(One summer day looking from Richmond Star and Garter.)
“I love those woods that go triumphing down to the river.”
“Somehow water is the element which I love best of all the four.” (He was passionately fond of the sea and of babbling brooks.—Ed.)
“Some one says that nothing strikes one more on returning from the Continent than the look of our English country towns. Houses not so big, nor such rows of them as abroad; but each house, little or big, distinct from one another, each man’s castle, built according to his own means and fancy, and so indicating the Englishman’s individual humour.
“I have been two days abroad—no further than Boulogne this time, but I am struck as always on returning from France with the look of good sense in the London people.”
(Standing before a Madonna, by Murillo, at the Dulwich Gallery—her eyes fixed on you.)
“Yes—but they seem to look at something beyond—beyond the Actual into Abstraction. I have seen that in a human face.” (I, E. F. G., have seen it in his. Some American spoke of the same in Wordsworth. I suppose it may be so with all Poets.)
1850
“When I was sitting by the banks of Doon—I don’t know why—I wasn’t in the least spoony—not thinking of Burns (but of the lapsing of the Ages)—when all of a sudden I gave way to a passion of tears.”
“I one day hurled a great iron bar over a haystack. Two bumpkins who stood by said there was no one in the two parishes who could do it. I was then about twenty-five.” (He could carry his mother’s pony round the dinner-table.—E. F. G.)