of Europe, and as good as he was learned. The volume did not, I believe, clear itself, and a great part of the impression, though latterly offered at a reduced price, still remains, I believe, in Mr. Moxon's hands. In this country people who do not grudge laying out their money for new publications on personal or fugitive interests, that every one is talking about, are very unwilling to part with it for literature which is unindebted to temporary excitement. If they buy such at all, it must be in some form for the most part that has little to recommend it but low price.

And now, my dear Sir, with many thanks for the trouble you have been at, and affectionate wishes for your welfare,

Believe me faithfully yours, WM. WORDSWORTH.

139. _Class-fellows and School-fellows_.

LETTER TO BASIL MONTAGU, ESQ.

Rydal Mount, Oct. 1. 1844.

MY DEAR MONTAGU,

Absence from home has prevented my replying earlier to your letter, which gave me much pleasure on many accounts, and particularly as I learned from it that you are so industrious, and to such good effect. I don't wonder at your mention of the friends whom we have lost by death. Bowles the poet still lives, and Rogers--all that survive of the poetical fraternity with whom I have had any intimacy. Southey, Campbell, and Cary, are no more. Of my class-fellows and schoolfellows very few remain; my _intimate_ associates of my own college are all gone long since. Myers my cousin, Terrot, Jones my fellow-traveller, Fleming and his brother Raincock of Pembroke, Bishop Middleton of the same college--it has pleased God that I should survive them all. Then there are none left but Joseph Cottle of the many friends I made at Bristol and in Somersetshire; yet we are only in our 75th year. But enough of this sad subject; let us be resigned under all dispensations, and thankful; for that is our duty, however difficult it may be to perform it. I send you the lock of hair which you desired, white as snow, and taken from a residue which is thinning rapidly.

You neither mention your own health nor Mrs. Montagu's; I conclude, therefore, that both of you are doing well. Pray remember me kindly to her; and believe me, my dear Montagu, your faithful and affectionate friend,

WM. WORDSWORTH.

In speaking of our Bristol friends I forgot to mention John Pinney, but him I have neither seen nor heard of for many years.[206]

[206] _Memoirs_, ii. 411-12.

140. _'From Home:' The Queen: Review of Poems, &c._

LETTER TO PROFESSOR REED.

Nov. 18. 1844.

MY DEAR MR. REED,

Mrs. Wordsworth and I have been absent from home for a month past, and we deferred acknowledging your acceptable letter till our return. Among the places to which we went on visits to our friends was Cambridge, where I was happy to learn that great improvement was going on among the young men. They were become much more regular in their conduct, and attentive to their duties. Our host was the master of Trinity College, Dr. Whewell, successor to my brother, Dr. Wordsworth, who filled the office for more than twenty years highly to his honour, and resigned before he was disqualified by age, lest, as his years advanced, his judgment might be impaired, and his powers become unfit for the responsibility without his being aware of it. This, you will agree with me, was a noble example: may it be followed by others!

On our return home we were detained two hours at Northampton by the vast crowd assembled to greet the Queen on her way to Burleigh House. Shouts and ringing of bells there were in abundance; but these are things of course. It did please us, however, greatly to see every village we passed through for the space of twenty-two miles decorated with triumphal arches, and every cottage, however humble, with its little display of laurel boughs and flowers hung from the windows and over the doors. The people, young and old, were all making it holiday, and the Queen could not but be affected with these universal manifestations of affectionate loyalty. As I have said, we were detained two hours, and I much regret that it did not strike me at the moment to throw off my feelings in verse, for I had ample time to have done so, and might, perhaps, have contrived to present through some of the authorities the tribute to my Royal Mistress. How must these words shock your republican ears! But you are too well acquainted with mankind and their history not to be aware that love of country can clothe itself in many shapes.

I need not say what pleasure it would give us to see you and Mrs. Reed in our beautiful place of abode.

I have no wish to see the review of my poems to which you allude, nor should I read it if it fell in my way. It is too late in life for me to profit by censure, and I am indifferent to praise merely as such. Mrs. Wordsworth will be happy to write her opinion of the portrait as you request.

Believe me, my dear Mr. Reed, Faithfully yours, WM. WORDSWORTH.[207]

[207] _Memoirs_, ii. 412-13.

141. _The Laureateship: Contemporaries, &c.: Tennyson_.

LETTER TO PROFESSOR REED.

Rydal Mount, Ambleside, July 1. 1845.

MY DEAR MR. REED,

I have, as usual, been long in your debt, which I am pretty sure you will excuse as heretofore. It gave me much pleasure to have a glimpse of your brother under circumstances which no doubt he will have described to you. He spoke of his health as improved, and I hope it will continue to do so. I understood from him that it was probable he should call at Rydal before his return to his own country. I need not say to you I shall be glad, truly glad, to see him both for his own sake, and as so nearly connected with you. My absence from home lately was not of more than three weeks. I took the journey to London solely to pay my respects to the Queen upon my appointment to the Laureateship upon the decease of my friend Mr. Southey. The weather was very cold, and I caught an inflammation in one of my eyes, which rendered my stay in the south very uncomfortable. I nevertheless did, in respect to the object of my journey, all that was required. The reception given me by the Queen at her ball was most gracious. Mrs. Everett, the wife of your minister, among many others, was a witness to it, without knowing who I was. It moved her to the shedding of tears. This effect was in part produced, I suppose, by American habits of feeling, as pertaining to a republican government. To see a grey-haired man of seventy-five years of age, kneeling down in a large assembly to kiss the hand of a young woman, is a sight for which institutions essentially democratic do not prepare a spectator of either sex, and must naturally place the opinions upon which a republic is founded, and the sentiments which support it, in strong contrast with a government based and upheld as ours is. I am not, therefore, surprised that Mrs. Everett was moved, as she herself described to persons of my acquaintance, among others to Mr. Rogers the poet. By the by, of this gentleman, now I believe in his eighty-third year, I saw more than of any other person except my host, Mr. Moxon, while I was in London. He is singularly fresh and strong for his years, and his mental faculties (with the exception of his memory a little) not at all impaired. It is remarkable that he and the Rev. W. Bowles were both distinguished as poets when I was a school-boy, and they have survived almost all their eminent contemporaries, several of whom came into notice long after them. Since they became known, Burns, Cowper, Mason the author of 'Caractacus' and friend of Gray, have died. Thomas Warton, Laureate, then Byron, Shelley, Keats, and a good deal later[208] Scott, Coleridge, Crabbe, Southey, Lamb, the Ettrick Shepherd, Cary the translator of Dante, Crowe the author of 'Lewesdon Hill,' and others of more or less distinction, have disappeared. And now of English poets, advanced in life, I cannot recall any but James Montgomery, Thomas Moore, and myself, who are living, except the octogenarian with whom I began.

[208]

Walter Scott died 21st Sept. 1832. S.T. Coleridge " 25th July 1834. Charles Lamb " 27th Dec. 1834. Geo. Crabbe " 3rd Feb. 1832. Felicia Hemans " 16th May 1835. Robert Southey " 21st March 1843.

I saw Tennyson, when I was in London, several times. He is decidedly the first of our living poets, and I hope will live to give the world still better things. You will be pleased to hear that he expressed in the strongest terms his gratitude to my writings. To this I was far from indifferent, though persuaded that he is not much in sympathy with what I should myself most value in my attempts, viz. the spirituality with which I have endeavoured to invest the material universe, and the moral relations under which I have wished to exhibit its most ordinary appearances. I ought not to conclude this first portion of my letter without telling you that I have now under my roof a cousin, who some time ago was introduced, improperly, I think, she being then a child, to the notice of the public, as one of the English poetesses, in an article of the _Quarterly_ so entitled. Her name is Emmeline Fisher, and her mother is my first cousin. What advances she may have made in latter years I do not know, but her productions from the age of eight to twelve were not less than astonishing. She only arrived yesterday, and we promise ourselves much pleasure in seeing more of her. Our dear friend Miss Fenwick is also under our roof; so is Katharine Southey, her late father's youngest daughter, so that we reckon ourselves rich; though our only daughter is far from us, being gone to Oporto with her husband on account of her enfeebled frame: and most unfortunately, soon after her arrival, she was seized with a violent attack of rheumatic fever caused by exposure to the evening air. We have also been obliged lately to part with four grandsons, very fine boys, who are gone with their father to Italy to visit their mother, kept there by severe illness, which sent her abroad two years ago. Under these circumstances we old people keep our spirits as well as we can, trusting the end to God's goodness.

Now, for the enclosed poem,[209] which I wrote the other day, and which I send to you, hoping it may give you some pleasure, as a scanty repayment for all that we owe you. Our dear friend, Miss Fenwick, is especially desirous that her warmest thanks should be returned to you for all the trouble you have taken about her bonds. But, to return to the verses: if you approve, pray forward them with my compliments and thanks for his letter to ----. In his letter he states that with others he is strenuously exerting himself in endeavours to abolish slavery, and, as one of the means of disposing the public mind to that measure, he is about to publish selections from various authors in behalf of _humanity_. He begs an original composition from me. I have nothing bearing directly upon slavery, but if you think this little piece would serve his cause indirectly, pray be so kind as to forward it to him. He speaks of himself as deeply indebted to my writings.

[209] The poem enclosed is 'The Westmoreland Girl,' dated June 6, 1845. The text corresponds with that in the one volume edition, with the exception of the two stanzas added in the next letter; and in the 1st stanza 'thoughtless' has been substituted for 'simple;' and in the 18th 'is laid' for 'must lie.' _H.R._

I have not left room to subscribe myself more than

Affectionately yours, WM. WORDSWORTH.[210]

[210] _Memoirs_, ii. 414-17.

142. _'Poems of Imagination:' New Edition, &c.: Portrait, &c._

LETTER TO PROFESSOR REED.

Brinsop Court, Sept. 27 [1845].

MY DEAR MR. REED,

The sight of your letter was very welcome, and its contents proved most agreeable. It was well that you did not forward my little poem to the party, he entertaining the opinions he holds, and being of the character you describe. I shall therefore be gratified if you, as you propose, write him a note, expressing that I have nothing among my MSS. that would suit his purpose. The verses are already printed in the new edition of my poems (double column), which is going through the press. It will contain about 300 verses not found in the previous edition. I do not remember whether I have mentioned to you that, following your example, I have greatly extended the class entitled 'Poems of the Imagination,' thinking, as you must have done, that if imagination were predominant in the class, it was not indispensable that it should pervade every poem which it contained. Limiting the class as I had done before seemed to imply, and to the uncandid or unobserving it did so, that the faculty, which is the _primum mobile_ in poetry, had little to do, in the estimation of the author, with the pieces not arranged under that head. I, therefore, feel much obliged to you for suggesting by your practice the plan which I have adopted. In respect to the Prefaces, my own wish would be that now the Poems should be left to speak for themselves without them; but I know that this would not answer for the purposes of sale. They will, therefore, be printed at the end of the volume; and to this I am in some degree reconciled by the matter they contain relating to poetry in general, and the principles they inculcate. I hope that, upon the whole, the edition will please you. In a very few instances I have altered the expression for the worse, on account of the same feeling or word occurring rather too near the passage. For example, the Sonnet on Baptism begins '_Blest_ be the Church.' But unfortunately the word occurs some three or four lines just before or after; I have, therefore, though reluctantly, substituted the less impressive word, '_Dear_ be the Church.' I mention this solely to prevent blame on your part in this and a few similar cases where an injurious change has been made. The book will be off my hands I hope in about two weeks.

* * * * *

Mrs. Wordsworth and I left home four days ago, and do not intend to return, if all goes well, in less than five or six weeks from this time. We purpose in our way home to visit York, the cathedral of which city has been restored; and then we shall go to Leeds, on a visit to our friend Mr. James Marshall, in full expectation that we shall be highly delighted by the humane and judicious manner in which his manufactory is managed, and by inspecting the schools which he and his brother have established and superintended. We also promise ourselves much pleasure from the sight of the magnificent church, which, upon the foundation of the old parish church of that town, has been built through the exertions and by the munificence of the present incumbent, that excellent and able man Dr. Hook, whom I have the honour of reckoning among my friends.

This letter is written by the side of my brother-in-law, who, eight years ago, became a cripple, confined to his chair, by the accident of his horse falling with him in the high road, where he lay without power to move either hand or leg, but left in perfect possession of his faculties. His bodily sufferings are by this time somewhat abated, but they still continue severe. His patience and cheerfulness are so admirable that I could not forbear mentioning him to you. He is an example to us all; and most undeserving should we be if we did not profit by it. His family have lately succeeded in persuading him to have his portrait taken as he sits in his arm-chair. It is an excellent likeness, one of the best I ever saw, and will be invaluable to his family. This reminds me of Mr. Inman and a promise which he made that he would send us a copy of your portrait of myself. I say a promise, though it scarcely amounted to that absolutely, but it was little short of it. Do you think he could find time to act upon his own wish in this matter? in which I feel interested on Mrs. Wordsworth's account, who reckons that portrait much the best both as to likeness and execution of all that have been made of me, and she is an excellent judge. In adverting to this subject, I of course presume that you would have no objection to the picture being copied if the artist were inclined to do it.

My paper admonishes me that I must conclude. Pray let me know in your next how Mrs. Reed and your family are in health, and present my good wishes to her.

Ever your faithful and much obliged friend, WM. WORDSWORTH.[211]

143. _Of the College of Maynooth, &c._

LETTER TO A NEPHEW.

Rydal Mount, June 30. 1845.

MY DEAR C----,

I ought to have acknowledged my debt to you long ago, but the inflammation in one of my eyes which seized me on my first arrival in London kept its ground for a long time. I had your two first pamphlets read to me, and immediately put them into circulation among my friends in this neighbourhood; but wishing to read them myself I did not like to write to you till I had done so, as there were one or two passages on which I wished to make a remark.

[211] _Memoirs_, ii. 418-21.

As to your arguments, they are unanswerable, and the three tracts do you the greatest possible credit; but the torrent cannot be stemmed, unless we can construct a body, I will not call it a party, upon a new and true principle of action, as you have set forth. Certain questions are forced by the present conduct of government upon the mind of every observing and thinking person. First and foremost, are we to have a _national_ English Church, or is the Church of England to be regarded merely as a sect? and is the _right to the Throne to be put on a new foundation_? Is the present ministry prepared for this, and all that must precede and follow it? Is Ireland an integral and inseparable portion of the Empire or not? If it be, I cannot listen to the argument in favour of endowing Romanism upon the ground of superiority of _numbers_. The Romanists are not a majority in England and Ireland, taken, as they ought to be, together. As to Scotland, it has its separate kirk by especial covenant. Are the ministers prepared to alter fundamentally the basis of the Union between England and Ireland, and to construct a new one? If they be, let them tell us so at once. In short, they are involving themselves and the Nation in difficulties from which there is no escape--for them at least none. What I have seen of your letter to Lord John M---- I like as well as your two former tracts, and I shall read it carefully at my first leisure moment.[212]

[212] _Memoirs_, ii. 151-2.

144. _Of the 'Heresiarch of the Church of Rome.'_

LETTER TO JOSEPH COTTLE, ESQ.

Rydal Mount, Dec. 6. 1845.

MY DEAR OLD FRIEND,

Now for your little tract, 'Heresiarch Church of Rome.' I have perused it carefully, and go the whole length with you in condemnation of Romanism, and probably _much further_, by reason of my having passed at least three years of life in countries where Romanism was the prevailing or exclusive religion; and if we are to trust the declaration 'By their fruits ye shall know them,' I have stronger reasons, in the privilege I have named, for passing a severe condemnation upon leading parts of their faith, and courses of their practice, than others who have never been eye-witnesses of the evils to which I allude. Your little publication is well timed, and will I trust have such an effect as you aimed at upon the minds of its readers.

And now let me bid you affectionately good bye, with assurance that I do and shall retain to the last a remembrance of your kindness, and of the many pleasant and happy hours which, at one of the most interesting periods of my life, I passed in your neighbourhood, and in your company.

Ever most faithfully yours, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.[213]

[213] _Memoirs_, ii. 152-3.

145. _Family Trials_.

LETTER TO PROFESSOR REED.

Rydal Mount, Jan. 23. 1846.

MY DEAR MR. REED,

* * * * *

I hope to be able to send you an impression of an engraving, from a picture of Mr. Haydon, representing me in the act of climbing Helvellyn. There is great merit in this work, and the sight of it will show my meaning on the subject of _expression_. This, I think, is attained; but, then, I am stooping, and the inclination of the head necessarily causes a foreshortening of the features below the nose, which takes from the likeness accordingly; so that, upon the whole, yours has the advantage, especially under the circumstance of your never having seen the original. Mrs. Wordsworth has been looking over your letters in vain to find the address of the person in London, through whose hands any parcel for you might be sent. Pray take the trouble of repeating the address in your next letter, and your request shall be attended to of sending you my two letters upon the offensive subject of a Railway to and through our beautiful neighbourhood.

* * * * *

You will be sorry to hear that Mrs. Wordsworth and I have been, and still are, under great trouble and anxiety. Our daughter-in-law fell into bad health between three and four years ago. She went with her husband to Madeira, where they remained nearly a year; she was then advised to go to Italy. After a prolonged residence there, her six children, whom her husband returned to England for, went, at her earnest request, to that country, under their father's guidance: there he was obliged, on account of his duty as a clergyman, to leave them. Four of the number resided with their mother at Rome, three of whom took a fever there, of which the youngest, as noble a boy, of nearly five years, as ever was seen, died, being seized with convulsions when the fever was somewhat subdued. The father, in a distracted state of mind, is just gone back to Italy; and we are most anxious to hear the result. My only surviving brother, also, the late Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and an inestimable person, is in an alarming state of health; and the only child of my eldest brother, long since deceased, is now languishing under mortal illness at Ambleside. He was educated to the medical profession, and caught his illness while on duty in the Mediterranean. He is a truly amiable and excellent young man, and will be universally regretted. These sad occurrences, with others of like kind, have thrown my mind into a state of feeling, which the other day vented itself in the two sonnets which Mrs. Wordsworth will transcribe as the best acknowledgment she can make for Mrs. Reed's and your kindness.

Ever faithfully and affectionately yours, WM. WORDSWORTH.[214]

[214] _Memoirs_, ii. 422-3.

146. _Bishop White: Mormonites, &c._

LETTER TO PROFESSOR REED.

February 3. 1846.

MY DEAR MR. REED,

I was much shocked to find that my last had been despatched without acknowledgment for your kindness in sending me the admirable engraving of Bishop White, which I was delighted, on many accounts, to receive. This omission was owing to the distressed state of mind in which I wrote, and which I throw myself on your goodness to excuse. I ought to have written again by next post, but we really have been, and still are, in such trouble from various causes, that I could not take up the pen, and now must beg you to accept this statement as the only excuse which I can offer. We have had such accounts from my daughter-in-law at Rome, that her mother and brother are just gone thither to support her, her mother being seventy years of age.

Do you know anything of a wretched set of religionists in your country, _Superstitionists_ I ought to say, called Mormonites, or latter-day saints? Would you believe it? a niece of Mrs. Wordsworth's has just embarked, we believe at Liverpool, with a set of the deluded followers of that wretch, in an attempt to join their society. Her name is ----, a young woman of good abilities and well educated, but early in life she took from her mother and her connections a methodistical turn, and has gone on in a course of what she supposes to be piety till she has come to this miserable close. If you should by chance hear anything about her, pray let us know.

The report of my brother's decease, which we look for every day, has not yet reached us. My nephew is still lingering on from day to day.

Ever faithfully and affectionately yours, WM. WORDSWORTH.

The print of Bishop White is noble, everything, indeed, that could be wished.[215]

[215] _Memoirs_, ii. 424-5.

147. _Governor Malartie: Lord Hector of Glasgow University, &c._

LETTER TO SIR W. GOMM. &c. &c., PORT LOUIS, MAURITIUS.

Rydal Mount, Ambleside, Nov. 23. 1846.

DEAR SIR WILLIAM,

Your kind letter of the 4th of August I have just received; and I thank you sincerely for this mark of your attention, and for the gratification it afforded me. It is pleasing to see fancy amusements giving birth to works of solid profit, as, under the auspices of Lady Gomm, they are doing in your island.

Your sonnet addressed to the unfinished monument of Governor Malartie is conceived with appropriate feeling and just discrimination. Long may the finished monument last as a tribute to departed worth, and as a check and restraint upon intemperate desires for change, to which the inhabitants of the island may hereafter be liable!

Before this letter reaches you the newspapers will probably have told you that I have been recently put in nomination, unknown to myself, for the high office of Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow; and that there was a majority of twenty-one votes in my favour, in opposition to the premier, Lord John Russell. The forms of the election, however, allowed Lord John Russell to be returned, through the single vote of the sub-rector voting for his superior. To say the truth, I am glad of this result; being too advanced in life to undertake with comfort any considerable public duty, and it might have seemed ungracious to decline the office.

Men of rank, or of high station, with the exception of the poet Campbell, who was, I believe, educated at this university, have almost invariably been chosen for a rector of this ancient university; and that another exception was made in my favour by a considerable majority affords a proof that literature, independent of office, does not want due estimation. I should not have dwelt so long upon this subject, had anything personal to myself occurred in which you could have taken interest.

As you do not mention your own health, or that of Lady Gomm, I infer with pleasure that the climate agrees with you both. That this may continue to be so is my earnest and sincere wish, in which Mrs. Wordsworth cordially unites.

Believe me, dear Sir William, Faithfully yours, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.[216]

148. _Death of 'Dora.'_

[Received July 10. 1847.]

MY DEAR C----,

Last night (I ought to have said a quarter before one this morning), it pleased God to take to Himself the spirit of our beloved daughter, and your truly affectionate cousin. She had latterly much bodily suffering, under which she supported herself by prayer, and gratitude to her heavenly Father, for granting her to the last so many of His blessings.

[216] _Memoirs_, ii. 432-3.

I need not write more. Your aunt bears up under this affliction as becomes a Christian.

Kindest love to Susan, of whose sympathy we are fully assured.

Your affectionate uncle, and the more so for this affliction,

WM. WORDSWORTH.[217]

Pray for us!

149. _Of the Same: Sorrow_.

We bear up under our affliction as well as God enables us to do. But oh! my dear friend, our loss is immeasurable. God bless you and yours.[218]

Our sorrow, I feel, is for life; but God's will be done![219]

[217] _Memoirs_, ii. 434.

[218] To Mr. Moxon, Aug. 9, 1847.

[219] 29th Dec. 1847.

150.

TO JOHN PEACE, ESQ.

Brigham [Postmark, 'Cockermouth, Nov. 18. 1848'].

MY DEAR FRIEND,

Mrs. Wordsworth has deputed to me the acceptable office of answering your friendly letter, which has followed us to Brigham, upon the banks of the river Derwent, near Cockermouth, the birthplace of four brothers and their sister. Of these four, I, the second, am now the only one left. Am I wrong in supposing that you have been here? The house was driven out of its place by a railway, and stands now nothing like so advantageously for a prospect of this beautiful country, though at only a small distance from its former situation.

We are expecting Mr. Cuthbert Southey to-day, from his curacy, seven or eight miles distant. He is busy in carrying through the press the first volume of his father's letters, or rather, collecting and preparing them for it. Do you happen to have any in your possession? If so, be so kind as to let me or his son know what they are, if you think they contain anything which would interest the public.

* * * * *

Mrs. W. and I are, thank God, both in good health, and possessing a degree of strength beyond what is usual at our age, being both in our seventy-ninth year. The beloved daughter whom it has pleased God to remove from this anxious and sorrowful world, I have not mentioned; but I can judge of the depth of your fellow-feeling for us. Many thanks to you for referring to the text in Scripture which I quoted to you so long ago.[220] 'Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.' He who does not find support and consolation there, will find it nowhere. God grant that it may he continued to me and mine, and to all sufferers! Believe me, with Mrs. W.'s very kind remembrance,

Faithfully yours, WM. WORDSWORTH.

* * * * *

When you see Mr. Cottle, pray remember us most affectionately to him, with respectful regards to his sister.[221]

151. _Illness and Death of a Servant at Rydal Mount_.

Our anxieties are over, and our sorrow is not without heartfelt, I may say heavenly, consolation. Dear, and good, and faithful, and dutiful Jane breathed her last about twelve o'clock last night. The doctor had seen her at noon; he found her much weaker. She said to him, 'I cannot stand now,' but he gave us no reason to believe her end was so very near. You shall hear all particulars when we are permitted to meet, which God grant may be soon. Nothing could be more gentle than her departure.

Yesterday Mary read to her in my presence some chapters from the New Testament, and her faculties were as clear as any one's in perfect health, and so they have ever been to the last.[222]

[220] [Note by Mr. Peace.] At Rydal Mount in 1838. Ephesians v. 20. 'My favourite text,' said he.

[221] _Memoirs_, ii. 435-6.

[222] _Ibid._ ii. 501-2.

152. _Humility_.

Writing to a friend, he says: 'I feel myself in so many respects unworthy of your love, and too likely to become more so.' (This was in 1844.) 'Worldly-minded I am not; on the contrary, my wish to benefit those within my humble sphere strengthens seemingly in exact proportion to my inability to realise those wishes. What I lament most is, that the spirituality of my nature does not expand and rise the nearer I approach the grave, as yours does, and as it fares with my beloved partner. The pleasure which I derive from God's works in His visible creation is not with me, I think, impaired, but reading does not interest me as it used to do, and I feel that I am becoming daily a less instructive companion to others. Excuse this egotism. I feel it necessary to your understanding what I am, and how little you would gain by habitual intercourse with me, however greatly I might benefit from intercourse with you.'[223]

153. _Hopefulness_.

Writing to a friend at a time of public excitement, he thus speaks: 'After all (as an excellent Bishop of the Scotch Church said to a friendly correspondent of mine), "Be of good heart; the affairs of the world will be conducted as heretofore,--by the foolishness of man and the wisdom of God."'[224]

[223] _Memoirs_, ii. 502-3.

[224] _Ibid._ ii. 503.

III. CONVERSATIONS AND PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF WORDSWORTH.

(_a_) FROM 'SATYRANE'S LETTERS:' KLOPSTOCK.

(_b_) PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF THE HON. MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE.

(_c_) RECOLLECTIONS OF A TOUR IN ITALY, BY H.C. ROBINSON.

(_d_) REMINISCENCES OF LADY RICHARDSON AND MRS. DAVY.

(_e_) CONVERSATIONS AND REMINISCENCES RECORDED BY THE BISHOP OF LINCOLN.

(_f_) REMINISCENCES OF REV. R.P. GRAVES, M.A., DUBLIN.

(_g_) ON DEATH OF COLERIDGE.

(_h_) FURTHER REMINISCENCES AND MEMORABILIA, BY REV. R.P. GRAVES, M.A., DUBLIN, NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.

(_i_) AN AMERICAN'S REMINISCENCES.

(_j_) RECOLLECTIONS OF AUBREY DE VERE, ESQ., NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.

(_k_) FROM 'RECOLLECTIONS OF THE LAST DAYS OF SHELLEY AND BYRON,' BY E.J. TRELAWNY, ESQ.

(_l_) FROM LETTERS OF PROFESSOR TAYLER (1872).

(_m_) ANECDOTE OF CRABBE, FROM DIARY OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

(_n_) WORDSWORTH'S LATER OPINION OF LORD BROUGHAM.

NOTE.

On these 'Personal Reminiscences' see the Preface in Vol. I. G.

(_a_) KLOPSTOCK: NOTES OF HIS CONVERSATION.

From 'Satyrane's Letters' (_Biographia Literaria_, vol. ii. pp. 228-254, ed. 1847).

Ratzeburg.

No little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unimprisoned from a child's hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than I this clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town, groves, and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at which I am writing. My spirits certainly, and my health I fancied, were beginning to sink under the noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our Hamburg hotel. I left it on Sunday, Sept. 23rd. with a letter of introduction from the poet Klopstock, to the _Amtmann_ of Ratzeburg. The _Amtmann_ received me with kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to board and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. The vehicle, in which I took my place, was considerably larger than an English stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and rude resemblance, that an elephant's ear does to the human. Its top was composed of naked boards of different colours, and seeming to have been parts of different wainscots. Instead of windows there were leathern curtains with a little eye of glass in each: they perfectly answered the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the cold. I could observe little, therefore, but the inns and farm-houses at which we stopped. They were all alike, except in size: one great room, like a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in tufts through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the floor of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a street, sometimes one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end. These are commonly floored. In the large room the cattle, pigs, poultry, men, women, and children, live in amicable community: yet there was an appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. One of these houses I measured. It was an hundred feet in length. The apartments were taken off from one corner. Between these and the stalls there was a small interspace, and here the breadth was forty-eight feet, but thirty-two where the stalls were; of course, the stalls were on each side eight feet in depth. The faces of the cows &c. were turned towards the room; indeed they were in it, so that they had at least the comfort of seeing each other's faces. Stall-feeding is universal in this part of Germany, a practice concerning which the agriculturist and the poet are likely to entertain opposite opinions--or at least, to have very different feelings. The wood-work of these buildings on the outside is left unplastered, as in old houses among us, and, being painted red and green, it cuts and tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within three miles of Hamburg almost to Molln, which is thirty miles from it, the country, as far as I could see it was a dead flat, only varied by woods. At Molln it became more beautiful. I observed a small lake nearly surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests. We were nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg to Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one hundred and twenty-six miles.

The lake of Ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine miles in length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. About a mile from the southernmost point it is divided into two, of course very unequal, parts by an island, which, being connected by a bridge and a narrow slip of land with the one shore, and by another bridge of immense length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. On this island the town of Ratzeburg is built. The pastor's house or vicarage, together with the _Amtmann's, Amtsschreiber's_, and the church, stands near the summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land and the little bridge, from which, through a superb military gate, you step into the island-town of Ratzeburg. This again is itself a little hill, by ascending and descending which, you arrive at the long bridge, and so to the other shore. The water to the south of the town is called the Little Lake, which however almost engrosses the beauties of the whole: the shores being just often enough green and bare to give the proper effect to the magnificent groves which occupy the greater part of their circumference. From the turnings, windings, and indentations of the shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and the whole has a sort of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. At the north of the Great Lake, and peeping over it, I see the seven church towers of Lubec, at the distance of twelve or thirteen miles, yet as distinctly as if they were not three. The only defect in the view is, that Ratzeburg is built entirely of red bricks, and all the houses roofed with red tiles. To the eye, therefore, it presents a clump of brick-dust red. Yet this evening, Oct. 10th. twenty minutes past five, I saw the town perfectly beautiful, and the whole softened down into _complete keeping_, if I may borrow a term from the painters. The sky over Ratzeburg and all the east was a pure evening blue, while over the west it was covered with light sandy clouds. Hence a deep red light spread over the whole prospect, in undisturbed harmony with the red town, the brown-red woods, and the yellow-red reeds on the skirts of the lake. Two or three boats, with single persons paddling them, floated up and down in the rich light, which not only was itself in harmony with all, but brought all into harmony.

I should have told you that I went back to Hamburg on Thursday (Sept. 27th.) to take leave of my friend, who travels southward, and returned hither on the Monday following. From Empfelde, a village half way from Ratzeburg, I walked to Hamburg through deep sandy roads and a dreary flat: the soil everywhere white, hungry, and excessively pulverised; but the approach to the city is pleasing. Light cool country houses, which you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with arbours and trellis work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in cloisters and piazzas, each house with neat rails before it, and green seats within the rails. Every object, whether the growth of Nature or the work of man, was neat and artificial. It pleased me far better, than if the houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a nobler taste: for this nobler taste would have been mere apery. The busy, anxious, money-loving merchant of Hamburg could only have adopted, he could not have enjoyed the simplicity of Nature. The mind begins to love Nature by imitating human conveniences in Nature; but this is a step in intellect, though a low one--and were it not so, yet all around me spoke of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and I entered with unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts even of the busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg. In this charitable and _catholic_ mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city. These are huge green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees growing in the interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. Of my return I have nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra post, which answers to posting in England. These north German post chaises are uncovered wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of finery, a _chef d'œuvre_ of mechanism, compared with them: and the horses!--a savage might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numeration table. Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle with the brown rye bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting together; only the horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion no water to his gin. Now and henceforward for subjects of more interest to you, and to the objects in search of which I loft you: namely, the _literati_ and literature of Germany.

Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as W---- and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother, the poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate. It is one of a row of little common-place summer-houses, (for so they looked,) with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected with several roads. Whatever beauty, (thought I,) may be before the poet's eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation. We waited a few minutes in a neat little parlour, ornamented with the figures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of which were from Klopstock's odes.[225]

[225] 'There is a rhetorical amplitude and brilliancy in the Messias,' says Mr. Carlyle, 'which elicits in our critic (Mr. Taylor) an instinct truer than his philosophy is. Neither has the still purer spirit of Klopstock's odes escaped him. Perhaps there is no writing in our language that offers so correct an emblem of him as this analysis.' I remember thinking Taylor's 'clear outline' of the Messias the most satisfying account of a poem I ever read: it fills the mind with a vision of pomp and magnificence, which it is pleasanter to contemplate, as it were, from afar, massed together in that general survey, than to examine part by part. Mr. Taylor and Mr. Carlyle agree in exalting that ode of Klopstock's, in which he represents the Muse of Britain and the Muse of Germany running a race. The piece seems to me more rhetorical than strictly poetical; and if the younger Muse's power of keeping up the race depends on productions of this sort, I would not give a penny for her chance, at least if the contest relates to pure poetry. Klopstock's _Herman_ (mentioned afterwards,) consists of three chorus-dramas, as Mr. Taylor calls them: _The Battle of Herman_, _Herman and the Princes_, and _The Death of Herman_. Herman is the Arminius of the Roman historians. S.C.

The poet entered. I was much disappointed in his countenance, and recognised in it no likeness to the bust. There was no comprehension in the forehead, no weight over the eye-brows, no expression of peculiarity, moral or intellectual, on the eyes, no massiveness in the general countenance. He is, if anything, rather below the middle size. He wore very large half-boots, which his legs filled, so fearfully were they swollen. However, though neither W---- nor myself could discover any indications of sublimity or enthusiasm in his physiognomy, we were both equally impressed with his liveliness, and his kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French with my friend, and with difficulty spoke a few sentences to me in English. His enunciation was not in the least affected by the entire want of his upper teeth. The conversation began on his part by the expression of his rapture at the surrender of the detachment of French troops under General Humbert. Their proceedings in Ireland with regard to the committee which they had appointed, with the rest of their organizing system, seemed to have given the poet great entertainment. He then declared his sanguine belief in Nelson's victory, and anticipated its confirmation with a keen and triumphant pleasure. His words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement Anti-Gallicanism. The subject changed to literature, and I inquired in Latin concerning the history of German poetry and the elder German poets. To my great astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little on the subject. He had indeed occasionally read one or two of their elder writers, but not so as to enable him to speak of their merits. Professor Ebeling, he said, would probably give me every information of this kind: the subject had not particularly excited his curiosity. He then talked of Milton and Glover, and thought Glover's blank verse superiour to Milton's.[226]

[226] _Leonidus_, an epic poem, by R. Glover, first appeared in May, 1737: in the fifth edition, published in 1770, it was corrected and extended from nine books to twelve. Glover was the author of Boadicea and Medea, tragedies, which had some success on the stage. I believe that _Leonidas_ has more merit in the conduct of the design, and in the delineation of character, than as poetry.

'He write an epic poem,' said Thomson, 'who never saw a mountain!' Glover had seen the sun and moon, yet he seems to have looked for their poetical aspects in Homer and Milton, rather than in the sky. 'There is not a single simile in _Leonidas_,' says Lyttleton, 'that is borrowed from any of the ancients, and yet there is hardly any poem that has such a variety of beautiful comparisons.' The similes of Milton come so flat and dry out of Glover's mangle, that they are indeed quite _another thing_ from what they appear in the poems of that Immortal: _ex. gr._

Like wintry clouds, which, opening for a time, Tinge their black folds with gleams of scattered light:--

Is not this Milton's 'silver lining' stretched and mangled?

The Queen of Night Gleam'd from the centre of th' etherial vault, And o'er the raven plumes of darkness shed Her placid light.

This is flattened from the well-known passage in Comus.

Soon will savage Mars Deform the lovely _ringlets of thy shrubs_.

A genteel improvement upon Milton's 'bush with frizzled hair implicit.' Then we have

--delicious to the sight Soft dales meand'ring show their flowery laps Among rude piles of nature,

spoiled from

--the flowery lap Of some irriguous valley spread its store.

Thus does this poet shatter and dissolve the blooming sprays of another man's plantation, instead of pushing through them some new shoots of his own to crown them with fresh blossoms.

Milton himself borrowed as much as Glover. Aye, ten times more; yet every passage in his poetry is Miltonic,--more than anything else. On the other hand, his imitators _Miltonize_, yet produce nothing worthy of Milton, the important characteristic of whose writings my father well expressed, when he said 'The reader of Milton must be always on his duty: _he is surrounded with sense_.' A man must have his sense to imitate him worthily. How we look through his words at the Deluge, as he floods it upon us in Book xi. l. 738-53!--The Attic bees produce honey so flavoured with the thyme of Hymettus that it is scarcely eatable, though to smell the herb itself in a breezy walk upon that celebrated Mount would be an exceeding pleasure; thus certain epic poems are overpoweringly flavoured with herbs of Milton, while yet the fragrant balm and fresh breeze of his poetry is not to be found in them. S.C.

W---- and myself expressed our surprise: and my friend gave his definition and notion of harmonious verse, that it consisted, (the English iambic blank verse above all,) in the apt arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs,

----'with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out,'

and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence or antithetic vigour, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose. Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover's superiority to single lines.[227]

[227] The 'abrupt and laconic structure' of Glover's periods appears at the very commencement of _Leonidas_, which has something military in its movement, but rather the stiff gait of the drilled soldier than the proud march of the martial hero.

The virtuous Spartan who resign'd his life To save his country at th' Oetaen straits, Thermopylae, when all the peopled east In arms with Xerxes filled the Grecian plains, O Muse record! The Hellespont they passed O'erpowering Thrace. The dreadful tidings swift To Corinth flew. Her Isthmus was the seat Of Grecian council. Orpheus thence returns To Lacedaemon. In assembly full, &c.

Glover's best passages are of a soft character. This is a pleasing _Homerism_:

Lycis dies, For boist'rous war ill-chosen. He was skill'd To tune the lulling flute, and melt the heart; Or with his pipe's awak'ning strains allure The lovely dames of Lydia to the dance. They on the verdant level graceful mov'd In vary'd measures; while the cooling breeze Beneath their swelling garments wanton'd o'er Their snowy breasts, and smooth Cayster's streams Soft-gliding murmur'd by. The hostile blade, &c. Bk. VIII.

And here is a pleasing expansion of Pindar, Olymp. II. 109:

Placid were his days, Which flow'd through blessings. As a river pure, Whose sides are flowery, and whose meadows fair, Meets in his course a subterranean void; There dips his silver head, again to rise, And, rising, glide through flow'rs and meadows new; So shall OÔleus in those happier fields, Where never tempests roar, nor humid clouds In mists dissolve, nor white descending flakes Of winter violate th' eternal green; Where never gloom of trouble shades the mind, Nor gust of passion heaves the quiet breast, Nor dews of grief are sprinkled. Bk. X. S.C.

He told us that he had read Milton, in a prose translation, when he was fourteen.[228] I understood him thus myself, and W--- interpreted Klopstock's French as I had already construed it. He appeared to know very little of Milton or indeed of our poets in general. He spoke with great indignation of the English prose translation of his MESSIAH. All the translations had been bad, very bad--but the English was _no_ translation--there were pages on pages not in the original: and half the original was not to be found in the translation. W--- told him that I intended to translate a few of his odes as specimens of German lyrics--he then said to me in English, 'I wish you would render into English some select passages of THE MESSIAH, and _revenge_ me of your countryman!'

[228] This was accidentally confirmed to me by an old German gentleman at Helmstadt, who had been Klopstock's school and bed-fellow. Among other boyish anecdotes, he related that the young poet set a particular value on a translation of the PARADISE LOST, and always slept with it under his pillow.

It was the liveliest thing which he produced in the whole conversation. He told us, that his first ode was fifty years older than his last. I looked at him with much emotion--I considered him as the venerable father of German poetry; as a good man as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with legs enormously swollen; yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative. My eyes felt as if a tear were swelling into them. In the portrait of Lessing there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect of his physiognomy--Klopstock wore the same, powdered and frizzled. By the bye, old men ought never to wear powder--the contrast between a large snow-white wig and the colour of an old man's skin is disgusting, and wrinkles in such a neighbourhood appear only channels for dirt. It is an honour to poets and great men, that you think of them as parts of Nature; and anything of trick and fashion wounds you in them, as much as when you see venerable yews clipped into miserable peacocks.--The author of THE MESSIAH should have worn his own grey hair.--His powder and periwig were to the eye what _Mr_. Virgil would be to the ear.

Klopstock dwelt much on the superiour power which the German language possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he had often translated parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved always sufficient for a Greek or Latin one. In English you cannot do this. I answered, that in English we could commonly render one Greek heroic line in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than one German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me:[229] and I, who wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad that he did not.

[229] Klopstock's observation was partly true and partly erroneous. In the literal sense of his words, and, if we confine the comparison to the average of space required for the expression of the same thought in the two languages, it is erroneous. I have translated some German hexameters into English hexameters, and find, that on the average three English lines will express four lines German. The reason is evident: our language abounds in monosyllables and dissyllables. The German, not less than the Greek, is a polysyllable language. But in another point of view the remark was not without foundation. For the German possessing the same unlimited privilege of forming compounds, both with prepositions and with epithets, as the Greek, it can express the richest single Greek word in a single German one, and is thus freed from the necessity of weak or ungraceful paraphrases. I will content myself with one example at present, viz. the use of the prefixed participles _ver_, _zer_, _ent_, and _weg_: thus _reissen_ to rend, _verreissen_ to rend away, _zerreissen_ to rend to pieces, _entreissen_ to rend off or out of a thing, in the active sense: or _schmelzen_ to melt--_ver_, _zer_, _ent_, _schmelzen_--and in like manner through all the verbs neuter and active. If you consider only how much we should feel the loss of the prefix _be_, as in bedropt, besprinkle, besot, especially in our poetical language, and then think that this same mode of composition is carried through all their simple and compound prepositions, and many of their adverbs; and that with most of these the Germans have the same privilege as we have of dividing them from the verb and placing them at the end of the sentence; you will have no difficulty in comprehending the reality and the cause of this superior power in the German of condensing meaning, in which its great poet exulted. It is impossible to read half a dozen pages of Wieland without perceiving that in this respect the German has no rival but the Greek. And yet I feel, that concentration or condensation is not the happiest mode of expressing this excellence, which seems to consist not so much in the less time required for conveying an impression, as in the unity and simultaneousness with which the impression is conveyed. It tends to make their language more picturesque: it _depictures_ images better. We have obtained this power in part by our compound verbs derived from the Latin: and the sense of its great effect no doubt induced our Milton both to the use and the abuse of Latin derivatives. But still these prefixed particles, conveying no separate or separable meaning to the mere English reader, cannot possibly act on the mind with the force or liveliness of an original and homogeneous language such as the German is, and besides are confined to certain words.

We now took our leave. At the beginning of the French Revolution Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary presents from the French Republic, (a golden crown I believe,) and, like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he declined. But when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury, he sent back these presents with a _palinodia_, declaring his abhorrence of their proceedings: and since then he has been perhaps more than enough an Anti-Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and detestation of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he suffers himself to forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence; and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so are their iniquities instruments of his goodness. From Klopstock's house we walked to the ramparts, discoursing together on the poet and his conversation, till our attention was diverted to the beauty and singularity of the sunset and its effects on the objects around us. There were woods in the distance. A rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,) lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and brassy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been divided into equal segments by a rule or pair of compasses, the portions could not have been more regular. All else was obscure. It was a fairy scene!--and to increase its romantic character, among the moving objects, thus divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a beautiful child, dressed with the elegant simplicity of an English child, riding on a stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other accoutrements of which were in a high degree costly and splendid. Before I quit the subject of Hamburg, let me say, that I remained a day or two longer than I otherwise should have done, in order to be present at the feast of St. Michael, the patron saint of Hamburg, expecting to see the civic pomp of this commercial Republic. I was however disappointed. There were no processions, two or three sermons were preached to two or three old women in two or three churches, and St. Michael and his patronage wished elsewhere by the higher classes, all places of entertainment, theatre, &c. being shut up on this day. In Hamburg, there seems to be no religion at all; in Lubec it is confined to the women. The men seem determined to be divorced from their wives in the other world, if they cannot in this. You will not easily conceive a more singular sight, than is presented by the vast aisle of the principal church at Lubec seen from the organ-loft: for, being filled with female servants and persons in the same class of life, and all their caps having gold and silver cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold and silver.

I will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes, which my friend W---- made of his conversations with Klopstock, during the interviews that took place after my departure. On these I shall make but one remark at present, and that will appear a presumptuous one, namely, that Klopstock's remarks on the venerable sage of Kˆnigsburg are to my own knowledge injurious and mistaken; and so far is it from being true, that his system is now given up, that throughout the Universities of Germany there is not a single professor who is not either a Kantean or a disciple of Fichte, whose system is built on the Kantean, and presupposes its truth; or lastly who, though an antagonist of Kant, as to his theoretical work, has not embraced wholly or in part his moral system, and adopted part of his nomenclature. 'Klopstock having wished to see the CALVARY of Cumberland, and asked what was thought of it in England, I went to Remnant's (the English bookseller) where I procured the Analytical Review, in which is contained the review of Cumberland's CALVARY. I remembered to have read there some specimens of a blank verse translation of THE MESSIAH. I had mentioned this to Klopstock, and he had a great desire to see them. I walked over to his house and put the book into his hands. On adverting to his own poem, he told me he began THE MESSIAH when he was seventeen: he devoted three entire years to the plan without composing a single line. He was greatly at a loss in what manner to execute his work. There were no successful specimens of versification in the German language before this time. The first three cantos he wrote in a species of measured or numerous prose. This, though done with much labour and some success, was far from satisfying him. He had composed hexameters both Latin and Greek as a school exercise, and there had been also in the German language attempts in that style of versification. These were only of very moderate merit.--One day he was struck with the idea of what could be done in this way--he kept his room a whole day, even went without his dinner, and found that in the evening he had written twenty-three hexameters, versifying a part of what he had before written in prose. From that time, pleased with his efforts, he composed no more in prose. To-day he informed me that he had finished his plan before he read Milton. He was enchanted to see an author who before him had trod the same path. This is a contradiction of what he said before. He did not wish to speak of his poem to any one till it was finished: but some of his friends who had seen what he had finished, tormented him till he had consented to publish a few books in a journal. He was then, I believe, very young, about twenty-five. The rest was printed at different periods, four books at a time. The reception given to the first specimens was highly flattering. He was nearly thirty years in finishing the whole poem, but of these thirty years not more than two were employed in the composition. He only composed in favourable moments; besides he had other occupations. He values himself upon the plan of his odes, and accuses the modern lyrical writers of gross deficiency in this respect. I laid the same accusation against Horace: he would not hear of it--but waived the discussion. He called Rousseau's ODE TO FORTUNE a moral dissertation in stanzas.[230] I spoke of Dryden's ST. CECILIA; but be did not seem familiar with our writers. He wished to know the distinctions between our dramatic and epic blank verse.

[230] (A la Fortune. Liv. II. Ode vi. Œuvres de Jean Baptiste Rousseau, p.121, edit. 1820. One of the latter strophes of this ode concludes with two lines, which, as the editor observes, have become a proverb, and of which the thought and expression are borrowed from Lucretius: _cripitur persona, manet res:_ III. v. 58.

Montrez nous, guerriers magnanimes, Votre vertu dans tout son jour: Voyons comment vos coeurs sublimes Du sort soutiendront le retour. Tant que sa faveur vous seconde, Vous Ètes les maÓtres du monde, Votre gloire nous Èblouit: Mais au moindre revers funeste, _Le masque tombe, l'homme reste, Et le heros s'Èvanouit_.

Horace, says the Editor, en traitant ce mÍme sujet, liv. X. ode XXXV. et Pindare en l'esquissant ‡ grands traits, au commencement de sa douziËme Olympique, n'avoient laissÈ ‡ leurs successeurs que son cÙtÈ moral ‡ envisager, et c'est le parti que prit Rousseau. The general sentiment of the ode is handled with great dignity in Paradise Regained. Bk. III. l. 43--157--a passage which, as Thyer says, contains the quintessence of the subject. Dante has some noble lines on Fortune in the viith canto of the _Inferno_,--lines worthy of a great mystic poet. After referring to the vain complaints and maledictions of men against this Power, he beautifully concludes:

Ma ella s'Ë beata e ciÚ non ode: Con l'altre prime creature lieta _Volve sua spera, e beata si gode_.

J.B. Rousseau was born in 1669, began his career at the close of the age of Louis Quatorze, died at Brussels, March 17, 1741. He had been banished from France, by an intrigue, on a false charge, as now seems clear, of having composed and distributed defamatory verses, in 1712; and it was engraved upon his tomb that he was 'thirty years an object of envy and thirty of compassion.' Belonging to the classical school of the 17th century, of which he was the last survivor, he came somewhat into conflict with the spirit of the 18th, which was preparing a new vintage, and would have none but new wine in new bottles. Rousseau, however, was a very finished writer in his way, and has been compared to Pindar, Horace, Anacreon and Malherbe. His ode to _M. le Comte du Luc_ is as fine an example as I know of the modern classical style. This is quite different from that which is exemplified in Wordsworth's Laodamia and Serjeant Talfourd's Ion; for in them the subjects only are ancient, while both the form and spirit are modern; whereas in the odes of Rousseau a modern subject is treated, as far as difference of times and language will allow, in the manner and tone of the Ancients. Samson Agonistes and Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris are conformed to ancient modes of thought, but in them the subject also is taken from antiquity. Rousseau's works consist of Odes, Epistles in verse, Cantatas, Epigrams, &c. &c. He wrote for the stage at the beginning of his literary life, but with no great success. S.C.)

He recommended me to read his HERMANN before I read either THE MESSIAH or the odes. He flattered himself that some time or other his dramatic poems would be known in England. He had not heard of Cowper. He thought that Voss in his translation of THE ILIAD had done violence to the idiom of the Germans, and had sacrificed it to the Greeks, not remembering sufficiently that each language has its particular spirit and genius.[231] He said Lessing was the first of their dramatic writers. I complained of NATHAN as tedious. He said there was not enough of action in it; but that Lessing was the most chaste of their writers. He spoke favourably of Goethe; but said that his SORROWS OF WERTER was his best work, better than any of his dramas: he preferred the first written to the rest of Goethe's dramas. Schiller's ROBBERS he found so extravagant, that he could not read it. I spoke of the scene of the setting sun.[232] He did not know it. He said Schiller could not live. He thought DON CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot was inextricable.--It was evident he knew little of Schiller's works: indeed, he said, he could not read them. B¸rger, he said, was a true poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be forgotten; that he gave himself up to the imitation of Shakespeare, who often was extravagant, but that Schiller was ten thousand times more so.[233]

[231] Voss, who lived from Feb. 20, 1751, to March, 1826, was author of the Luise, 'a rural epopaea of simple structure divided into three idyls, which relate the betrothment and marriage of the heroine.' This is a pleasing and very peculiar poem, composed in hexameter verse. 'The charm of the narrative,' says Mr. T., 'consists in the minute description of the local domestic manners of the personages.' The charm consists, I think, in the blending of these manners with the beauty of Nature, and the ease and suitability of the versification. Voss's translation of the Odyssey is praised for being so perfect an imitation of the original. The Greek has been rendered, 'with a fidelity and imitative harmony so admirable, that it suggests to the scholar the original wording, and reflects, as from a mirror, every beauty and every blemish of the ancient poem.' Hist. Survey, pp. 61-68. S. C.

[232] Act III. Sc. 2. The night scene, which is the 5th of Act iv, is fine too in a frantic way. The songs it contains are very spirited. That sung by the Robbers is worthy of a Thug; it goes beyond our notions of any European bandit, and transports us to the land of Jaggernat. S. C.

[233] The works of B¸rger, who was born on the first day of 1748, died June 8, 1794, consist of Poems (2 vols.), Macbeth altered from Shakespeare, (pronounced by Taylor,--no good judge of _Shakespeare_,--in some respects superiour to the original,) Muncha¸sen's Travels; Translations; (of the six first books of the Iliad, and some others); Papers philological and political. His fame rests chiefly on three ballads, The Wild Hunter, The Parson's Daughter, and Lenore. The powerful diction and admirable harmony,--rhythm, sound, rhyme of these compositions Mr. Taylor describes as the result of laborious art; it strikes me, from the outline which he has given of B¸rger's history, that the violent feelings, the life-like expression of which constitutes their power and value, may have been partly the reflex of the poet's own mind. His seems to have been a life of mismanagement from youth till middle age. Like Milton, he lost a beloved second wife by childbed in the first year of marriage: like him, he married a third time, but without his special necessity--blindness and unkind daughters. He wedded a lady who had fallen in love with his poetry, or perhaps his poetical reputation: an union founded, as it appears, in vanity, ended in vexation of spirit: and as Death, which had deprived him of two wives, did not release him from a third, he obtained his freedom, at the end of little more than three years, from a court of justice. Why did Klopstock undervalue, by preference of such a poet, the lofty-minded Schiller--the dearest to England of all German bards; perhaps because the author of Wallenstein was a philosopher, and had many things in his philosophy which the author of The Messiah could not find in _his_ heaven and earth. S.C.

He spoke very slightingly of Kotzebue, as an immoral author in the first place, and next, as deficient in power. At Vienna, said he, they are transported with him; but we do not reckon the people of Vienna either the wisest or the wittiest people of Germany. He said Wieland was a charming author, and a sovereign master of his own language: that in this respect Goethe could not be compared to him, nor indeed could any body else. He said that his fault was to be fertile to exuberance. I told him the OBERON had just been translated into English. He asked me if I was not delighted with the poem. I answered, that I thought the story began to flag about the seventh or eighth book; and observed, that it was unworthy of a man of genius to make the interest of a long poem turn entirely upon animal gratification. He seemed at first disposed to excuse this by saying, that there are different subjects for poetry, and that poets are not willing to be restricted in their choice. I answered, that I thought the _passion_ of love as well suited to the purposes of poetry as any other passion; but that it was a cheap way of pleasing to fix the attention of the reader through a long poem on the mere _appetite_. Well! but, said he, you see, that such poems please every body. I answered, that it was the province of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs. He agreed, and confessed, that on no account whatsoever would he have written a work like the OBERON. He spoke in raptures of Wieland's style, and pointed out the passage where Retzia is delivered of her child, as exquisitely beautiful.[234]

[234] Oberon, Canto viii. stanzas 69-80. The little touch about the new born babe's returning its mother's kiss is very romantic: though put modestly in the form of a query:

--Und scheint nicht jeden Kuss Sein kleiner mund dem ihren zu entsaugen?

The word _entsaugen (suck off)_ is expressive--it very naturally characterises the kiss of an infant five minutes of age. Wieland had great nursery experience. 'My sweetest hours,' says he, in a letter quoted in the Survey,' are those in which I see about me, in all their glee of childhood, my whole posse of little half-way things between apes and angels.'

Mr. Sotheby's translation of the Oberon made the poem popular in this country. The original first appeared in 1780. S. C.

I said that I did not perceive any very striking passages; but that I made allowance for the imperfections of a translation. Of the thefts of Wieland, he said, they were so exquisitely managed, that the greatest writers might be proud to steal as he did. He considered the books and fables of old romance writers in the light of the ancient mythology, as a sort of common property, from which a man was free to take whatever he could make a good use of. An Englishman had presented him with the odes of Collins, which he had read with pleasure. He knew little or nothing of Gray, except his ELEGY written in a country CHURCH-YARD. He complained of the fool in LEAR. I observed that he seemed to give a terrible wildness to the distress; but still he complained. He asked whether it was not allowed, that Pope had written rhymed poetry with more skill than any of our writers--I said I preferred Dryden, because his couplets had greater variety in their movement. He thought my reason a good one; but asked whether the rhyme of Pope were not more exact. This question I understood as applying to the final terminations, and observed to him that I believed it was the case; but that I thought it was easy to excuse some inaccuracy in the final sounds, if the general sweep of the verse was superiour. I told him that we were not so exact with regard to the final endings of lines as the French. He did not seem to know that we made no distinction between masculine and feminine (i.e. single or double,) rhymes: at least he put inquiries to me on this subject. He seemed to think, that no language could be so far formed as that it might not be enriched by idioms borrowed from another tongue. I said this was a very dangerous practice; and added, that I thought Milton had often injured both his prose and verse by taking this liberty too frequently. I recommended to him the prose works of Dryden as models of pure and native English. I was treading upon tender ground, as I have reason to suppose that he has himself liberally indulged in the practice.

The same day I dined at Mr. Klopstock's, where I had the pleasure of a third interview with the poet. We talked principally about indifferent things. I asked him what he thought of Kant. He said that his reputation was much on the decline in Germany. That for his own part he was not surprised to find it so, as the works of Kant were to him utterly incomprehensible--that he had often been pestered by the Kanteans; but was rarely in the practice of arguing with them. His custom was to produce the book, open it and point to a passage, and beg they would explain it. This they ordinarily attempted to do by substituting their own ideas. I do not want, I say, an explanation of your own ideas, but of the passage which is before us. In this way I generally bring the dispute to an immediate conclusion. He spoke of Wolfe as the first Metaphysician they had in Germany. Wolfe had followers; but they could hardly be called a sect, and luckily till the appearance of Kant, about fifteen years ago, Germany had not been pestered by any sect of philosophers whatsoever; but that each man had separately pursued his inquiries uncontrolled by the dogmas of a master. Kant had appeared ambitious to be the founder of a sect; that he had succeeded: but that the Germans were now coming to their senses again. That Nicolai and Engel had in different ways contributed to disenchant the nation;[235] but above all the incomprehensibility of the philosopher and his philosophy. He seemed pleased to hear, that as yet Kant's doctrines had not met with many admirers in England--did not doubt but that we had too much wisdom to be duped by a writer who set at defiance the common sense and common understandings of men. We talked of tragedy. He seemed to rate highly the power of exciting tears--I said that nothing was more easy than to deluge an audience, that it was done every day by the meanest writers.'

I must remind you, my friend, first, that these notes are not intended as specimens of Klopstock's intellectual power, or even '_colloquial prowess_,' to judge of which by an accidental conversation, and this with strangers, and those two foreigners, would be not only unreasonable, but calumnious. Secondly, I attribute little other interest to the remarks than what is derived from the celebrity of the person who made them. Lastly, if you ask me, whether I have read THE MESSIAH, and what I think of it? I answer--as yet the first four books only: and as to my opinion--(the reasons of which hereafter)--you may guess it from what I could not help muttering to myself, when the good pastor this morning told me, that Klopstock was the German Milton----'a very _German_ Milton indeed!!!'----Heaven preserve you, and S.T. COLERIDGE.

[235] These _disenchanters_ put one in mind of the ratcatchers, who are said and supposed to rid houses of rats, and yet the rats, somehow or other, continue to swarm. The Kantean rats were not aware, I believe, when Klopstock spoke thus, of the extermination that had befallen them: and even to this day those acute animals infest the old house, and steal away the daily bread of the children,--if the old notions of Space and Time, and the old proofs of religious verities by way of the _understanding_ and _speculative reason,_ must be called such. Whether or no these are their true spiritual sustenance, or the necessary guard and vehicle of it, is perhaps a question.

But who were Nicolai and Engel, and what did they against the famous enchanter? The former was born in 1733, at Berlin, where he carried on his father's business of book-selling, pursued literature with marked success, and attained to old age, full of literary honours. By means of three critical journals (the _Literatur-Briefe,_ the _Bibliothek der Schˆnen Wissenschaftern,_ and the _Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek,_) which he conducted with the powerful cooperation of Lessing, and of his intimate friend Mendelssohn, and to which he contributed largely himself, he became very considerable in the German world of letters, and so continued for the space of twenty years. Jˆrdens, in his Lexicon, speaks highly of the effect of Nicolai's writings in promoting freedom of thought, enlightened views in theology and philosophy, and a sound taste in fine literature--describes him as a brave battler with intolerance, hypocrisy, and confused conceptions in religion; with empty subtleties, obscurities, and terminologies, that can but issue in vain fantasies, in his controversial writings on the 'so-named critical philosophy.' He engaged with the _Kritik der reinen Vernunft,_ on its appearance in 1781, in the _Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek;_ first explained his objections to it in the 11th vol. of his _Reisebeschreibung_, (Description of a Journey through Germany and Switzerland in the year 1781,) and afterwards, in his romance entitled The Life and Opinions of Sempronius Gundibert, a German Philosopher, sought to set forth the childish crotchets and abuses imputable to many disciples of this philosophy in their native absurdity. The _ratsbone_ alluded to by Klopstock, was doubtless contained in the above-named romance, which the old poet probably esteemed more than Nicolai's more serious polemics.

Gundibert has had its day, but in a fiction destined to a day of longer duration,--Goethe's Faust,--the Satirist is himself most effectively satirised. There he is, in that strange yet beautiful temple, pinned to the wall in a ridiculous attitude, to be laughed at as long as the temple itself is visited and admired. This doom came upon him, not so much for his campaign against the Kanteans, as for his _Joys of Werter_,--because he had dared to ridicule a book, which certainly offered no small temptations to the parodist. Indeed he seems to have been engaged in a series of hostilities with Fichte, Lavater, Wieland, Herder, and Goethe.

(See Mr. Hayward's excellent translation of Faust, of which I have heard a literary German say that it gave a better notion of the original than any other which he had seen.)

In the _Walpurgisnacht_ of the Faust he thus addresses the goblin dancers:--

Ihr seyd noch immer da! Nein das ist unerhˆrt! Verschwindet doch! Wir haben ja aufgekl‰rt!

'Fly! Vanish! Unheard of impudence! What, still there! In this enlightened age too, when you have been Proved not to exist?'--_Shelley's Translation_.

Do we not see the doughty reviewer before us magisterially waving his hand and commanding the apparitions to vanish?--then with despondent astonishment exclaiming:

Das Teufelspack es fragt nach keiner Regel. Wir sind so klug und dennoch spukt's in Tegel.

So wise we are! yet what fantastic fooleries still stream forth from my contemporary's brains; how are we still haunted! The speech of Faust concerning him is mis-translated by Shelley, who understood the humour of the piece, as well as the poetry, but not the particular humours of it. Nothing can be more expressive of a conceited, narrow-minded reviewer. 'Oh he!--he is absolutely everywhere,--What others dance, he must decide upon. If he can't chatter about every step, 'tis as good as not made at all. _Nothing provokes him so much as when we go forward_. If you'd turn round and round in a circle, as he does in his old mill, he'd approve of that perhaps; especially if you'd consult him about it.'

'A man of such spirited habitudes,' says Mr. Carlyle, after affirming that Nicolai wrote against Kant's philosophy without comprehending it, and judged of poetry, as of Brunswick Mum, by its utility, 'is now by the Germans called a _Philister_. Nicolai earned for himself the painful pre-eminence of being _Erz Philister_, Arch Philistine.' 'He, an old enemy of Goethe's,' says Mr. Hill, in explanation of the title in which he appears in the _Walpurgisnacht_, 'had published an account of his phantasmal illusions, pointing them against Fichte's system of idealism, which he evidently confounded with what Coleridge would have called Subjective Idolism.'

Such was this wondrous _disenchanter_ in the eyes of later critics than Klopstock: a man strong enough to maintain a long fight against genius, not wise enough to believe in it and befriend it. How many a controversialist seems a mighty giant to those who are predisposed to his opinions, while, in the eyes of others, he is but a blind floundering Polyphemus, who knows not how to direct his heavy blows; if not a menacing scarecrow, with a stake in his hand, which he has no power to drive home! I remember reading a thin volume in which all metaphysicians that had ever left their thoughts behind them were declared utterly in the wrong--all up to, but not including, the valiant author himself. The world had lain in darkness till he appeared, like a new Phoebus, on the scene. This great man despatched Kant's system--(never having read a syllable of any work of Kant's)--in a page and a quarter! and the exploit had its celebraters and admirers. Yet strange to say, the metaphysical world went on just as if nothing had happened!--after the sun was up, it went groping about, as if it had never been enlightened, and actually ever since has continued to talk as if Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and other metaphysicians understood the nature of the things they wrote about rather _more_ than the mass of mankind, instead of _less! Verschwindet doch_! might this author say, as Nicolai said to the spectres of the Brocken and the phantoms of literature,

Verschwindet doch! _Wir haben ja aufgekl‰rt_.

Engel opposed Kant in philosophical treatises, one of which is entitled _Zwei Gerpr‰che den Werth der Kritik betreffend_. He too occupied a considerable space in Literature--his works fill twelve volumes, besides a few other pieces. 'To him,' says Jˆrdens, 'the criticism of taste and of art, speculative, practical, and popular philosophy, owe many of their later advances in Germany.' Jˆrdens pronounces his romance, entitled _Lorenz Stark_, a masterpiece in its way, and says of his plays, that they deserve a place beside the best of Lessing's. He was the author of a miscellaneous work, entitled The Philosopher for the World, and is praised by Cousin as a meritorious anthropologist. Engel was born September 11, 1741, at Parchim, of which his father was pastor, in Mecklenburg-Schwerin; died June 28, 1802. Neither Nicolai nor Engel is noticed by Cousin among the adversaries of Kant's doctrine: the intelligent adversaries,--who assailed it with skill and knowledge, rather proved its strength than discovered its weakness. _Fortius acri ridiculum_; but this applies only to transient triumphs, where the object of attack, though it furnishes _occasion_ for ridicule, affords no just _cause_ for it. S.C.

* * * * *

(_b_) PERSONAL REMINISCENCES (1836), BY THE HON. MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE.

In the summer of 1836 I went on the Northern Circuit with Baron Parke. We took Bowness and Storrs, in our way from Appleby to Lancaster; and I visited Wordsworth, and my dear friend Arnold from Storrs. It was my fortune to have to try the great Hornby Castle cause, as it was called; this I did at the end of the circuit, returning from Liverpool to Lancaster for the purpose. Arnold was kind enough to lend me his house (Foxhow) for the vacation; and when the circuit ended, my wife and children accompanied me to it, and we remained there six weeks. During that time Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth were our only neighbours, and we scarcely saw any one besides; but we needed no other addition to the lovely and loveable country in which we were. He was extremely kind, both in telling us where to go, and very often going with us. He was engaged in correcting the press for a new edition of his poems. The London post, I think, went out at 2 P.M., and then, he would say, he was at our service. A walk with him in that country was a real treat: I never met with a man who seemed to know a country and the people so well, or to love them better, nor one who had such exquisite taste for rural scenery: he had evidently cultivated it with great care; he not only admired the beauties, but he could tell you what were the peculiar features in each scene, or what the incidents to which it owed its peculiar charm. He combined, beyond any man with whom I ever met, the unsophisticated poetic delight in the beauties of nature with a somewhat artistic skill in developing the sources and conditions of them. In examining the parts of a landscape he would be minute; and he dealt with shrubs, flower-beds, and lawns with the readiness of a practiced landscape-gardener. His own little grounds afforded a beautiful specimen of his skill in this latter respect; and it was curious to see how he had imparted the same faculty in some measure to his gardener--James Dixon, I think, was his name. I found them together one morning in the little lawn by the Mount. 'James and I,' said he, 'are in a puzzle here. The grass here has spots which offend the eye; and I told him we must cover them with soap-lees. "That," he says, "will make the green there darker than the rest." "Then," I said, "we must cover the whole." He objected: "That will not do with reference to the little lawn to which you pass from this." "Cover that," I said. To which he replies, "You will have an unpleasant contrast with the foliage surrounding it."'

Beside this warm feeling and exquisite taste, which made him so delightful a guide, his favourite spots had a human interest engrafted on them,--some tradition, some incident, some connection with his own poetry, or himself, or some dear friend. These he brought out in a striking way. Apart from these, he was well pleased to discourse on poetry or poets; and here appeared to me to be his principal scholarship. He was extremely well read in English poetry; and he would in his walk review a poem or a poet with admirable precision and fairness. He did not intrude his own poetry or himself, but he did not decline to talk about either; and he spoke of both simply, unboastingly, and yet with a manly consciousness of their worth. It was clear he thought he had achieved a high place among poets: it had been the aim of his life, humanly speaking; and he had taken worthy pains to accomplish and prepare himself for the enterprise. He never would sacrifice anything he thought right on reflection, merely to secure present popularity, or avert criticism which he thought unfounded; but he was a severe critic on himself, and would not leave a line or an expression with which he was dissatisfied until he had brought it to what he liked. He thought this due to the gift of poetry and the character of the poet. Carelessness in the finish of composition he seemed to look on almost as an offence. I remember well, that after speaking with love and delight of a very popular volume of poetry, he yet found great fault with the want of correctness and finish. Reciting one of the poems, and pointing out inaccuracies in it, he said, 'I like the volume so much, that, if I was the author, I think I should never rest till I had nearly rewritten it.' No doubt he carried this in his own case to excess, when he corrected so largely, in the decline of life, poems written in early manhood, under a state of feelings and powers which it was impossible to reproduce, and yet which was necessary, generally speaking, for successful alteration. I cannot but agree with many who think that on this account the earlier copies of his poems are more valuable than the later.

1836. _September_. Wednesday 21.--Wordsworth and I started in my carriage for Lowther, crossed Kirkstone to Paterdale, by Ulleswater, going through the Glenridding Walks,[236] and calling at Hallsteads. We reached the castle time enough before dinner for him to give me a walk.

[236] I remember well, asking him if we were not trespassing on private pleasure-grounds here. He said, no; the walks had, indeed, been inclosed, but he remembered them open to the public, and he always went through them when he chose. At Lowther, we found among the visitors, the late Lord W----; and describing our walk, _he_ made the same observation, that we had been trespassing; but Wordsworth maintained his point with somewhat more warmth than I either liked, or could well account for. But afterwards, when we were alone, he told me he had purposely answered Lord W---- stoutly and warmly, because he had done a similar thing with regard to some grounds in the neighbourhood of Penrith, and excluded the people of Penrith from walking where they had always enjoyed the right before. He had evidently a pleasure in vindicating these rights, and seemed to think it a duty. J.T.C.

After luncheon, on Thursday 22d, we had an open carriage, and proceeded to Haweswater. It is a fine lake, entirely unspoilt by bad taste. On one side the bank rises high and steep, and is well clothed with wood; on the other it is bare and more sloping. Wordsworth conveyed a personal interest in it to me, by telling me that it was the first lake which my uncle[237] had seen on his coming into this country: he was in company with Wordsworth and his brother John. Wordsworth pointed out to me somewhere about the spot on the hill-side, a little out of the track, from which they first saw the lake; and said, he well remembered how his face brightened, and how much delight he appeared to feel. Yesterday morning we returned to this place. We called on our way and took our luncheon at Hallsteads, and also called at Paterdale Hall. At both it was gratifying to see the cordial manner of W.'s reception: he seemed loved and honoured; and his manner was of easy, hearty, kindness to them.

[237] See _Memoirs_, vol. i. pp. 147-8.

My tour with him was very agreeable, and I wish I could preserve in my memory more of his conversation than I shall be able to do. I was anxious to get from him anecdotes of himself and my uncle, and of their works. He told me of himself, that his first verses were a Popian copy written at school on the 'Pleasure of Change;' then he wrote another on the 'Second Centenary of the School's Foundation;' that he had written these verses on the holidays, and on the return to school; that he was rather the poet of the school. The first verses from which he remembered to have received great pleasure, were Miss Carter's 'Poem on Spring,' a poem in the six-line stanza, which he was particularly fond of, and had composed much in, for example, 'Ruth.' He said there was some foundation in fact, however slight, for every poem he had written of a narrative kind; so slight indeed, sometimes, as hardly to deserve the name; for example, 'The Somnambulist' was wholly built on the fact of a girl at Lyulph's Tower being a sleep-walker; and 'The Water Lily,' on a ship bearing that name. 'Michael' was founded on the son of an old couple having become dissolute and run away from his parents; and on an old shepherd having been seven years in building up a sheepfold in a solitary valley: 'The Brothers,' on a young shepherd, in his sleep, having fallen down a crag, his staff remaining suspended midway. Many incidents he seemed to have drawn from the narration of Mrs. Wordsworth, or his sister, 'Ellen' for example, in 'The Excursion;' and they must have told their stories well, for he said his principle had been to give the oral part as nearly as he could in the very words of the speakers, where he narrated a real story, dropping, of course, all vulgarisms or provincialisms, and borrowing sometimes a Bible turn of expression: these former were mere accidents, not essential to the truth in representing how the human heart and passions worked; and to give these last faithfully was his object. If he was to have any name hereafter, his hope was on this, and he did think he had in some instances succeeded;[238] that the sale of his poems increased among the classes below the middle; and he had had, constantly, statements made to him of the effect produced in reading 'Michael' and other such of his poems. I added my testimony of being unable to read it aloud without interruption from my own feelings. 'She was a phantom of delight' he said was written on 'his dear wife,' of whom he spoke in the sweetest manner; a manner full of the warmest love and admiration, yet with delicacy and reserve. He very much and repeatedly regretted that my uncle had written so little verse; he thought him so eminently qualified, by his very nice ear, his great skill in metre, and his wonderful power and happiness of expression. He attributed, in part, his writing so little, to the extreme care and labour which he applied in elaborating his metres. He said, that when he was intent on a new experiment in metre, the time and labour he bestowed were inconceivable; that he was quite an epicure in sound. Latterly he thought he had so much acquired the habit of analysing his feelings, and making them matter for a theory or argument, that he had rather dimmed his delight in the beauties of nature and injured his poetical powers. He said he had no idea how 'Christabelle' was to have been finished, and he did not think my uncle had ever conceived, in his own mind, any definite plan for it; that the poem had been composed while they were in habits of daily intercourse, and almost in his presence, and when there was the most unreserved intercourse between them as to all their literary projects and productions, and he had never heard from him any plan for finishing it. Not that he doubted my uncle's _sincerity_ in his subsequent assertions to the contrary; because, he said, schemes of this sort passed rapidly and vividly through his mind, and so impressed him, that he often fancied he had arranged things, which really and upon trial proved to be mere embryos. I omitted to ask him, what seems obvious enough now, whether, in conversing about it, he had never asked my uncle how it would end. The answer would have settled the question. He regretted that the story had not been made to end the same night in which it begun. There was difficulty and danger in bringing such a personage as the witch to the daylight, and the breakfast-table; and unless the poem was to have been long enough to give time for creating a second interest, there was a great probability of the conclusion being flat after such a commencement.

[238] You could not walk with him a mile without seeing what a loving interest he took in the play and working of simple natures. As you ascend Kirkstone from Paterdale, you have a bright stream leaping down from rock to rock, on your right, with here and there silent pools. One of Wordsworth's poor neighbours worked all the week over Kirkstone, I think in some mines; and returning on Saturday evenings, used to fish up this little stream. We met him with a string of small trout. W. offered to buy them, and bid him take them to the Mount. 'Nay,' said the man, 'I cannot sell them, Sir; the little children at home look for them for supper, and I can't disappoint them.' It was quite pleasant to see how the man's answer delighted the Poet. J.T.C.

* * * * *

A great number of my uncle's sonnets, he said, were written from the 'Cat and Salutation,' or a public-house with some such name, in Smithfield, where my uncle imprisoned himself for some time; and they appeared in a newspaper, I think he said the _Morning Chronicle_.

He remembered his writing a great part of the translation of 'Wallenstein,' and he said there was nothing more astonishing than the ease and rapidity with which it was done.

_Sept. 29th, Foxhow_.--We are just setting out, in a promising day, for a second trip to Keswick, intending, if possible, to penetrate into Wastdale, over the Sty Head. Before I go, I wish to commemorate a walk with the Poet, on a drizzly muddy day, the turf sponging out water at every step, through which he stalked as regardless as if he were of iron, and with the same fearless, unchanged pace over rough and smooth, slippery and sound. We went up by the old road[239] from Ambleside to Keswick, and struck off from the table-land on the left, over the fell ground, till he brought me out on a crag, bounded, as it were, by two ascents, and showing me in front, as in a frame, Grasmere Lake, 'the one green island,' the church, village, &c., and the surrounding mountains. It is a lovely scene, strikingly described in his verses beginning,

'When to the attractions of the busy world, Preferring studious leisure,' &c.[240]

_Oct. 7th_.--Yesterday Wordsworth drove me to Low-wovel; and then we ascended a great way towards Kirkstone by Troutbeck, passing by many interesting cots, barns, and farm-houses, where W. had constantly something to point out in the architecture, or the fringes of moss, fern, &c., on the roofs or walls. We crossed the valley, and descended on Troutbeck Church, whence we came down to the turnpike road, and I left the Poet, who was going on to assist Sir T. Pasley in laying out his grounds. I turned homeward, till I met my horse.

* * * * *

[239] This old road was very steep, after the fashion of former days, crossing the hill straight over its highest point. A new cut had been made, somewhat diminishing the steepness, but still leaving it a very inconvenient and difficult ascent. At length another alteration was made, and the road was carried on a level round the foot of the hill. My friend Arnold pointed these out to me, and, quizzing my politics, said, the first denoted the old Tory corruption, the second bit by bit, the third Radical Reform. J.T.C.

[240] See Poems on the naming of Places.

As we walked, I was admiring the never-ceasing sound of water, so remarkable in this country. 'I was walking,' he said, 'on the mountains, with ----, the Eastern traveller; it was after rain, and the torrents were full. I said, "I hope you like your companions--these bounding, joyous, foaming streams." "No," said the traveller, pompously, "I think they are not to be compared in delightful effect with the silent solitude of the Arabian Desert." My mountain blood was up. I quickly observed that he had boots and a stout great-coat on, and said, "I am sorry you don't like this; perhaps I can show you what will please you more." I strode away, and led him from crag to crag, hill to vale, and vale to hill, for about six hours; till I thought I should have had to bring him home, he was so tired.'

* * * * *

_October 10th_.--I have passed a great many hours to-day with Wordsworth, in his house. I stumbled on him with proof sheets before him. He read me nearly all the sweet stanzas written in his copy of the 'Castle of Indolence,'[241] describing himself and my uncle; and he and Mrs. W. both assured me the description of the latter at that time was perfectly accurate; that he was almost as a great boy in feelings, and had all the tricks and fancies there described. Mrs. W. seemed to look back on him, and those times, with the fondest affection. Then he read me some lines, which formed part of a suppressed portion of 'The Waggoner;' but which he is now printing 'on the Rock of Names,' so called because on it they had carved out their initials:

W.W. Wm. Wordsworth. M.H. Mary W. D.W. Dorothy Wordsworth. S.T.C. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. J.W. John Wordsworth. S.H. Sarah Hutchinson.

[241] Poems founded on the Affections.

This rock was about a mile beyond Wythburn Chapel, to which they used to accompany my uncle, in going to Keswick from Grasmere, and where they would meet him when he returned. This led him to read much of 'The Waggoner' to me. It seems a very favourite poem of his, and he read me splendid descriptions from it. He said his object in it had not been understood. It was a play of the fancy on a domestic incident and lowly character: he wished by the opening descriptive lines to put his reader into the state of mind in which he wished it to be read. If he failed in doing that, he wished him to lay it down. He pointed out, with the same view, the glowing lines on the state of exultation in which Ben and his companions are under the influence of liquor. Then he read the sickening languor of the morning walk, contrasted with the glorious uprising of Nature, and the songs of the birds. Here he has added about six most exquisite lines.

We walked out on the turf terrace, on the Loughrigg side of Rydal Water. Most exquisitely did the lake and opposite bank look. Thence he led me home under Loughrigg, through lovely spots I had never seen before. His conversation was on critical subjects, arising out of his attempts to alter his poems. He said he considered 'The White Doe' as, in conception, the highest work he had ever produced. The mere physical action was all unsuccessful; but the true action of the poem was spiritual--the subduing of the will, and all inferior passions, to the perfect purifying and spiritualising of the intellectual nature; while the Doe, by connection with Emily, is raised as it were from its mere animal nature into something mysterious and saint-like. He said he should devote much labour to perfecting the execution of it in the mere business parts, in which, from anxiety 'to get on' with the more important parts, he was sensible that imperfections had crept in, which gave the style a feebleness of character.

He talked of Milton, and observed how he sometimes indulged himself, in the 'Paradise Lost,' in lines which, if not in time, you could hardly call verse, instancing,

'And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old;'

and then noticed the sweet-flowing lines which followed, and with regard to which he had no doubt the unmusical line before had been inserted.

'Paradise Regained' he thought the most perfect in _execution_ of anything written by Milton; that and the 'Merchant of Venice,' in language, he thought were almost faultless: with the exception of some little straining in some of the speeches about the caskets, he said, they were perfect, the genuine English expressions of the ideas of their own great minds. Thomson he spoke of as a real poet, though it appeared less in his 'Seasons' than in his other poems. He had wanted some judicious adviser to correct his taste; but every person he had to deal with only served to injure it. He had, however, a true love and feeling for Nature, and a greater share of poetical imagination, as distinguished from dramatic, than any man between Milton and him. As he stood looking at Ambleside, seen across the valley, embosomed in wood, and separated from us at sufficient distance, he quoted from Thomson's 'Hymn on Solitude,' and suggested the addition, or rather insertion, of a line at the close, where he speaks of glancing at London from Norwood. The line, he said, should have given something of a more favourable impression:

'Ambition---- [242] and pleasure vain.'

_October 14th, Foxhow_.--We have had a delightful day to-day. The weather being fine, Wordsworth agreed to go with us into Easedale; so we got three ponies, for Mary and Madge, and Fred and Alley, alternately, and walked from Grasmere, he _trudging_[243] before, with his green gauze shade over his eyes, and in his plaid jacket and waistcoat. First, he turned aside at a little farm-house, and took us into a swelling field, to look down on the tumbling stream which bounded it, and which we saw precipitated at a distance, in a broad white sheet, from the mountain. A beautiful water-break of the same stream was before us at our feet, and he noticed the connection which it formed in the landscape with the distant waterfall. Then, as he mused for an instant, he said, 'I have often thought what a solemn thing it would be, if we could have brought to our mind, at once, all the scenes of distress and misery, which any spot, however beautiful and calm before us, has been witness to since the beginning. That water-break, with the glassy, quiet pool beneath it, that looks so lovely, and presents no images to the mind but of peace,--there, I remember, the only son of his father, a poor man, who lived yonder, was drowned. He missed him, came to search, and saw his body dead in the pool.' We pursued our way up the stream, not a very easy way for the horses, near to the waterfall before mentioned, and so gradually up to the Tarn. Oh, what a scene! The day one of the softest and brightest in autumn; the lights various; the mountains in the richest colouring, fern covering them with reddish gold in great part; here and there, trees in every variety of autumn foliage; and the rock itself of a kind of lilac tint; the outlines of the mountains very fine; the Tarn, which might almost be called a lake for size and abundance of water, with no culture, or trees, or habitation around it, here and there a great rock stretching into it like a promontory, and high mountains surrounding it on three sides, on two of them almost precipitate; on the fourth side, it is more open, and on this the stream, crossed by four great stepping-stones, runs out of it, and descends into Grasmere vale and lake. He pointed out the precipitous mountain at the head of the Tarn, and told us an incident of his sister and himself coming from Langdale, which lies on the other side. He having for some reason parted, she encountered a fog, and was bewildered. At last, she sat down and waited; in a short time it began to clear; she could see that a valley was before her. In time, she saw the backs of cattle feeding, which emerged from the darkness, and at last the Tarn; and then found she had stopped providentially, and was sitting nearly on the edge of the precipice. Our return was somewhat more perilous for the riders than the ascent; but we accomplished it safely, and, in our return, turned in Butterlip How, a circular, soft, green hill, surrounded with oak trees, at the head of Grasmere. It is about twenty acres, and belongs to a London banker, purchased, as I suppose, with a view to building on it. It is a lovely spot for a house, with delicious views of the lake and church, Easedale, Helm Crag, &c. I have seen no place, I think, on which I should so much like to build my retreat.

[242] I cannot fill the blank. J.T.C.

[243] I used the word _trudging_ at the time; it denoted to me his bold way of walking. J.T.C.

_October 16th_.--Since church, we have taken our last walk with Wordsworth. M. was mounted on Dora W.'s pony. He led us up on Loughrigg, round to the Tarn, by the back of Loughrigg to the foot of Grasmere Lake, and so home by this side of Rydal; the weather warm and fine, and a lovely walk it was. The views of the mountains, Langdale Way, the Tarn itself and its banks, and the views on Grasmere and Rydal Waters, are almost beyond anything I have seen, even in this country.

He and Mrs. W. came this evening to bid us farewell. We parted with great, I believe mutual, regret; certainly they have been kind to us in a way and degree which seemed unequivocally to testify good liking to us, and them it is impossible not to love. The more I have seen of Wordsworth, the more I admire him as a poet and as a man. He has the finest and most discriminating feeling for the beauties of Nature that I ever witnessed; he expresses himself in glowing and yet manly language about them. There is much simplicity in his character, much _naÔvetÈ_, but it is all generous and highly moral.[244]

[244] _Memoirs_, ii. 300-15.

* * * * *

(_c_) RECOLLECTIONS OF TOUR IN ITALY, BY H.C. ROBINSON.

Oct. 18. 1850.

MY DEAR SIR,

I feel quite ashamed, I assure you, of sending you the Itinerary of my journey with Mr. Wordsworth, so poorly accompanied as it must be, and the more, because Mr. Wordsworth seems to have thought that I might be able to make a contribution to your work worth your acceptance. At the same time, I am much relieved by recollecting that he himself cared nothing for the connection which a place might have with a great poet, unless an acquaintance with it served to illustrate his works. He made this remark in the Church of St. Onofrio at Rome, where Tasso lies buried. The place which, on this account, interested him more than any other on the journey was _Vaucluse_, while he cared nothing for Arezzo, which claims to be the place of Petrarch's birth. Indeed, a priest on the spot, on another visit, said it is not certain that he was born there, much less in the house marked with his name. Mr. W. was not without the _esprit de corps_, even before his official dignity, and took great interest in Savona, on account of Chiabrera, as appears in the 'Musings near Aquapendente,' perhaps the most beautiful of these Memorials of the Italian tour--'alas too few!' As he himself repeatedly said of the journey, 'It is too late.' 'I have matter for volumes,' he said once, 'had I but youth to work it up.' It is remarkable how in this admirable poem meditation predominates over observation. It often happened that objects of universal attraction served chiefly to bring back to his mind absent objects dear to him. When we were on that noble spot, the Amphitheatre at Nismes, I observed his eyes fixed in a direction where there was the least to be seen; and, looking that way, I beheld two very young children at play with flowers; and I overheard him say to himself, 'Oh! you darlings, I wish I could put you in my pocket and carry you to Rydal Mount.'

It was Mr. Theed, the sculptor, who informed us of the pine tree being the gift of Sir George Beaumont. This incident occurred within a few minutes after our walking up the Pincian Hill. And this was the very first observation Mr. W. made at Rome.

It was a remark justly made on the Memorials of the Swiss Journey in 1820, that Mr. W. left unnoticed the great objects which have given rise to innumerable common-place verses and huge piles of bad prose, and which every body talks about, while he dwelt on impressions peculiar to himself. As a reproach, nothing can be more idle and unmeaning. I expected it would be so with these latter poems, and so I found it. There are not more than two others which bring anything to my mind.

The most important of these is the 'Cuckoo at Laverna.' I recollect perfectly well that I heard the cuckoo at Laverna twice before he heard it; and that it absolutely fretted him that my ear was first favoured; and that he exclaimed with delight, 'I hear it! I hear it!' It was at Laverna, too, that he led me to expect that he had found a subject on which he would write; and that was the love which birds bore to St. Francis. He repeated to me a short time afterwards a few lines, which I do not recollect among those he has written on St. Francis in this poem. On the journey, one night only I heard him in bed composing verses, and on the following day I offered to be his amanuensis; but I was not patient enough, I fear, and he did not employ me a second time. He made inquiries for St. Francis's biography, as if he would dub him his Leib-heiliger (body-saint), as Goethe (saying that every one must have one) declared St. Philip Neri to be his.

The painter monk at Camaldoli also interested him, but he heard my account only in addition to a _very poor_ exhibition of professional talent; but he would not allow the pictures to be so very poor, as every nun ought to be beautiful when she takes the veil.

I recollect, too, the pleasure he expressed when I said to him, 'You are now sitting in Dante's chair.' It faces the south transept of the cathedral at Florence.

I have been often asked whether Mr. W. wrote anything on the journey, and my answer has always been, 'Little or nothing.' Seeds were cast into the earth, and they took root slowly. This reminds me that I once was privy to the conception of a sonnet, with a distinctness which did not once occur on the longer Italian journey. This was when I accompanied him into the Isle of Man. We had been drinking tea with Mr. and Mrs. Cookson, and left them when the weather was dull. Very soon after leaving them we passed the church tower of Bala Sala. The upper part of the tower had a sort of frieze of yellow lichens. Mr. W. pointed it out to me, and said, 'It's a perpetual sunshine.' I thought no more of it, till I read the beautiful sonnet,

'Broken in fortune, but in mind entire;'[245]

and then I exclaimed, I was present at the conception of this sonnet, at least of the combination of thought out of which it arose.

I beg to subscribe myself, with sincere esteem,

Faithfully yours, H.C. ROBINSON.[246]

[245] See _Memoirs_, ii. 246.

[246] _Ibid._ ii. 329-32.

* * * * *

(_d_) REMINISCENCES OF WORDSWORTH.

BY LADY RICHARDSON, AND MRS. DAVY, OF THE OAKS, AMBLESIDE.

(1.) LADY RICHARDSON.

Lancrigg, Easedale, August 26. 1841.

Wordsworth made some striking remarks on Goethe in a walk on the terrace yesterday. He thinks that the German poet is greatly overrated, both in this country and his own. He said, 'He does not seem to me to be a great poet in either of the classes of poets. At the head of the first class I would place Homer and Shakspeare, whose universal minds are able to reach every variety of thought and feeling without bringing their own individuality before the reader. They infuse, they breathe life into every object they approach, but you never find _themselves_. At the head of the second class, those whom you can trace individually in all they write, I would place Spenser and Milton. In all that Spenser writes you can trace the gentle affectionate spirit of the man; in all that Milton writes you find the exalted sustained being that he was. Now in what Goethe writes, who aims to be of the first class, the _universal_, you find the man himself, the artificial man, where he should not be found; so consider him a very artificial writer, aiming to be universal, and yet constantly exposing his individuality, which his character was not of a kind to dignify. He had not sufficiently clear moral perceptions to make him anything but an artificial writer.

Tuesday, the 2d of May, Wordsworth and Miss F. came early to walk about and dine. He was in a very happy kindly mood. We took a walk on the terrace, and he went as usual to his favourite points. On our return he was struck with the berries on the holly tree, and said, 'Why should not you and I go and pull some berries from the other side of the tree, which is not seen from the window? and then we can go and plant them in the rocky ground behind the house.' We pulled the berries, and set forth with our tool. I made the holes, and the Poet put in the berries. He was as earnest and eager about it, as if it had been a matter of importance; and as he put the seeds in, he every now and then muttered, in his low solemn tone, that beautiful verse from Burns's 'Vision:'

'And wear thou this, she solemn said, And bound the holly round my head. The polished leaves and berries red Did rustling play; And like a passing thought she fled In light away.'

He clambered to the highest rocks in the 'Tom Intake,' and put in the berries in such situations as Nature sometimes does with such true and beautiful effect. He said, 'I like to do this for posterity. Some people are selfish enough to say, What has posterity done for me? but the past does much for us.'

(II.) ADDITIONAL SENT TO THE PRESENT EDITOR BY LADY RICHARDSON.

_August 28th_, 1841.--Mr. Wordsworth, Miss Fenwick, and Mrs. Hill came to dine, and it rained on the whole day, but happily the Poet talked on from two to eight without being weary, as we certainly were not. After dinner, when we came to the drawing-room, the conversation turned on the treatment of Wordsworth by the reviews of the day. I had never heard him open out on it before, and was much struck with the manner in which he did it; from his present elevation looking calmly back on the past, and at the same time feeling that an irreparable injury had been done to him at the time when life and hope were young. As nearly as I can I shall record his words as they were spoken. He said:

'At the time I resolved to dedicate myself to poetry and separate myself from the ordinary lucrative professions, it would certainly have been a great object to me to have reaped the profits I should have done from my writings but for the stupidity of Mr. Gifford and the impertinence of Mr. Jeffrey. It would have enabled me to purchase many books which I could not obtain, and I should have gone to Italy earlier, which I never could afford to do until I was sixty-five, when Moxon gave me a thousand pounds for my writings. This was the only kind of injury Mr. Jeffrey did me, for I immediately perceived that his mind was of that kind that his individual opinion on poetry was of no consequence to me whatever, that it was only by the influence his periodical exercised at the time in preventing my poems being read and sold that he could injure me; for feeling that my writings were founded on what was true and spiritual in human nature, I knew the time would come when they must be known, and I never therefore felt his opinion of the slightest value, except in preventing the young of that generation from receiving impressions which might have been of use to them through life. I say this, I hope not in a boasting spirit, but I am now daily surprised by receiving letters from various places at home and abroad expressive of gratitude to me from persons I never saw or heard of. As this occurs now, I may fairly conclude that it might have been so when the poems appeared, but for the tyranny exercised over public opinion by the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly Reviews_.'

_December_ 1841.--Wordsworth and Miss Fenwick spent the shortest day of the year with us; he brought with him his Epitaph on Southey, and as we sat round the fire after dinner, my mother asked him to read it to us, which he did in his usual impressive manner. He asked our impression of it. My mother ventured to tell him of one word, or rather two, which she thought might be altered with advantage. They were these:

'Wide was his range, but ne'er in human breast Did private feeling find a holier nest.'

'Holier nest' were the words she objected to, as not being a correct union of ideas. He took the suggestion most kindly, and said it had been much discussed in his own mind and in his family circle, but that he saw the force of what she said, and that he was aware many others would see it also. He said there was yet time to change it, and that he should consult Judge Coleridge whether the line, as he once had it,

'Did private feeling meet in holier rest,'

would not be more appropriate to the simplicity of an epitaph where you con every word, and where every word is expected to bear an exact meaning. We all thought this was an improvement. During tea he talked with great animation of the separation of feeling between the rich and poor in this country; the reason of this he thinks is the greater freedom we enjoy; that the line of demarcation not being so clearly laid down in this country by the law as in others, people fancy they must make it for themselves. He considers Christianity the only cure for this state of things. He spoke of his own desire to carry out the feeling of brotherhood with regard to servants, which he all along endeavoured to do. He doubted whether he might not have had better servants on a different system; but he thought it right to endeavour to inspire your domestics with a feeling of common interest. My mother said she entirely agreed with him, but she had always found it most difficult.

(III.) LADY RICHARDSON (CONTINUED).

_November_ 1843.--Wordsworth holds the critical power very low, infinitely lower than the inventive; and he said to-day that if the quantity of time considered in writing critiques on the works of others were given to original composition, of whatever kind it might be, it would be much better employed; it would make a man find out sooner his own level, and it would do infinitely less mischief. A false or malicious criticism may do much injury to the minds of others; a stupid invention, either in prose or verse, is quite harmless.

_December_ 22_d_, 1843.--The shortest day is past, and it was a very pleasant one to us, for Wordsworth and Miss Fenwick offered to spend it with us. They came early, and, although it was misty and dingy, he proposed to walk up Easedale. We went by the terrace, and through the little gate on the Fell, round by Brimmer Head, having diverged a little up from Easedale, nearly as far as the ruined cottage. He said, when he and his sister wandered there so much, that cottage was inhabited by a man of the name of Benson, a waller, its last inhabitant. He said on the terrace, 'This is a striking anniversary to me; for this day forty-four years ago, my sister and I took up our abode at Grasmere, and three days after we found out this walk, which long remained our favourite haunt.' There is always something very touching in his way of speaking of his sister; the tones of his voice become more gentle and solemn, and he ceases to have that flow of expression which is so remarkable in him on all other subjects. It is as if the sadness connected with her present condition was too much for him to dwell upon in connection with the past, although habit and the 'omnipotence of circumstance' have made its daily presence less oppressive to his spirits. He said that his sister spoke constantly of their early days, but more of the years they spent together in other parts of England than those at Grasmere. As we proceeded on our walk he happened to speak of the frequent unhappiness of married persons, and the low and wretched principles on which the greater number of marriages were formed. He said that unless there was a strong foundation of love and respect, the 'unavoidable breaks and cataracts' of domestic life must soon end in mutual aversion, for that married life ought not to be in theory, and assuredly it never was in practice, a system of mere submission on either side, but it should be a system of mutual cooperation for the good of each. If the wife is always expected to conceal her difference of opinion from her husband, she ceases to be an equal, and the man loses the advantage which the marriage tie is intended to provide for him in a civilised and Christian country. He then went on to say, that, although he never saw an amiable single woman without wishing that she were married, from his strong feeling of the happiness of a well-assorted marriage, yet he was far from thinking that marriage always improved people. It certainly did not, unless it was a congenial marriage.[247]

(IV.) Mrs. DAVY.

'The Oaks, Ambleside, Monday, Jan. 22. 1844.

While Mrs. Quillinan was sitting with us to-day, Henry Fletcher ran in to say that he had reserved his summons for Oxford (he had been in suspense about rooms as an exhibitioner at Balliol), and must be off within an hour. His young cousins and I went down with him to wait for the mail in the marketplace. We found Mr. Wordsworth walking about before the post-office door in very charming mood. His spirits were excited by the bright morning sunshine, and he entered at once on a full flow of discourse. He looked very benevolently on Henry as he mounted on the top of the coach, and seemed quite disposed to give an old man's blessing to the young man entering on an untried field, and then (nowise interrupted by the hurrying to and fro of ostlers with their smoking horses, or passengers with their carpet bags) he launched into a dissertation, in which there was, I thought, a remarkable union of his powerful diction, and his practical, thoughtful good sense, on the subject of college habits, and of his utter distrust of all attempts to nurse virtue by an avoidance of temptation. He expressed also his entire want of confidence (from experience he said) of highly-wrought religious expression in youth. The safest training for the mind in religion he considered to be a contemplating of the character and personal history of Christ. 'Work it,' he said, 'into your thoughts, into your imagination, make it a real presence in the mind.' I was rejoiced to hear this plain, loving confession of a Christian faith from Wordsworth. I never heard one more earnest, more as if it came out of a devoutly believing heart.

[247] The close of Lady Richardson's 'Reminiscences' here in the _Memoirs_ is not given, as being more fully introduced under December 1841, p. 438. The repetition of the same sentiments in 1843, however, is noticeable. For a vivid and sweetly toned paper on Wordsworth by Lady Richardson--based on the _Memoirs_--see _Sharpe's London Magazine_ for March 1853, pp. 148-55. G.

The Oaks, March 5. 1844.

On our way to Lancrigg to-day, we called at Foxhow. We met Mr. Wordsworth there, and asked him to go with us. It was a beautiful day, one of his very own 'mild days' of this month. He kindly consented, and walked with us to meet the carriage at Pelter Bridge. On our drive, he mentioned, with marked pleasure, a dedication written by Mr. Keble, and sent to him for his approval, and for his permission to have it prefixed to Mr. Keble's new volumes of Latin Lectures on Poetry delivered at Oxford. Mr. Wordsworth said that he had never seen any estimate of his poetical powers, or more especially of his aims in poetry, that appeared to him so discriminating and so satisfactory. He considers praise a perilous and a difficult thing. On this subject he often quotes his lamented friend, Sir George Beaumont, whom, in his intercourse with men of genius, literary aspirants, he describes as admirable in the modesty which he inculcated and practised on this head.

The Oaks, Ambleside, July 11. 1844.

Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth at dinner, along with our family party. Mr. and Mrs. Price (from Rugby), two aunts of Mrs. P.'s, and her brother, Mr. Rose, a young clergyman (a devout admirer of Wordsworth), joined us at tea. A circle was made as large as our little parlour could hold. Mr. Price sat next to Mr. Wordsworth, and by design or fortunate accident, introduced some remark on the powers and the discourse of Coleridge. Mr. Wordsworth entered heartily and largely on the subject. He said that the liveliest and truest image he could give of Coleridge's talk was 'that of a majestic river, the sound or sight of whose course you caught at intervals, which was sometimes concealed by forests, sometimes lost in sand, then came flashing out broad and distinct, then again took a turn which your eye could not follow, yet you knew and felt that it was the same river: so,' he said, 'there was always a train, a stream, in Coleridge's discourse, always a connection between its parts in his own mind, though one not always perceptible to the minds of others.' Mr. Wordsworth went on to say, that in his opinion Coleridge had been spoilt as a poet by going to Germany. The bent of his mind, which was at all times very much to metaphysical theology, had there been fixed in that direction. 'If it had not been so,' said Wordsworth, 'he would have been the greatest, the most abiding poet of his age. His very faults would have made him popular (meaning his sententiousness and laboured strain), while he had enough of the essentials of a poet to make him deservedly popular in a higher sense.'

* * * * *

Mr. Price soon after mentioned a statement of Coleridge's respecting himself, recorded in his 'Table Talk,' namely, that a visit to the battle-field of Marathon would raise in him no kindling emotion, and asked Mr. Wordsworth whether this was true as a token of his mind. At first Mr. Wordsworth said, 'Oh! that was a mere bravado, for the sake of astonishing his hearers!' but then, correcting himself, he added, 'And yet it might in some sense be true, for Coleridge was not under the influence of external objects. He had extraordinary powers of summoning up an image or series of images in his own mind, and he might mean that his idea of Marathon was so vivid, that no visible observation could make it more so.' 'A remarkable instance of this,' added Mr. Wordsworth, 'is his poem, said to be "composed in the Vale of Chamouni." Now he never was at Chamouni, or near it, in his life.' Mr. Wordsworth next gave a somewhat humorous account of the rise and progress of the 'Ancient Mariner.' 'It arose,' he said, 'out of the want of five pounds which Coleridge and I needed to make a tour together in Devonshire. We agreed to write jointly a poem, the subject of which Coleridge took from a dream which a friend of his had once dreamt concerning a person suffering under a dire curse from the commission of some crime.' 'I,' said Wordsworth, 'supplied the crime, the shooting of the albatross, from an incident I had met with in one of Shelvocke's voyages. We tried the poem conjointly for a day or two, but we pulled different ways, and only a few lines of it are mine.' From Coleridge, the discourse then turned to Scotland. Mr. Wordsworth, in his best manner, with earnest thoughts given out in noble diction, gave his reasons for thinking that as a poet Scott would not live. 'I don't like,' he said, 'to say all this, or to take to pieces some of the best reputed passages of Scott's verse, especially in presence of my wife, because she thinks me too fastidious; but as a poet Scott _cannot_ live, for he has never in verse written anything addressed to the immortal part of man. In making amusing stories in verse, he will be superseded by some newer versifier; what he writes in the way of natural description is merely rhyming nonsense.' As a prose writer, Mr. Wordsworth admitted that Scott had touched a higher vein, because there he had really dealt with feeling and passion. As historical novels, professing to give the manners of a past time, he did not attach much value to those works of Scott's so called, because that he held to be an attempt in which success was impossible. This led to some remarks on historical writing, from which it appeared that Mr. Wordsworth has small value for anything but contemporary history. He laments that Dr. Arnold should have spent so much of his time and powers in gathering up and putting into imaginary shape the scattered fragments of the history of Rome.[248]

These scraps of Wordsworth's large, thoughtful, earnest discourse, seem very meagre as I note them down, and in themselves perhaps hardly worth preserving and yet this is an evening which those who spent it in his company will long remember. His venerable head; his simple, natural, and graceful attitude in his arm-chair; his respectful attention to the slightest remarks or suggestions of others in relation to what was spoken of; his kindly benevolence of expression as he looked round now and then on the circle in our little parlour, all bent to 'devour up his discourse,' filled up and enlarged the meaning which I fear is but ill conveyed in the words as they are now set down.

(V.) LADY RICHARDSON: WORDSWORTH'S BIRTH-DAY.

On Tuesday, April the 7th, 1844, my mother[249] and I left Lancrigg to begin our Yorkshire journey. We arrived at Rydal Mount about three o'clock, and found the tables all tastefully decorated on the esplanade in front of the house. The Poet was standing looking at them with a very pleased expression of face; he received us very kindly, and very soon the children began to arrive. The Grasmere boys and girls came first, and took their places on the benches placed round the gravelled part of the esplanade; their eyes fixed with wonder and admiration on the tables covered with oranges, gingerbread, and painted eggs, ornamented with daffodils, laurels, and moss, gracefully intermixed. The plot soon began to thicken, and the scene soon became very animated. Neighbours, old and young, of all degrees, ascended to the Mount to keep the Poet's seventy-fourth birthday, and every face looked friendly and happy. Each child brought its own mug, and held it out to be filled with tea, in which ceremony all assisted. Large baskets of currant cakes were handed round and liberally dispensed; and as each detachment of children had satisfied themselves with tea and cake, they were moved off, to play at hide and seek among the evergreens on the grassy part of the Mount. The day was not bright, but it was soft, and not cold, and the scene, viewed from the upper windows of the house, was quite beautiful, and one I should have been very sorry not to have witnessed. It was innocent and gay, and perfectly natural. Miss F----, the donor of the fÍte, looked very happy, and so did all the Poet's household. The children, who amounted altogether to above 300, gave three cheers to Mr. Wordsworth and Miss F----. After some singing and dancing, and after the division of eggs, gingerbread, and oranges had taken place, we all began to disperse. We spent the night at the Oaks, and set off on our journey the following morning. The gay scene at the Mount often comes before me, as a pleasant dream. It is perhaps the only part of the island where such a reunion of all classes could have taken place without any connection of landlord and tenant, or any clerical relation, or school direction. Wordsworth, while looking at the gambols on the Mount, expressed his conviction that if such meetings could oftener take place between people of different condition, a much more friendly feeling would be created than now exists in this country between the rich and poor.

[248] But see _Memorials of Italy_, 'Sonnets on Roman Historians.'

[249] Mrs. Fletcher.

* * * * *

_July 12th,_ 1844.--Wordsworth spoke much during the evening of his early intercourse with Coleridge, on some one observing that it was difficult to carry away a distinct impression from Coleridge's conversation, delightful as every one felt his outpourings to be. Wordsworth agreed, but said he was occasionally very happy in clothing an idea in words; and he mentioned one which was recorded in his sister's journal during a tour they all made together in Scotland. They passed a steam engine, and Wordsworth made some observation to the effect that it was scarcely possible to divest oneself of the impression on seeing it that it had life and volition. 'Yes,' replied Coleridge, 'it is a giant with one idea.'

* * * * *

He discoursed at great length on Scott's works. His poetry he considered of that kind which will always he in demand, and that the supply will always meet it, suited to the age. He does not consider that it in any way goes below the surface of things; it does not reach to any intellectual or spiritual emotion; it is altogether superficial, and he felt it himself to be so. His descriptions are not true to Nature; they are addressed to the ear, not to the mind. He was a master of bodily movements in his battle-scenes; but very little productive power was exerted in popular creations.

DUDDON EXCURSION

On Friday, the 6th September 1844, I set off to breakfast at Rydal Mount, it being the day fixed by Mr. Wordsworth for our long-projected excursion to the Valley of the Duddon.

* * * * *

The rain fell in torrents, and it became doubtful whether we should set off or not; but as it was a thunder-shower, we waited till it was over, and then Wordsworth, Mr. Quillinan, Miss Hutchinson, and I, set forth in our carriage to Coniston, where we were to find the Rydal Mount carriage awaiting us with Mr. Hutchinson. Wordsworth talked very agreeably on the way to Coniston, and repeated several verses of his own, which he seemed pleased that Serjeant Talfourd had repeated to him the day before. He mentioned a singular instance of T. Campbell's inaccuracy of memory in having actually printed as his own a poem of Wordsworth's, 'The Complaint:' he repeated it beautifully as we were going up the hill to Coniston. On reaching the inn in the village of Coniston, the rain again fell in torrents. At length, the carriages were ordered to the door with the intention of our returning home; but just as they were ready the sun broke out, and we turned the horse's head towards Ulpha Kirk. The right bank of Coniston was all new to me after we passed the village, and Old Man of Coniston. The scenery ceases to be bold and rugged, but is very pleasing, the road passing through hazel copses, the openings showing nice little cornfields and comfortable detached farms, with old uncropped trees standing near them; some very fine specimens of old ash trees, which I longed to transport to Easedale, where they have been so cruelly lopped. The opening towards the sea, as we went on, was very pleasing; but the first striking view of the Duddon was looking down upon it soon after we passed Broughton, where you turn to the right, and very soon after perceive the peculiar beauty of the valley, although it does not take its wild and dreamlike beauty till you pass Ulpha Kirk. We reversed the order of the sonnets, and saw the river first, 'in radiant progress tow'rd the deep,' instead of tracing this 'child of the clouds' from its cradle in the lofty waste. We reached the Kirk of Ulpha between five and six. The appearance of the little farm-house inn at once made anything approaching to a dinner an impossibility had we wished it ever so much; but in due time we had tea and boiled ham, with two eggs apiece, and were much invigorated by this our first Duddonian meal. The hostess was evidently surprised that we thought of remaining all night, so humbly did she think of the accommodation she had to offer. She remembered Mr. Wordsworth sleeping there fifteen years ago, because it was just after the birth of her daughter, a nice comely girl who attended us at tea. Mr. Quillinan showed great good nature and unselfishness in the arrangements he made, and the care he took of the admirable horse, which I saw him feeding out of a tub, a manger being too great a refinement for Ulpha.

* * * * *

After tea, although it was getting dark, we went to the churchyard, which commands a beautiful view towards Seathwaite, and we then walked in that direction, through a lane where the walls were more richly covered by moss and fern than any I ever saw before. A beautiful dark-coloured tributary to the Duddon comes down from the moors on the left hand, about a mile from Ulpha; and soon after we had passed the small bridge over this stream, Mr. Wordsworth recollected a well which he had discovered some thirty or forty years before. We went off the road in search of it, through a shadowy, embowered path; and as it was almost dark we should probably have failed in finding it, had we not met a very tiny boy, with a can of water in his hand, who looked at us in speechless amazement, when the Poet said, 'Is there a well here, my little lad?' We found the well, and then joined the road again by another path, leaving the child to ponder whether we were creatures of earth or air.

* * * * *

Saturday morning was cloudy but soft, and lovely in its hazy effects. When I went out about seven, I saw Wordsworth going a few steps, and then moving on, and stopping again, in a very abstracted manner; so I kept back. But when he saw me, he advanced, and took me again to the churchyard to see the morning effects, which were very lovely. He said he had not slept well, that the recollection of former days and people had crowded upon him, and, 'most of all, my dear sister; and when I thought of her state, and of those who had passed away, Coleridge, and Southey, and many others, while I am left with all my many infirmities, if not sins, in full consciousness, how could I sleep? and then I took to the alteration of sonnets, and that made the matter worse still.' Then suddenly stopping before a little bunch of harebell, which, along with some parsley fern, grew out of the wall near us, he exclaimed, 'How perfectly beautiful that is!

"Would that the little flowers that grow could live, Conscious of half the pleasure that they give."'

He then expatiated on the inexhaustible beauty of the arrangements of Nature, its power of combining in the most secret recesses, and that it must be for some purpose of beneficence that such operations existed. After breakfast, we got into the cart of the inn, which had a seat swung into it, upon which a bolster was put, in honour, I presume, of the Poet Laureate. In this we jogged on to Seathwaite, getting out to ascend a craggy eminence on the right, which Mrs. Wordsworth admired: the view from it is very striking. You see from it all the peculiarities of the vale, the ravine where the Duddon 'deserts the haunts of men,' 'the spots of stationary sunshine,' and the homesteads which are scattered here and there, both on the heights and in the lower ground near protecting rocks and craggy steeps. Seathwaite I had a perfect recollection of; and the way we approached it twenty years ago, from Coniston over Walna Scar, is the way Mr. Wordsworth still recommends as the most beautiful. We went on some distance beyond the chapel, and every new turning and opening among the hills allured us on, till at last the Poet was obliged to exercise the word of command, that we should proceed no further. The return is always a flat thing, so I shall not detail it, except that we reached our respective homes in good time; and I hope I shall never cease to think with gratitude and pleasure of the kindness of my honoured guide through the lovely scenes he has rescued from obscurity, although it happily still remains an unvitiated region, 'which stands in no need of the veil of twilight to soften or disguise its features: as it glistens in the morning's sun it fills the spectator's heart with gladsomeness.'

_November 21_.--My mother and I called at Rydal last Saturday, to see the Wordsworths after their autumnal excursion. We found him only at home, looking in great vigour and much the better for this little change of scene and circumstance. He spoke with much interest of a communication he had had from a benevolent surgeon at Manchester, an admirer of his, who thinks that a great proportion of the blindness in this country might be prevented by attention to the diseases of the eye in childhood. He spoke of two very interesting blind ladies he had seen at Leamington, one of whom had been at Rydal Mount a short time before her 'total eclipse,' and now derived the greatest comfort from the recollection of these beautiful scenes, almost the last she looked on. He spoke of his own pleasure in returning to them, and of the effect of the first view from 'Orrest Head,' the point mentioned in his 'unfortunate[250] sonnet, which has,' he said, 'you are aware, exposed me to the most unlooked for accusations. They actually accuse me of desiring to interfere with the innocent enjoyments of the poor, by preventing this district becoming accessible to them by a railway. Now I deny that it is to that class that this kind of scenery is either the most improving or the most attractive. For the very poor the great God of Nature has mercifully spread out His Bible everywhere; the common sunshine, green fields, the blue sky, the shining river, are everywhere to be met with in this country; and it is only an individual here and there among the uneducated classes who feels very deeply the poetry of lakes and mountains; and such persons would rather wander about where they like, than rush through the country in a railway. It is not, therefore, the poor, as a class, that would benefit morally or mentally by a railway conveyance; while to the educated classes, to whom such scenes as these give enjoyment of the purest kind, the effect would be almost entirely destroyed.'

[250] See the Sonnet and Letters on the Furness Railway (vol. ii. p. 321). G.

_Wednesday, 20th Nov_.--A most remarkable halo was seen round the moon soon after five o'clock to-day; the colours of the rainbow were most brilliant, and the circle was entire for about five minutes.

Thursday, Mr. Wordsworth dined here with the Balls, Davys, and Mr. Jefferies. Mr. W. spoke with much delight of the moon the day before, and said his servant, whom he called 'dear James,' called his attention to it.

* * * * *

_Wednesday, Dec. 18th_.--The Wordsworths and Quillinans sat two hours with us. He said he thought [Dr. Arnold] was mistaken in the philosophy of his view of the danger of Milton's Satan being represented without horns and hoofs; that Milton's conception was as true as it was grand; that making sin ugly was a common-place notion compared with making it beautiful outwardly, and inwardly a hell. It assumed every form of ambition and worldliness, the form in which sin attacks the highest natures.

* * * * *

This day, Sunday, the 9th of February, the snow is again falling fast, but very gently. Yesterday, the 8th, was a beautiful day. We had a very pleasant visit of above an hour from Wordsworth and his wife. He was in excellent spirits, and repeated with a solemn beauty, quite peculiar to himself, a sonnet he had lately composed on 'Young England;' and his indignant burst 'Where then is _old_, our dear old England?' was one of the finest bursts of Nature and Art combined I have ever heard. My dear mother's face, too, while he was repeating it, was a fine addition to the picture; and I could not help feeling they were both noble specimens of 'dear old England.' Mrs. Wordsworth, too, is a goodly type of another class of old England, more thoroughly English perhaps than either of the others, but they made an admirable trio; and Mrs. Wordsworth's face expressed more admiration of her husband in his bardic mood than I ever saw before. He discussed mesmerism very agreeably, stating strongly his detestation of clairvoyance; not only on the presumption of its being altogether false, but supposing it, for argument sake, to be true, then he thinks it would be an engine of enormous evil, putting it in the power of any malicious person to blast the character of another, and shaking to the very foundations the belief in individual responsibility. He is not disposed to reject without examination the assertions with regard to the curative powers of mesmerism. He spoke to-day with pleasure of having heard that Mr. Lockhart had been struck by his lines from a MSS. poem, printed in his Railway-Sonnet pamphlet.

* * * * *

_February 24th_.--Snow still on the ground. It has never been quite clear of snow since the 27th January. Partial thaws have allowed us to peep out into the world of Ambleside and Rydal; and last Saturday we drank tea at Foxhow, and met the Wordsworths and Miss F----. He is very happy to have his friend home again, and was in a very agreeable mood. He repeated his sonnet on the 'Pennsylvanians,' and again that on 'Young England,' which I admire so much.

* * * * *

_March 6th_.--Wordsworth, whom we met yesterday at dinner at the Oaks, expressed his dislike to monuments in churches; partly from the absurdity and falsehood of the epitaphs which sometimes belonged to them, and partly from their injuring the architectural beauties of the edifice, as they grievously did in Westminster Abbey and many other cathedrals. He made an exception in favour of those old knightly monuments, which he admitted added to the solemnity of the scene, and were in keeping with the buildings; and he added, 'I must also except another monument which once made a deep impression on my mind. It was in a small church near St. Alban's; and I once left London in the afternoon, so as to sleep at St. Alban's the first night, and have a few hours of evening light to visit this church. It was before the invention of railways, and I determined that I would always do the same; but, the year after, railways existed, and I have never been able to carry out my project again: all wandering is now over. Well, I went to this small country church; and just opposite the door at which you enter, the figure of the great Lord Bacon, in pure white, was the first thing that presented itself. I went there to see his tomb, but I did not expect to see himself; and it impressed me deeply. There he was, a man whose fame extends over the whole civilised world, sitting calmly, age after age, in white robes of pure alabaster, in this small country church, seldom visited except by some stray traveller, he having desired to be interred in this spot, to lie near his mother.'

On referring to Mallet's Life of Bacon, I see he mentions that he was privately buried at St. Michael's church, near St. Alban's; and it adds, 'The spot that contains his remains lay obscure and undistinguished, till the gratitude of a private man, formerly his servant' (Sir Thomas Meautys), 'erected a monument to his name and memory.' This makes it probable that the likeness is a correct one.

_November 8th_, 1845.--On our way to take an early dinner at Foxhow yesterday, we met the Poet at the foot of his own hill, and he engaged us to go to tea to the Mount on our way home to hear their adventures, he and his Mary having just returned from a six weeks' wander among their friends. During their absence we always feel that the road between Grasmere and Ambleside is wanting in something, beautiful as it is. We reached the Mount before six, and found dear Mrs. Wordsworth much restored by her tour. She has enjoyed the visit to her kith and kin in Herefordshire extremely, and we had a nice comfortable chat round the fire and the tea-table. After tea, in speaking of the misfortune it was when a young man did not seem more inclined to one profession than another, Wordsworth said that he had always some feeling of indulgence for men at that age who felt such a difficulty. He had himself passed through it, and had incurred the strictures of his friends and relations on this subject. He said that after he had finished his college course, he was in great doubt as to what his future employment should be. He did not feel himself good enough for the Church, he felt that his mind was not properly disciplined for that holy office, and that the struggle between his conscience and his impulses would have made life a torture. He also shrank from the law, although Southey often told him that he was well fitted for the higher parts of the profession. He had studied military history with great interest, and the strategy of war; and he always fancied that he had talents for command; and he at one time thought of a military life, but then he was without connections, and he felt if he were ordered to the West Indies his talents would not save him from the yellow fever, and he gave that up. At this time he had only a hundred a year. Upon this he lived, and travelled, and married, for it was not until the late Lord Lonsdale came into possession that the money which was due to them was restored. He mentioned this to show how difficult it often was to judge of what was passing in a young man's mind, but he thought that for the generality of men, it was much better that they should be early led to the exercise of a profession of their own choice.

_December_ 1846.--Henry Fletcher and I dined at the Mount on the 21st of this month. The party consisted of Mr. Crabb Robinson (their Christmas guest), Mrs. Arnold, Miss Martineau, and ourselves. My mother's cold was too bad to allow her to go, which I regretted, as it was, like all their little meetings, most sociable and agreeable. Wordsworth was much pleased with a little notice of his new edition in the _Examiner_; he thought it very well done. He expressed himself very sweetly at dinner on the pleasant terms of neighbourly kindness we enjoyed in the valleys. It will be pleasant in after times to remember his words, and still more his manner when he said this, it was done with such perfect simplicity and equality of feeling, without the slightest reference to self, and I am sure without thinking of himself at the time as more than one of the little circle whose friendly feeling he was commending.

* * * * *

_October_ 1846.--Wordsworth dined with us one day last week, and was in much greater vigour than I have seen him all this summer.

* * * * *

He mentioned incidentally that the spelling of our language was very much fixed in the time of Charles the Second, and that the attempts which had been made since, and are being made in the present day, were not likely to succeed. He entered his protest as usual against [Carlyle's] style, and said that since Johnson no writer had done so much to vitiate the English language. He considers Lord Chesterfield the last good English writer before Johnson. Then came the Scotch historians, who did infinite mischief to style, with the exception of Smollett, who wrote good pure English. He quite agreed to the saying that all great poets wrote good prose; he said there was not one exception. He does not think Burns's prose equal to his verse, but this he attributes to his writing his letters in English words, while in his verse he was not trammelled in this way, but let his numbers have their own way.

_Lancrigg, November_.--Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth took an early dinner with us on the 26th of this month. He was very vigorous, and spoke of his majority at Glasgow, also of his reception at Oxford. He told us of an application he had just had from a Glasgow publisher that he should write a sonnet in praise of Fergusson and Allan Ramsay, to prefix to a new edition of those Poets which was about to appear. He intended to reply, that Burns's lines to Fergusson would be a much more appropriate tribute than anything he could write; and he went on to say that Burns owed much to Fergusson, and that he had taken the plan of many of his poems from Fergusson, and the measure also. He did not think this at all detracted from the merit of Burns, for he considered it a much higher effort of genius to excel in degree, than to strike out what may be called an original poem. He spoke highly of the purity of language of the Scotch poets of an earlier period, Gavin Douglass and others, and said that they greatly excelled the English poets, after Chaucer, which he attributed to the distractions of England during the wars of York and Lancaster.

_December 25th_, 1846.--My mother and I called at Rydal Mount yesterday early, to wish our dear friends the blessings of the season. Mrs. W. met us at the door most kindly, and we found him before his good fire in the dining-room, with a flock of robins feasting at the window. He had an old tattered book in his hand; and as soon as he had given us a cordial greeting, he said, in a most animated manner, 'I must read to you what Mary and I have this moment finished. It is a passage in the Life of Thomas Elwood.' He then read to us the following extract:

'Some little time before I went to Alesbury prison, I was desired by my quondam master, Milton, to take an house for him in the neighbourhood where I dwell, that he might get out of the city, for the safety of himself and his family, the pestilence then growing hot in London. I took a pretty box for him in Giles-Chalford, a mile from me, of which I gave him notice; and intended to have waited on him, and seen him well settled in it, but was prevented by that imprisonment.

'But now being released, and returned home, I soon made a visit to him, to welcome him into the country.

'After some common discourses had passed between us, he called for a manuscript of his, which being brought, he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with me and read it at my leisure; and when I had so done, return it to him with my judgment thereupon.

'When I came home, and had set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he entituled 'Paradise Lost.' After I had with the best attention read it through, I made him another visit, and returned him his book with due acknowledgment of the favour he had done me in communicating it to me. He asked me how I liked it, and what I thought of it, which I modestly, but freely told him; and after some further discourse about it, I pleasantly said to him, "Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?" He made me no answer, but sate some time in a muse; then brake off that discourse, and fell upon another subject. After the sickness was over, and the city well cleansed and become safely habitable again, he returned thither; and when afterwards I went to wait on him there (which I seldom failed of doing whenever my occasions drew me to London), he showed me his second poem, called "Paradise Regained;" and in a pleasant tone said to me, "This is owing to you, for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalford, which before I had not thought of." _But from this digression I return to the family I then lived in.'_

Wordsworth was highly diverted with the _apology_ of the worthy Quaker, for _the digression_, which has alone saved him from oblivion. He offered to send us the old book, which came a few days after; and I shall add another digression in favour of John Milton, to whom he appears to have been introduced about the year 1661, by a Dr. Paget. It is thus notified _apropos_ to Thomas Elwood feeling a desire for more learning than he possessed, which having expressed to Isaac Pennington, with whom he himself lived as tutor to his children, he says, 'Isaac Pennington had an intimate acquaintance with Dr. Paget, a physician of note in London, and he with John Milton, a gentleman of great note for learning throughout the learned world, for the accurate pieces he had written on various subjects and occasions. This person having filled a public station in the former times, lived now a private and retired life in London, and, having wholly lost his sight, kept always a man to read to him, which usually was the son of some gentleman of his acquaintance, whom in kindness he took to improve in his learning.

'He received me courteously, as well for the sake of Dr. Paget, who introduced me, as of Isaac Pennington who recommended me, to both whom he bore a good respect; and having inquired divers things of me, with respect to my former progression in learning, he dismissed me to provide myself of such accommodations as might be most suitable to my future studies.

'I went, therefore, and took myself a lodging as near to his house, which was then in Jewin-street, as conveniently I could, and from thenceforward went every day in the afternoon (except on the first days of the week), and sitting by him in his dining-room, read to him in such books in the Latin tongue as he pleased to hear me read.'

(VI.) MRS. DAVY (CONTINUED).

The Oaks, Ambleside, Jan. 15. 1845.

We dined to-day at Rydal Mount. Mr. Wordsworth, during dinner, grave and silent, till, on some remark having been made on the present condition of the Church, he most unreservedly gave his own views; and gave expression, as I have only once heard him give before, to his own earnest, devout, humble feelings as a Christian. In the evening, being led by some previous conversation to speak of St. Paul, he said, 'Oh, what a character that is! how well we know him! How human, yet how noble! How little outward sufferings moved him! It is not in speaking of these that he calls himself wretched; it is when he speaks of the inward conflict. Paul and David,' he said, 'may be called the two Shakspearian characters in the Bible; both types, as it were, of human nature in its strength and its weakness. Moses is grand, but then it is chiefly from position, from the office he had entrusted to him. We do not know Moses as a man, as a brother man.'

_April_ 7, 1846.--I went to the Mount to-day, to pay my respects to Mr. Wordsworth on his birthday. I found him and dear Mrs. Wordsworth very happy, in the arrival of their four grandsons. The two elder are to go to Rossall next week. Some talk concerning schools led Mr. Wordsworth into a discourse, which, in relation to himself, I thought very interesting, on the dangers of emulation, as used in the way of help to school progress. Mr. Wordsworth thinks that envy is too likely to go along with this, and therefore would hold it to be unsafe. 'In my own case,' he said, 'I never felt emulation with another man but once, and that was accompanied by envy. It is a horrid feeling.' This 'once' was in the study of Italian, which, he continued, 'I entered on at college along with ----' (I forget the name he mentioned). 'I never engaged in the proper studies of the university, so that in these I had no temptation to envy any one; but I remember with pain that I _had_ envious feelings when my fellow-student in Italian got before me. I was his superior in many departments of mind, but he was the better Italian scholar, and I envied him. The annoyance this gave me made me feel that emulation was dangerous for _me_, and it made me very thankful that as a boy I never experienced it. I felt very early the force of the words, "Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect," and as a teacher, or friend, or counsellor of youth, I would hold forth no other motive to exertion than this. There is, I think, none other held forth in the gospels. No permission is given to emulation there.... There must always be a danger of incurring the passion of vanity by emulation. If we try to outstrip a fellow-creature, and succeed, we may naturally enough be proud. The true lesson of humility is to strive after conformity to that excellence which we never can surpass, never even by a great distance attain to.' There was, in the whole manner as well as matter of Mr. Wordsworth's discourse on this subject, a deep veneration for the will of God concerning us, which I shall long remember with interest and delight--I hope with profit. 'Oh! one other time,' he added, smiling, 'one other time in my life I felt envy. It was when my brother was nearly certain of success in a foot race with me. I tripped up his heels. This _must_ have been envy.'

* * * * *

Lesketh How, Jan. 11. 1847.

In a morning visit by our fireside to-day from Mr. Wordsworth, something led to the mention of Milton, whose poetry, he said, was earlier a favourite with him than that of Shakspeare. Speaking of Milton's not allowing his daughters to learn the meaning of the Greek they read to him, or at least not exerting himself to teach it to them, he admitted that this seemed to betoken a low estimate of the condition and purposes of the female mind. 'And yet, where could he have picked up such notions,' said Mr. W., 'in a country which had seen so many women of learning and talent? But his opinion of what women ought to be, it may be presumed, is given in the unfallen Eve, as contrasted with the right condition of man before his Maker:

"He for God only, she for God in him."

Now that,' said Mr. Wordsworth, earnestly, '_is_ a low, a very low and a very false estimate of woman's condition.' He was amused on my showing him the (almost) contemporary notice of Milton by Wycherly, and, after reading it, spoke a good deal of the obscurity of men of genius in or near their own times. 'But the most singular thing,' he continued, 'is, that in all the writings of Bacon there is not one allusion to Shakspeare.'

Lasketh How, Jan. 10. 1849.

A long fireside visit from Mr. Wordsworth this morning, in highly sociable spirits; speaking much of old days and old acquaintances. He spoke with much regret of Scott's careless views about money, and said that he had often spoken to him of the duty of economy, as a means to insure literary independence. Scott's reply always was, 'Oh, I can make as much as I please by writing.' 'This,' said Mr. W., 'was marvellous to me, who had never written a line with a view to profit.' Speaking of his own prose writing, he said, that but for Coleridge's irregularity of purpose he should probably have left much more in that kind behind him. When Coleridge was proposing to publish his 'Friend,' he (Mr. Wordsworth) offered contributions. Coleridge expressed himself pleased with the offer, but said, 'I must arrange my principles for the work, and when that is done I shall be glad of your aid.' But this 'arrangement of principles' never took place. Mr. Wordsworth added, 'I think my nephew, Dr. _Conversations and Personal Reminiscences_.

Wordsworth,[251] will, after my death, collect and publish all I have written in prose.'

On this day, as I have heard him more than once before, Mr. Wordsworth, in a way very earnest, and to me very impressive and remarkable, disclaimed all value for, all concern about, posthumous fame.[252]

_(e)_ CONVERSATIONS AND REMINISCENCES RECORDED BY THE (NOW) BISHOP OF LINCOLN, &c.

Remember, first read the ancient classical authors; _then_ come to _us_; and you will be able to judge for yourself which of us is worth reading.

The first book of Homer appears to be independent of the rest. The plan of the _Odyssey_ is more methodical than that of the _Iliad_. The character of Achilles seems to me one of the grandest ever conceived. There is something awful in it, particularly in the circumstance of his acting under an abiding foresight of his own death. One day, conversing with Payne Knight and Uvedale Price concerning Homer, I expressed my admiration of Nestor's speech, as eminently natural, where he tells the Greek leaders that _they_ are mere children in comparison with the heroes of _old_ whom _he_ had known[253]. 'But,' said Knight and Price, 'that passage is spurious.' However, I will not part with it. It is interesting to compare the same characters (Ajax, for instance) as treated by Homer, and then afterwards by the Greek dramatists, and to mark the difference of handling. In the plays of Euripides, politics come in as a disturbing force: Homer's characters act on physical impulse. There is more _introversion_ in the dramatist: whence Aristotle rightly calls him _tsagichhÙtatos_. The tower-scene, where Helen comes into the presence of Priam and the old Trojans, displays one of the most beautiful pictures anywhere to be seen. Priam's speech[254] on that occasion is a striking proof of the courtesy and delicacy of the Homeric age, or, at least, of Homer himself.

[251] On another occasion, I believe, he intimated a desire that his works in Prose should be edited by his son-in-law, Mr. Quillinan. (_Memoirs,_ ii. 466.)

[252] _Memoirs,_ ii. 437-66.

[253] _Iliad_, i. 260.

[254] _Ibid._ iii. 156.

Catullus translated literally from the Greek; succeeding Roman writers did not so, because Greek had then become the fashionable, universal language. They did not translate, but they paraphrased; the ideas remaining the same, their dress different. Hence the attention of the poets of the Augustan age was principally confined to the happy selection of the most appropriate words and elaborate phrases; and hence arises the difficulty of translating them.

The characteristics ascribed by Horace to Pindar in his ode, 'Pindarum quisquis,' &c. are not found in his extant writings. Horace had many lyrical effusions of the Theban bard which we have not. How graceful is Horace's modesty in his 'Ego _apis_ Matinae More modoque,' as contrasted with the Dircaean Swan! Horace is my great favourite: I love him dearly.

I admire Virgil's high moral tone: for instance, that sublime 'Aude, hospes, contemnere opes,' &c. and 'his dantem jura Catonem!' What courage and independence of spirit is there! There is nothing more imaginative and awful than the passage,

'----Arcades ipsum Credunt se vidisse Jovem,' &c.[255]

In describing the weight of sorrow and fear on Dido's mind, Virgil shows great knowledge of human nature, especially in that exquisite touch of feeling[256],

'Hoc visum nulli, _non ipsi effata sorori.'_

The ministry of Confession is provided to satisfy the natural desire for some relief from the load of grief. Here, as in so many other respects, the Church of Rome adapts herself with consummate skill to our nature, and is strong by our weaknesses. Almost all her errors and corruptions are abuses of what is good.

I think Buchanan's 'Maiae Calendae' equal in sentiment, if not in elegance, to anything in Horace; but your brother Charles, to whom I repeated it the other day, pointed out a false quantity in it[257]. Happily this had escaped me.

[255] _Aen_. viii. 352.

[256] _Ibid._ iv. 455.

[257] If I remember right, it is in the third line,

'Ludisque dicatae, jocisque;'

a strange blunder, for Buchanan must have read Horace's,

'Quid dedicatum poscit Apolliuem,'

a hundred times.

When I began to give myself up to the profession of a poet for life, I was impressed with a conviction, that there were four English poets whom I must have continually before me as examples--Chaucer, Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton. These I must study, and equal _if I could_; and I need not think of the rest[258].

[258] This paragraph was communicated by Mr. H.C. Robinson.

I have been charged by some with disparaging Pope and Dryden. This is not so. I have committed much of both to memory. As far as Pope goes, he succeeds; but his Homer is not Homer, but Pope.

I cannot account for Shakspeare's low estimate of his own writings, except from the sublimity, the superhumanity, of his genius. They were infinitely below his conception of what they might have been, and ought to have been.

The mind often does not think, when it thinks that it is thinking. If we were to give our whole soul to anything, as the bee does to the flower, I conceive there would be little difficulty in any intellectual employment. Hence there is no excuse for obscurity in writing.

'Macbeth,' is the best conducted of Shakspeare's plays. The fault of 'Julius Caesar,' 'Hamlet,' and 'Lear,' is, that the interest is not, and by the nature of the case could not be, sustained to their conclusion. The death of Julius Caesar is too _overwhelming_ an incident for _any_ stage of the drama but the _last_. It is an incident to which the mind clings, and from which it will not be torn away to share in other sorrows. The same may be said of the madness of Lear. Again, the opening of 'Hamlet' is full of exhausting interest. There is more mind in 'Hamlet' than in any other play, more knowledge of human nature. The first act is incomparable.... There is too much of an every-day sick room in the death-bed scene of Catherine, in 'Henry the Eighth'--too much of leeches and apothecaries' vials.... 'Zanga' is a bad imitation of 'Othello.' Garrick never ventured on Othello: he could not submit to a blacked face. He rehearsed the part once. During the rehearsal Quin entered, and, having listened for some time with attention, exclaimed, 'Well done, David! but where's the teakettle?' alluding to the print of Hogarth, where a black boy follows his mistress with a teakettle in his hand.... In stature Garrick was short.... A fact which conveys a high notion of his powers is, that he was able to _act out_ the absurd stage-costume of those days. He represented Coriolanus in the attire of Cheapside. I remember hearing from Sir G. Beaumont, that while he was venting, as Lear, the violent paroxysms of his rage in the awful tempest scene, his wig happened to fall off. The accident did not produce the slightest effect on the gravity of the house, so strongly had he impregnated every breast with his own emotions.

Some of my friends (H.C. for instance) doubt whether poetry on contemporary persons and events can be good. But I instance Spenser's 'Marriage,' and Milton's 'Lycidas.' True, the 'Persae' is one of the worst of Aeschylus's plays; at least, in my opinion.

Milton is falsely represented by some as a democrat. He was an aristocrat in the truest sense of the word. See the quotation from him in my 'Convention of Cintra.'[259] Indeed, he spoke in very proud and contemptuous terms, of the populace. 'Comus' is rich in beautiful and sweet flowers, and in exuberant leaves of genius; but the ripe and mellow fruit is in 'Samson Agonistes.' When he wrote that, his mind was Hebraized. Indeed, his genius fed on the writings of the Hebrew prophets. This arose, in some degree, from the temper of the times; the Puritan lived in the Old Testament, almost to the exclusion of the New.

The works of the old English dramatists are the gardens of our language.

One of the noblest things in Milton is the description of that sweet, quiet morning in the 'Paradise Regained,' after that terrible night of howling wind and storm. The contrast is divine.[260]

[259] Page 174 (vol. i.), where Milton speaks of the evils suffered by a nation,' unless men more than vulgar, bred up in the knowledge of ancient and illustrious deeds, conduct its affairs.'

[260] _Paradise Regained_, iv. 431.

What a virulent democrat ---- is! A man ill at ease with his own conscience is sure to quarrel with all government, order, and law.

The influence of Locke's Essay was not due to its own merits, which are considerable; but to external circumstances. It came forth at a happy opportunity, and coincided with the prevalent opinions of the time. The Jesuit doctrines concerning the papal power in deposing kings, and absolving subjects from their allegiance, had driven some Protestant theologians to take refuge in the theory of the divine right of kings. This theory was unpalatable to the world at large, and others invented the more popular doctrine of a social contract, in its place; a doctrine which history refutes. But Locke did what he could to accommodate this principle to his own system.

The only basis on which property can rest is right derived from prescription.

The best of Locke's works, as it seems to me, is that in which he attempts the least--his _Conduct of the Understanding_.

In the Summer of 1827, speaking of some of his contemporaries, Wordsworth said, T. Moore has great natural genius; but he is too lavish of brilliant ornament. His poems smell of the perfumer's and milliner's shops. He is not content with a ring and a bracelet, but he must have rings in the ears, rings on the nose--rings everywhere.

Walter Scott is not a careful composer. He allows himself many liberties, which betray a want of respect for his reader. For instance, he is too fond of inversions; _i.e._ he often places the verb before the substantive, and the accusative before the verb. W. Scott quoted, as from me,

'The swan on _sweet_ St. Mary's lake Floats double, swan and shadow,'

instead of _still_; thus obscuring my idea, and betraying his own uncritical principles of composition.

Byron seems to me deficient in _feeling_. Professor Wilson, I think, used to say that 'Beppo' was his best poem; because all his faults were there brought to a height. I never read the 'English Bards' through. His critical prognostications have, for the most part, proved erroneous.

Sir James Mackintosh said of me to M. de StaÎl, Wordsworth is not a great poet, but he is the greatest man among poets.' Madame de StaÎl complained of my style.

Now whatever may be the result of my experiment in the subjects which I have chosen for poetical composition--be they vulgar or be they not,--I can say without vanity, that I have bestowed great pains on my _style_, full as much as any of my contemporaries have done on theirs. I yield to none in _love for my art_. I, therefore, labour at it with reverence, affection, and industry. My main endeavour as to style has been that my poems should be written in pure intelligible English. Lord Byron has spoken severely of my compositions. However faulty they may be, I do not think that I ever could have prevailed upon myself to print such lines as he has done; for instance,

'I stood at Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, A palace and a prison on each hand.'

Some person ought to write a critical review, analysing Lord Byron's language, in order to guard others against imitating him in these respects.

Shelley is one of the best _artists_ of us all: I mean in workmanship of style.

At Calgarth, dining with Mrs. and the Miss Watsons ... a very fine portrait of the late Bishop in the dining-room.... Mr. Wordsworth there: a very agreeable party. Walked home with him in the evening to Rydal. It rained all the way. We met a poor woman in the road. She sobbed as she passed us. Mr. Wordsworth was much affected with her condition: she was swollen with dropsy, and slowly hobbling along with a stick, having been driven from one lodging to another. It was a dark stormy night. Mr. Wordsworth brought her back to the Lowwood Inn, where, by the landlord's leave, she was housed in one of his barns.

One day I met Mr. M.T. Sadler at the late Archbishop's. Sadler did not know me; and before dinner he began to launch forth in a critical dissertation on contemporary English Poetry. 'Among living poets, your Grace may know there is one called Wordsworth, whose writings the world calls childish and puerile, but I think some of them wonderfully pathetic.' 'Now, Mr. Sadler,' said the Archbishop, 'what a scrape you are in! here is Mr. Wordsworth: but go down with him to dinner, and you will find that, though a great poet, he does not belong to the "genus irritabile."' This was very happy.

After returning one day from church at Addington, I took the liberty of saying a few words on the sermon we had heard. It was a very homely performance. 'I am rather surprised, my Lord Archbishop, that when your Grace can have the choice of so many preachers in England, you do not provide better for yourself.' 'Oh!' said he, 'I think I can bear bad preaching better than most people, and I therefore keep it to myself.' This seemed to me a very pleasing trait in the gentle and loveable character of that admirable man.

Patriarchal usages have not quite deserted us of these valleys. This morning (new year's day) you were awakened early by the minstrels playing under the eaves, 'Honour to Mr. Wordsworth!' 'Honour to Mrs. Wordsworth!' and so to each member of the household by name, servants included, each at his own window. These customs bind us together as a family, and are as beneficial as they are delightful. May they never disappear!

In my Ode on the 'Intimations of Immortality in Childhood,' I do not profess to give a literal representation of the state of the affections and of the moral being in childhood. I record my own feelings at that time--my absolute spirituality, my 'all-soulness,' if I may so speak. At that time I could not believe that I should lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust.

Many of my poems have been influenced by my own circumstances when I was writing them. 'The Warning' was composed on horseback, while I was riding from Moresby in a snow-storm. Hence the simile in that poem,

'While thoughts press on and feelings overflow, And quick words round him fall like _flakes of snow_.'

In the 'Ecclesiastical Sonnets,' the lines concerning the Monk (Sonnet xxi.),

'Within his cell. Round the decaying trunk of human pride. At morn, and eve, and midnight's silent hour, Do penitential cogitations cling: Like ivy round some ancient elm they twine In grisly folds and strictures serpentine; Yet while they strangle, a fair growth they bring For recompence--their own perennial bower;'--

were suggested to me by a beautiful tree clad as thus described, which you may remember in Lady Fleming's park at Rydal, near the path to the upper waterfall.

S----, in the work you mentioned to me, confounds _imagery_ and _imagination_. Sensible objects really existing, and felt to exist, are _imagery_; and they may form the materials of a descriptive poem, where objects are delineated as they are. Imagination is a subjective term: it deals with objects not as they are, but as they appear to the mind of the poet.

The imagination is that intellectual lens through the medium of which the poetical observer sees the objects of his observation, modified both in form and colour; or it is that inventive dresser of dramatic _tableaux_, by which the persons of the play are invested with new drapery, or placed in new attitudes; or it is that chemical faculty by which elements of the most different nature and distant origin are blended together into one harmonious and homogeneous whole.

A beautiful instance of the modifying and _investive_ power of imagination may be seen in that noble passage of Dyer's 'Ruins of Rome,'[261] where the poet hears the voice of Time; and in Thomson's description of the streets of Cairo, expecting the arrival of the caravan which had perished in the storm,[262]

Read all Cowley; he is very valuable to a collector of English sound sense.... Burns's 'Scots wha hae' is poor as a lyric composition.

Ariosto and Tasso are very absurdly depressed in order to elevate Dante. Ariosto is not always sincere; Spenser always so.

I have tried to read Goethe. I never could succeed. Mr. ---- refers me to his 'Iphigenia,' but I there recognise none of the dignified simplicity, none of the health and vigour which the heroes and heroines of antiquity possess in the writings of Homer. The lines of Lucretius describing the immolation of Iphigenia are worth the whole of Goethe's long poem. Again, there is a profligacy, an inhuman sensuality, in his works which is utterly revolting. I am not intimately acquainted with them generally. But I take up my ground on the first canto of 'Wilhelm Meister;' and, as the attorney-general of human nature, I there indict him for wantonly outraging the sympathies of humanity. Theologians tell us of the degraded nature of man; and they tell us what is true. Yet man is essentially a moral agent, and there is that immortal and unextinguishable yearning for something pure and spiritual which will plead against these poetical sensualists as long as man remains what he is.

[261] 1. 37:

'The pilgrim oft, At dead of night, 'mid his oraison, hears Aghast the voice of TIME, disparting towers,' &c.

[262] Thomson's 'Summer,' 980:

'In Cairo's crowded streets, The impatient merchant, wondering, waits in vain, And Mecca saddens at the long delay.'

Scientific men are often too fond of aiming to be men of the world. They crave too much for titles, and stars, and ribbons. If Bacon had dwelt only in the court of Nature, and cared less for that of James the First, he would have been a greater man, and a happier one too.

I heard lately from young Mr. Watt a noble instance of magnanimity in an eminent French chemist. He had made a discovery, which he was informed would, if he took out a patent, realise a large fortune. 'No,' said he, 'I do not live to amass money, but to discover Truth; and as long as she attends me in my investigations so long will I serve her and her only.'

Sir ---- I know from my own experience was ruined by prosperity. The age of Leo X. would have shone with greater brilliance if it had had more clouds to struggle with. The age of Louis XIV. was formed by the Port Royal amid the storms and thunders of the League. Racine lived in a court till it became necessary to his existence, as his miserable death proved. Those petty courts of Germany have been injurious to its literature. They who move in them are too prone to imagine themselves to be the whole world, and compared with the whole world they are nothing more than these little specks in the texture of this hearth-rug.

As I was riding Dora's pony from Rydal to Cambridge, I got off, as I occasionally did, to walk. I fell in with a sweet-looking peasant girl of nine or ten years old. She had been to carry her father's dinner, who was working in the fields, and she was wheeling a little wheelbarrow, in which she collected manure from the roads for her garden at home. After some talk I gave her a penny, for which she thanked me in the sweetest way imaginable. I wish I had asked her whether she could read, and whether she went to school. But I could not help being struck with the happy arrangement which Nature has made for the education of the heart, an arrangement which it seems the object of the present age to counteract instead of to cherish and confirm. I imagined the happy delight of the father in seeing his child at a distance, and watching her as she approached to perform her errand of love. I imagined the joy of the mother in seeing her return. I am strongly of opinion (an opinion you, perhaps, have seen expressed by me in a letter to Mr. Rose[263]) that this is the discipline which is more calculated by a thousand degrees to make a virtuous and happy nation than the all-engrossing, estranging, eleemosynary institutions for education, which perhaps communicate more _knowledge_. In these institutions what the pupils gain in _knowledge_ they often lose in _wisdom_. This is a distinction which must never be lost sight of.

[263] See vol. i. pp. 340-8. G.

Education should never be wholly eleemosynary. But must the parent suffer privations for the sake of the child? Yes; for these privations endear the child to the parent, and the parent to the child; and whatever education the parent may thus gain or lose for his child, he has thus gained the noblest result of the most liberal education for himself--the habit of self-denial.

Next to your principles, and affections, and health, value your time.[264]

[264] _Memoirs_, ii. pp. 467-80.

* * * * *

(_f_) REMINISCENCES OF THE REV. R.P. GRAVES, M.A., FORMERLY OF WINDERMERE, NOW OF DUBLIN.

I remember Mr. Wordsworth saying that, at a particular stage of his mental progress, he used to be frequently so rapt into an unreal transcendental world of ideas that the external world seemed no longer to exist in relation to him, and he had to reconvince himself of its existence _by clasping a tree_, or something that happened to be near him. I could not help connecting this fact with that obscure passage in his great Ode on the 'Intimations of Immortality,' in which he speaks of

'Those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things; Fallings from us, vanishings: Blank misgivings of a creature, Moving about in worlds not realised,' &c.

I heard him once make the remark that it would be a good habit to watch closely the first involuntary thoughts upon waking in the morning, as indications of the real current of the moral being.

I was struck by what seemed to me a beautiful analogy, which I once heard him draw, and which was new to me--that the individual characters of mankind showed themselves distinctively in childhood and youth, as those of trees in Spring; that of both, of trees in Summer and of human kind in middle life, they were then alike to a great degree merged in a dull uniformity; and that again, in Autumn and in declining age, there appeared afresh all their original and inherent variety brought out into view with deeper marking of character, with more vivid contrast, and with greater accession of interest and beauty.

He thought the charm of _Robinson Crusoe_ mistakenly ascribed, as it commonly is done, to its _naturalness_. Attaching a full value to the singular yet easily imagined and most picturesque circumstances of the adventurer's position, to the admirable painting of the scenes, and to the knowledge displayed of the working of human feelings, he yet felt sure that the intense interest created by the story arose chiefly from the extraordinary energy and resource of the hero under his difficult circumstances, from their being so far beyond what it was natural to expect, or what would have been exhibited by the average of men; and that similarly the high pleasure derived from his successes and good fortunes arose from the peculiar source of these uncommon merits of his character.

I have heard him pronounce that the Tragedy of _Othello_, Plato's records of the last scenes of the career of Socrates, and Isaac Walton's _Life of George Herbert_, were in his opinion the most pathetic of human compositions.

In a walk one day, after stopping, according to his custom, to claim admiration for some happy aspect of the landscape, or beautiful _composition_ on a smaller scale of natural objects, caught by him at the precisely best point of view in the midst of his conversation on other subjects, he added, good-humouredly, that there were three callings for success in which Nature had furnished him with qualifications--the callings of poet, landscape-gardener, and critic of pictures and works of art. On hearing this I could not but remember how his qualifications for the second were proved by the surprising variety of natural beauties he managed to display to their best advantage, from the very circumscribed limits of the garden at Rydal Mount, 'an invisible hand of art everywhere working' (to use his own exquisite expression) 'in the very spirit of Nature,' and how many there were who have owed the charm of their grounds and gardens to direction sought from his well-known taste and feeling. As to works of art, his criticism was not that of one versed in the history of the schools, but, always proceeding upon first principles, the 'prima philosophia,' as he called it; and it was, as it appeared to me, of the highest order.

He was a very great admirer of _Virgil_, not so much as a creative poet, but as the most consummate master of language, that, perhaps, ever existed. From him, and Horace, who was an especial favourite, and Lucretius, he used to quote much.[265]

[265] _Memoirs_, ii. 467-83.

* * * * *

(_g_) ON THE DEATH OF COLERIDGE.

The death of Coleridge was announced to us by his friend Wordsworth. It was the Sunday evening after the event occurred that my brother and I walked over to the Mount, where we found the Poet alone. One of the first things we heard from him was the death of one who had been, he said, his friend for more than thirty years. He then continued to speak of him; called him the most _wonderful_ man that he had ever known--wonderful for the originality of his mind, and the power he possessed of throwing out in profusion grand central truths from which might be evolved the most comprehensive systems. Wordsworth, as a poet, regretted that German metaphysics had so much captivated the taste of Coleridge, for he was frequently not intelligible on this subject; whereas, if his energy and his originality had been more exerted in the channel of poetry, an instrument of which he had so perfect a mastery, Wordsworth thought he might have done more permanently to enrich the literature, and to influence the thought of the nation, than any man of the age. As it was, however, he said he believed Coleridge's mind to have been a widely fertilising one, and that the seed he had so lavishly sown in his conversational discourses, and the Sibylline leaves (not the poems so called by him) which he had scattered abroad so extensively covered with his annotations, had done much to form the opinions of the highest-educated men of the day; although this might be an influence not likely to meet with adequate recognition. After mentioning, in answer to our inquiries about the circumstances of their friendship, that though a considerable period had elapsed during which they had not seen much of each other, Coleridge and he had been, for more than two years, uninterruptedly, in as close intimacy as man could be with man, he proceeded to read to us the letter from Henry Nelson Coleridge which conveyed the tidings of his great relation's death, and of the manner of it. It appeared that, his death was a relief from intense pain, which, however, subsided at the interval of a few days before the event; and that shortly after this cessation of agony, he fell into a comatose state. The most interesting part of the letter was the statement, that the last use he made of his faculties was to call his children and other relatives and friends around him, to give them his blessing, and to express his hope to them that the manner of his end might manifest the depth of his trust in his Saviour Christ. As I heard this, I was at once deeply glad at the substance, and deeply affected by Wordsworth's emotion in reading it. When he came to this part his voice at first faltered, and then broke; but soon divine faith that the change was a blest one overcame aught of human grief, and he concluded in an equable though subdued tone. Before I quit this subject, I will tell you what I was interested in hearing from a person of the highest abilities,[266] whom I had the good fortune of meeting at Rydal Mount. He said that he had visited Coleridge about a month before his death, and had perceived at once his countenance pervaded by a most remarkable serenity. On being congratulated on his appearance, Coleridge replied that he did now, for the first time, begin to hope, from the mitigation of his pains, that his health was undergoing a permanent improvement (alas! he was deceived; yet may we not consider this hopeful feeling, which is, I believe, by no means uncommon, to be under such circumstances a valuable blessing?); but that what he felt most thankful for was the deep, calm peace of mind which he then enjoyed; a peace such as he had never before experienced, or scarcely hoped for. This, he said, seemed now settled upon him; and all things were thus looked at by him through an atmosphere by which all were _reconciled and harmonised_.[267]

[266] Dr. Whewell. G.

[267] Extract of a letter to a friend, by Rev. R.P. Graves, M.A., formerly of Windermere, now of Dublin: _Memoirs_, pp. 288-90.

(_h_) FURTHER REMINISCENCES OF WORDSWORTH BY THE SAME, SENT TO THE PRESENT EDITOR.

I remember to have been very much struck by what appeared to me the wisdom of a plan suggested by Wordsworth, for the revision of the authorised version of the Bible and of the Book of Common Prayer.

With regard to the former, no one, he said, could be more deeply convinced of the inestimable value of its having been made when it was, and being what it is. In his opinion it was made at the happy juncture when our language had attained adequate expansion and flexibility, and when at the same time its idiomatic strength was unimpaired by excess of technical distinctions and conventional refinements; and these circumstances, though of course infinitely subordinate to the spiritual influence of its subject-matter, he considered to be highly important in connection with a volume which naturally became a universally recognised standard of the language; for thus the fresh well of English undefiled was made a perennial blessing to the nation, in no slight degree conducive to the robust and manly thinking and character of its inhabitants. He was satisfied, too, as to its general and most impartial accuracy, and its faithfulness in rendering not only the words but the style, the strength, and the spirit and the character of the original records. He attached too the value one might suppose he would attach to the desirableness of leaving undisturbed the sacred associations which to the feelings of aged Christians belonged to the _ipsissima verba_ which had been their support under the trials of life.

And so with regard to the Prayer Book, he reverenced and loved it as the Church's precious heritage of primitive piety, equally admirable for its matter and its style. It may be interesting to add, that in reference to this latter point I have heard him pronounce that many of the collects seemed to him examples of perfection, consisting, according to his impression, of words whose signification filled up without excess or defect the simple and symmetrical contour of some majestic meaning, and whose sound was a harmony of accordant simplicity and grandeur; a combination, he added, such as we enjoy in some of the best passages of Shakespeare.

But notwithstanding that he held these opinions, which will evince that he was not one who would lightly touch either sacred volume, he did not think that plain mistakes in the translation of the Bible, or obsolete words, or renderings commonly misunderstood, should be perpetually handed down in our authorised version of the volume of inspiration, or that similar blemishes in the Prayer Book, which, as being of human composition, would admit of freer though still reverential handling, should be permitted to continue as stumbling-blocks interfering with its acceptableness and usefulness.

The plan which he suggested as meeting the difficulties of the case was the following:

That by proper authority a Committee of Revision of the English Bible should be appointed, whose business should be, retaining the present authorised version as a standard to be departed from as little as possible to settle upon such indubitable corrections of meaning and improvements of expression as they agreed ought to be made, and have these printed _in the margin_ of all Bibles published by authority. That, as an essential part of the scheme, this Committee of Revision should be renewed periodically, but not too frequently--he appeared to think that periods of fifty years might serve--at which times it should be competent to the Committee to authorise the transference from the margin into the text of all such alterations as had stood the test of experience and criticism during the previous period, as well as to fix on new marginal readings.

He was of opinion that in the constitution of the Committee care should be taken to appoint not only divines of established reputation for sound theology, and especially for their knowledge in connection with the original languages of the sacred volume, but some one author at least noted for his mastery over the vernacular language.

It will be seen that this plan, while it provides for corrections of errors and substitution of understood for obsolete or mistaken expressions, leaves undisturbed the associations of aged Christians, and prepares the younger generation for receiving the marginal amendments into the text. Wordsworth conceived that fixing the duration of the period of revision was of great consequence, both as obviating all agitation in the way of call for such a process, and as tending in the matter of critical discussions respecting the sanctioning, cancelling, and proposing of amendments to bring them to something of definitiveness in preparation for each era of revision.

The same process, under certain modifications, he thought applicable to the Book of Common Prayer. In this he deprecated all tampering with doctrine, considering that alterations ought to be confined to changes rendering the services more clearly understood or more conveniently used. It is fair to add, however, that I have heard him express a strong desire that the Athanasian Creed were rid of the so-called damnatory clauses; at the same time declaring that no one was ever more profoundly convinced than himself of the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity.

He was in favour of a collection of metrical hymns, more peculiarly Christian in character than the Psalter, being set forth by authority for use in the Church; and for the choice of such hymns he thought a Committee should be appointed in which the knowledge of divine, of poet, and of laymen trusted for common sense and experience in life should be severally and conjointly engaged. As a practical suggestion of moment in the _composition_ of such hymns he advised that composers should not in the four-line stanza do more than make the second and fourth lines rhyme; leaving the other two unrhymed, he said, would give an important addition of freedom both to the sense and the style.

R.P. GRAVES. Windermere, 1850.

To the above memorandum I now (Sept. 1874) add two items, of which I retain a distinct remembrance.

(1) He was in favour of the officiating clergyman being allowed to introduce into his reading of the Lessons in church the authorised marginal corrections.

(2) He expressed in very strong terms his opinion that the prefatory portion of the Marriage Service should be altered so as to make it not only less repulsive to modern feelings, but more accordant with the higher aspects of the union to be solemnised.

_Passion in Poetry_.--One day, speaking of passion as an element of poetry, he referred to his own poems, and said that he thought there was a stronger fire of passion than was elsewhere to be found among them in the lyrical burst near the conclusion of 'The Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle:'

'Armour rusting in his halls, On the blood of Clifford calls: "Quell the Scot," exclaims the Lance-- "Bear me to the heart of France," Is the longing of the Shield.'

_Chronological Classification of Poems_.--Many years ago I expressed to Wordsworth a wish that his poems were printed in the order of their composition, assigning as reasons for the wish the great interest which would attach to observing the progressive development of the poet's thought, and the interpretative value of the light mutually reflected by poems of the same period. I remember being surprised by the feeling akin to indignation which he manifested at the suggestion. He said that such proceeding would indicate on the part of a poet an amount of egotism, placing interest in himself above interest in the subjects treated by him, which could not belong to a true poet caring for the elements of poetry in their right proportion, and designing to bring to bear upon the minds of his readers the best influences at his command in the way best calculated to make them effectual. I felt that his ground of objection made me revere him the more both as a man and as a poet; yet I retained the opinion that much might be said on the reader's part in the case of a great poet for such an arrangement of his poems as I had been suggesting, and I welcomed in after-days the concession made by him in consenting to put dates to the poems, while adhering to their classification according to subject or predominant element.

_Verbal Criticism_.--Wordsworth not only sympathised with the feelings expressed in Southey's touching lines upon The Dead, but admired very much the easy flow of the verse and the perfect freedom from strain in the expression by which they are marked. Yet in the first two stanzas he noted three flaws, and suggested changes by which they might have been easily avoided. I have underlined the words he took exception to:

'My days among the dead are past; Around me I behold,

Where'er _these casual eyes_ are cast, The mighty minds of old; My never-failing friends are they, With whom I _converse_ day by day.

With them I take delight in weal, And seek relief in woe; And while I understand and feel How much to them I owe, My cheeks have often been bedew'd With tears of thoughtful gratitude.'

In the first stanza, for 'Where'er _these casual eyes_ are cast,' which he objected to as not simple and natural, and as scarcely correct, he suggested 'Where'er _a casual look I cast_;' and for '_converse_,' the accent of which he condemned as belonging to the noun and not to the verb, he suggested '_commune_.' In the second stanza he pointed out the improper sequence of tenses in the third and fifth lines, which he corrected by reading in the latter '_My cheeks are oftentimes bedew'd_.' Of the narrative poems of his friend, well executed as he considered them, and of the mainly external action of imagination or fancy in which they deal, I have certainly heard him pronounce a very depreciatory opinion; whether I ever heard him use the hard words attributed to him, 'I would not give five shillings for a ream of them,' I cannot now assert, but if used, they were said in reference to the nobler kind of imaginative power which reveals to man the deep places and sublimer affinities of his own being. But to some others of Southey's verses, as well as to the lines above quoted, and to his prose writings in general, he was wont to give liberal praise; and no one could doubt the sincerity and warmth of his admiration of the intellect and virtues of the man, or the brotherly affection towards him which he not unfrequently expressed.

R.P. GRAVES. Dublin, 1875.

(i) AN AMERICAN'S REMINISCENCES.

To PROFESSOR HENRY REED.

Philadelphia, Sept. 1850.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

You have asked me to write out as fully as I can an account of my visit to Wordsworth last Summer, of which your letter of introduction was the occasion. Feeling very grateful to you for the pleasure which that visit gave me, and desiring to make a more minute record of it than either the