[343] "Wordsworth's pamphlet will fail of producing any general effect, because the sentences are long and involved; and his friend De Quincey, who corrected the press, has rendered them more obscure by an unusual system of punctuation." (Southey to Scott, 30th July, 1809.) The tract is, as Southey hints, heavy.
[344] The first essay in the third volume of the second edition.
[345] Wordsworth's children were,—
John, born 18th June, 1803; still living; a clergyman.
Dorothy, born 16th August, 1804; died 9th July, 1847.
Thomas, born 16th June, 1806; died 1st December, 1812.
Catharine, born 6th September, 1808; died 4th June, 1812.
William, born 12th May, 1810; succeeded his father as
Stamp-Distributor.
[346] Good luck (in the sense of Chance) seems properly to be the occurrence of Opportunity to one who has neither deserved nor knows how to use it. In such hands it commonly turns to ill luck. Moore's Bermudan appointment is an instance of it Wordsworth had a sound common-sense and practical conscientiousness, which enabled him to fil his office as well as Dr. Franklin could have done. A fitter man could not have been found in Westmoreland.
[347]
"I am not one who much or oft delight
In personal talk."
[348] How far he swung backward toward the school under whose influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he had protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The advocate of the language of common life has a verse in his Thanksgiving Ode which, if one met with it by itself, he would think the achievement of some later copyist of Pope:—
"While the tubed engine [the organ] feels the inspiring blast."
And in "The Italian Itinerant" and "The Swiss Goatherd" we find a
thermometer or barometer called
"The well-wrought scale
Whose sentient tube instructs to time
A purpose to a fickle clime."
Still worse in the "Eclipse of the Sun," 1821:—