paint, so clear and bright is it, and this shall be symbolical of all.”*

The following occurs in the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill:+

"This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important event in my life. I took up the collection of his poems from curiosity, with no expectation of mental relief from it, though I had before resorted to poetry with that hope. In the worst period of my depression, I had read through the whole of Byron (then new to me), to try whether a poet, whose peculiar department was supposed to be that of the intenser feelings, could rouse any feeling in me. As might be expected, I got no good from this reading, but the reverse. The poet's state of mind was too like my own. His was the lament of a man who had worn out all pleasures, and who seemed to think that life, to all who possess the good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid, uninteresting thing which I found it. His Harold and Manfred had the same burden on them which I had; and I was not in a frame of mind to derive any comfort from the vehement sensual passion of his Giaours, or the sullenness of his Laras. But while Byron was

exactly what did not suit my condition, Wordsworth was exactly what did. I had looked in The Excursion two or three years before, and found little in it; and I should probably have found as little had I read it at this time. But the miscellaneous poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815 (to which little of value was added in the latter part of the author's life), proved to be the precise thing for my mental wants at that particular juncture.

* See Reminiscences by Thomas Carlyle (edited by Charles Eliot Norton), vol. ii. p. 297-309.

See pages 146-150.

In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty over me, there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Wordsworth's poetry; the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among mountains, which, owing to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty. But Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence. There have certainly been, even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry of deeper and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what his did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and

common destiny of human beings. And the delight which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. At the conclusion of the poems came the famous Ode, falsely called Platonic, Intimations of Immortality; in which, along with more than his usual sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it. I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me. Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he."

What follows is from the Autobiography of Henry Taylor :-*

"Following on the death of Wordsworth came the question how and by whom his life should be written. What I had to say was said in a letter to Miss Fenwick of the 24th May 1850... One thing I conceive will have occurred to you, that there is no choice between a very brief biography and a very explicit one; and that a biography which should be explicit as to mere fact would lead to much misconstruction; and that much explanation would do nothing with

* Vol. ii. pp. 56-61.

the world at large to clear up the questions that would arise. For a composite character will always be inscrutable to the many, very often even to the few.

Miss Fenwick writes: I dare say we should think much alike of the Memoir. It was written in far too great a hurry. The original idea of it was good; but time was wanting to select his materials and condense. A few years hence a better life may be written. For my own part, I think the life is rather buried in the biography than brought to light in it.'

Next came the question of a monument, and on this, too, my views and those of Miss Fenwick were in accord.

'Though one would have been sorry,' she writes, 'had there been no demonstration of a public feeling, yet, when I think of a monument in Westminster Abbey, and know his feeling and opinion of such things, I do dislike the idea with all my disliking feelings. I never heard him approve much of any memorial excepting for statesmen and warriors. . Yesterday evening I visited his grave in Grasmere churchyard, as yet even without a headstone. Who that has visited, or ever shall visit, his grave in the churchyard among the mountains would wish for any monument?'

A committee was appointed, however, and a sum exceeding £2000 seems to have been subscribed. I was put upon the committee, but I have no recollection of having taken a part in its proceedings. I wrote to Miss Fenwick, 1st July 1850: 'I do not think that I can do any good in the committee. Of course a great poet's works are his monument, and every other must be as a molehill beside a pyramid. If there were some great sculptor living whose genius lacked an opportunity and a subject, a monument to Mr. Wordsworth might furnish one; but I know of no such person, and the bust of Mr. Southey put up in Westminster Abbey by the Committee of which I was a member (the worst, I think, of the many bad

likenesses of him), has given me a great disinclination to hazarding such things. What I should like would be simply to have a copy in marble of Chantrey's bust put up in Westminster Abbey, and another in Grasmere Church. What you say to Alice makes me think that this might probably be your feeling, and that of Mrs. Wordsworth.'

A statue and a bust were eventually produced; the former, I think, bad, the latter (by Mr. Thrupp) very good as originally moulded, from a mask, but sadly smoothed away into nothingness at the instance of some country neighbour of Wordsworth's, whose notions of refinement could not be satisfied without the obliteration of everything that was characteristic and true. The sculptor had never seen Wordsworth, and may be excused for his undue deference to the opinions of one who had been familiar with the face. But it was a lamentable defect. Some casts were taken from the unsophisticated mould,-one, at least—which I possess—and I think more. It is admirable as a likeness in my opinion, and to my knowledge in that of Mrs. Wordsworth; and there is a rough grandeur in it, with which, if it were to be converted into marble, posterity might be content.

Popularity, indeed, is scarcely the word to designate the species of celebrity which Wordsworth had achieved. It is what he himself would have distinctly disclaimed. He had been accustomed to regard it as derogating from a poet's title to greatness. During the thirty years, more or less, for which his poetry was little read, this was no doubt a consolatory creed; and when it came to be much read, he would still refuse to admit that it was popular. When I adverted to the large circulation of his works,-No,' he said, 'a steady moderate sale';-and there was this much truth in it, that to the reading populace his poetry never did reach, and probably never will. For my own part I see no reason why contemporaneous popularity should argue eventual evanescence,