escaped lamentably proves) ought not to be long out of sight.

What a shock that was to our poor hearts! Were she to depart, the Phasis of my Moon would be robbed of light to a degree that I have not courage to think of."

In the same letter, however, the old passion for travelling asserted itself. He once said that, as Writing was Southey's ruling passion, Wandering was his. Wordsworth seems almost to have agreed with Goethe—

To make room for wandering was it,
That the world was made so wide.

He says: "My sister-in-law, Joanna Hutchinson, and her brother Henry, an ex-sailor, are about to embark for Norway. Were I not tied at home, I should certainly accompany them. As far as I can look back, I discern in my mind imaginative traces of Norway. The people are said to be simple and worthy, and Nature is magnificent. I have heard Sir H. Davy affirm that there is nothing equal to some of the ocean inlets of that region.”

A year and a half later (February 1833) he wrote to Robin

son:

"I am come to that time of life when I must be prepared to part with, or to precede, my dearest friends; and God's will be done!"

Writing to his daughter's friend, Miss Kinnaird (now Mrs. Drummond) from Rydal, on the 30th January 1833, he said of his sister: "Her state weighs incessantly upon every thought of my heart."

Dorothy Wordsworth's long illness was borne with patient resignation. In a letter to Lady Beaumont, January 1834, she said: "My prison! (if we may so call it) is one of the prettiest and most cheerful in England." She occasionally amused

herself by writing verses. One set of these, addressed in the year 1837 to Thomas Carr, her medical attendant, beginning

Five years of sickness and of pain,

she copied out, and sent to her cousin, with the following letter:

"MY DEAR COUSIN EDWARD, - A madman might as well attempt to relate the history of his own doings, and those of his fellows in confinement, as I to tell you one hundredth part of what I have felt, suffered, and done.

Through God's mercy I am now calm and easy.

I have not seen Charles Lamb's book. His sister still survives a solitary twig-patiently enduring the storm of life. In losing her brother she lost her all-all but the remembrance of him, which cheers her the day through. May God bless you.--Yours ever truly,

DOROTHY WORDSWORTH.

Sunday, Rydal Mount, October 8th, 1837."

Added to this domestic sorrow was Wordsworth's dread of the overthrow of our national Institutions, by radical changes effected on these great inheritances in Church and State. His letters at this time are full of the subject; and in the next chapter specimens of them will be given. The one which follows, addressed to Hamilton, refers both to his sister, to Coleridge, and to Walter Savage Landor.

"Moresby, June 25, 1832. My dear sister has been languishing more than seven months in a sick-room, nor dare I or any of her friends entertain a hope that her strength will ever be restored; and the course of public affairs, as I think I told you before, threatens, in my view, destruction to the Institutions of the country; an event which, whatever may rise out of it hereafter, cannot but produce distress and misery for two or three generations at least. In any times I am but at best a poor and unpunctual correspondent, yet I am pretty sure you would have heard from me but for this reason; therefore let the statement pass for an apology as far as you think fit.

It gives me much pleasure that you and Coleridge have met, and that you were not disappointed in the conversation of a man from whose writings you had previously drawn so much delight and improvement. He and my beloved sister are the two beings to whom my intellect is most indebted, and they are now proceeding, as it were pari passu, along the path of sickness-I will not say towards the grave, but I trust towards a blessed immortality.

It was not my intention to write so seriously; my heart is full, and you must excuse it. You do not tell me how you like Cambridge as a place, nor what you thought of its buildings and other works of art. Did you not see Oxford as well? It has greatly the advantage over Cambridge in its happy intermixture of streets, churches, and collegiate buildings.

A fortnight ago I came hither to my son and daughter, who are living a gentle, happy, quiet, and useful life together. My daughter Dora is also with us. A week ago appeared here Mr. W. S. Landor the poet, and author of the Imaginary Conversations, which probably have fallen in your way. We had never met before, though several letters had passed between us, and as I had not heard that he was in England, my gratification in seeing him was heightened by surprise. We passed a day together at the house of my friend Mr. Rawson, on the banks of Wast-Water. His conversation is lively and original, his learning great, though he will not allow it, and his laugh the heartiest I have heard for a long time. It is, I think, not much less than twenty years since he left England for France and afterwards Italy, where he hopes to end his days, nay, has fixed near Florence upon the spot where he wishes to be buried."

An undated letter to Basil Montagu, acknowledging a volume of Selections (from whom, or of what, is not ascertained), contains the following remarks on the state of "public affairs":

"What you Londoners may think of public affairs I know not; but I forebode the not very distant overthrow of the Institutions under which this country has so long prospered. The Liberals of our neighbourhood tell me that the mind of the nation has outgrown its Institutions; rather say, I reply, that it has shrunk and dwindled from them, as the body of a sick man does from his clothes.

We are on fire with zeal to educate the poor, which would be all very well if that zeal did not blind us to what we stand still more in need of, an improved education of the middle and upper classes; which ought to begin in our great public schools, thence ascend to the universities (from which the first suggestion should come) and descend to the very nursery.

If the book from which your Selections are made were the favourite reading of men of rank and influence I should dread little from the discontented in any class. But what hope is there of such a rally in our debilitated intellects? The soundest hearts (with few exceptions) I meet with are Americans. They seem to have a truer sense of the benefits of our Government than we ourselves have. Farewell, with many thanks. Yours faithfully, W. W."

In connection with this letter to Montagu, a sentence of Southey's to Henry Taylor on the 16th July 1831 may be quoted. He was writing of the political state of the country, and said, "I saw Wordsworth last week. He is more desponding than I; and perhaps I despond less than I should, if I saw more clearly before me." *

CHAPTER XXXVII.

CORRESPONDENCE-LITERARY CRITICISM-FIFTH AND LAST
TOUR IN SCOTLAND, 1832-1834.

WORDSWORTH'S letter to Rowan Hamilton, November 22, 1831,* states his opinion as to the Reform Bill, and its relation to the English Constitution. But his correspondence with others on this subject notably with Lord Lonsdale-has more than a passing interest. Although the controversy has long since closed, these letters of Wordsworth deal with principles underlying political controversy, which have a perennial value, while our Parliamentary debates, like "our little systems," "have their day, and cease to be."

The following are extracts from a letter to Lord Lonsdale, dated Rydal Mount, Feb. 17th, 1832 :—

"As you have done me the honour of asking my opinion on Lord H.'s† lettter, I will give it without reserve. The facts upon which Lord H.'s proposal of compromise is grounded are an increased majority in the Commons in favour of the Bill, and a belief that the Ministers have carte blanche for creating Peers to carry it. Is it not in the power of any councillors having access to the King to convince him not only of the ruinous tendency of such a step, but to make him feel, as a point of duty, that whatever power the forms of law may give him to create Peers for setting aside their deliberate resolve, the spirit of the Constitution allows him no right