April 13th, 1815.*—I had a cast made yesterday of Wordsworth's face. He bore it like a philosopher. John Scott was to meet him at breakfast, and just as he came in the plaster was put on. Wordsworth was sitting in the other room in my dressing-gown, with his hands folded, sedate, solemn, and still. I stepped into Scott and told him as a curiosity to take a peep, that he might say the first sight he ever had of so great a poet was in this stage towards immortality.

I opened the door slowly, and there he sat, innocent and unconscious of our plot, in mysterious stillness and silence. When he was relieved, he came into breakfast with his usual cheerfulness, and delighted us by his bursts of inspiration. At one time he shook us both, in explaining the principles of his system, his views of man, and his object in writing.

Wordsworth's faculty is in describing those far-reaching and intense feelings, and glimmerings, and doubts, and fears, and hopes of man, as referring to what he might be before he was born, or what he may be hereafter.

He is a great being, and will hereafter be ranked as one who had a portion of the spirit of the mighty ones, especially Milton, but who did not possess the power of using that spirit otherwise than with reference to himself, and so as to excite a reflex action only: this is, in my opinion, his great characteristic.

We afterwards called on Hunt, and as Hunt had previously attacked him and had now reformed his opinions, the meeting was interesting.

Hunt paid him the highest compliments, and told him that as he grew wiser and got older, he found his respect for his powers, and enthusiasm for his genius increase.

*

Hunt was very ill, or it would have been his place to

Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, edited by Tom Taylor, vol. i., pp. 297-299.

have called on Wordsworth. Here, again, he really burst forth with burning feelings; I never heard him so eloquent before.

I afterwards sauntered along with him to West-End Lane, and so on to Hampstead, with great delight. Never did any man so beguile the time as Wordsworth. His purity of heart, his kindness, his soundness of principle, his information, his knowledge, and the intense and eager feelings with which he pours forth all he knows, affect, interest, and enchant me. I do not know any one I would be so inclined to worship as a purified being.

May 23rd, 1815:-Breakfasted with Wordsworth, and spent a delightful two hours. Speaking of Burke, Fox, and Pitt, he said, 'You always went from Burke with your mind filled; from Fox with your feelings excited; and from Pitt with wonder at his having had the power to make the worse appear the better reason.' Pitt,' he said, 'preferred power to principle.'

I

say it is not so. Pitt at a crisis of danger sacrificed his consistency for the sake of his sovereign and country. Which is more just?

Wordsworth has one and perhaps the greatest part of the great genius; but he has not the lucidus ordo, and he under

values it, which is wrong. In phrenological development he is without constructiveness, while imagination is as big as

an egg.

During this visit to London, in 1815, Wordsworth called on Leigh Hunt, who had just come out of prison.

The account of their interview is best given in Hunt's own words, in his Autobiography.

"It was here* also I had the honour of a visit from Mr Wordsworth. ... I had the pleasure of showing him his * At his lodgings in Edgeware Road.

book on my shelves by the side of Milton; a sight which must have been the more agreeable, inasmuch as the visit was unexpected. He favoured me, in return, with giving his opinion of some of the poets, his contemporaries, who would assuredly not have paid him a visit on the same grounds on which he was pleased to honour myself. Nor do I believe, that from that day to this, he thought it becoming in him to reciprocate the least part of any benefit which a word in good season may have done for him.

Lord Byron, in resent

'prince of the bards of

ment for my having called him the
his time,' would not allow him to be even the 'one-eyed
monarch of the blind.' He said he was the blind mon-
arch of the one-eyed.' I must still differ with his lordship
on that point; but I must own, that, after all which I have
seen and read, posterity, in my opinion, will differ not a
little with one person respecting the amount of merit to be
ascribed to Mr Wordsworth; though who that one person is
I shall leave the reader to discover.

Mr Wordsworth, whom Mr Hazlitt designated as one that would have had the wide circle of his humanities made still wider, and a good deal more pleasant, by dividing a little more of his time between his lakes in Westmoreland and the hotels of the Metropolis, had a dignified manner, with a deep and roughish but not unpleasing voice, and an exalted mode of speaking. He had a habit of keeping his left hand in the bosom of his waistcoat, and in this attitude, except when he turned round to take one of the subjects of his criticism from the shelves (for his contemporaries were there also), he sat dealing forth his eloquent but hardly catholic judgments. In his father's house' there were not 'many mansions.' He was as sceptical on the merits of all kinds of poetry but one, as Richardson was on those of the novels of Fielding.

Under the study in which my visitor and I were sitting

H

was an archway, leading to a nursery-ground; a cart
happened to go through it while I was inquiring whether he
would take any refreshment; and he uttered, in so lofty a
voice, the words, Anything which is going forward,' that I
felt inclined to ask him whether he would take a piece of
the cart. Lamb would certainly have done it.
was a levity which would neither have been so proper on
my part, after so short an acquaintance, nor very intelligible
perhaps, in any sense of the word, to the serious poet.
There are good-humoured warrants for smiling, which lie
deeper even than Mr Wordsworth's thoughts for tears.

But this

I did not see this distinguished person again till thirty years afterwards; when, I should venture to say, his manner was greatly superior to what it was in the former instance; indeed, quite natural and noble, with a cheerful air of animal as well as spiritual confidence; a gallant bearing, curiously reminding me of the Duke of Wellington, as I saw him walking some eighteen years ago by a lady's side, with no unbecoming oblivion of his time of life. I observed, also, that the poet no longer committed himself in scornful criticisms, or, indeed, in any criticisms whatever, at least as far as I knew. He had found out that he could, at least, afford to be silent. Indeed, he spoke very little of anything. The conversation turned upon Milton, and I fancied I had opened a subject that would have brought him out,' by remarking that the most diabolical thing in all Paradise Lost was a feeling attributed to the angels. 'Ay!' said Mr Wordsworth, and inquired what it was. I said it was the passage in which the angels, when they observed Satan journeying through the empyrean, let down a set of steps out of heaven, on purpose to add to his misery-to his despair of ever being able to re-ascend them; they being angels in a state of bliss, and he a fallen spirit doomed to eternal punishment. The passage is as follows:

Each stair was meant mysteriously, nor stood
There always, but, drawn up to heaven, sometimes
Viewless; and underneath a bright sea flow'd
Of jasper, or of liquid pearl, whereon
Who after came from earth sailing arriv'd
Wafted by angels, or flew o'er the lake
Rapt in a chariot drawn by fiery steeds.
The stairs were then let down, whether to dare
The fiend by easy ascent, or aggravate

His sad exclusion from the doors of bliss.

Mr Wordsworth pondered, and said nothing. I thought to myself, what pity for the poor devil would not good Uncle Toby have expressed! Into what indignation would not Burns have exploded! What knowledge of themselves would not have been forced upon those same coxcombical and malignant angels by Fielding or Shakespeare!

Walter Scott said, that the eyes of Burns were the finest he ever saw. I cannot say the same of Mr Wordsworth's; that is, not in the sense of the beautiful, or even of the profound. But certainly I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired or supernatural. They were like fires half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two caverns. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes.” *

On the 30th May, Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth of the poem addressed to his friend, when The Prelude was first read in his hearing, of The Examiner, and other matters.

<< CALNE, 30th May 1815. First,

MY HONOURED FRIEND,-. . . . But to your letter. I had never determined to print the lines addressed to you. I lent them to Lady Beaumont on her promise that they should be copied, and returned; and not knowing of any copy in my own possession I sent for them, because I was making a MSS. collection of all my poems-publishable or

* The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, (ed. 1860), pp. 247-249.