He used to say that the idea of one who was both Virgin and Mother had sunk so deep into the heart of humanity that there it must ever remain.

Wordsworth’s estimate of his contemporaries was not generally high. I remember his once saying to me: “I have known many that might be called very clever men, and a good many of real and vigorous abilities, but few of genius; and only one whom I should call ‘wonderful.’ That one was Coleridge. At any hour of the day or night he would talk by the hour, if there chanced to be any sympathetic listener, and talk better than the best page of his writings; for a pen half paralyzed his genius. A child would sit quietly at his feet and wonder, till the torrent had passed by. The only man like Coleridge whom I have known is Sir William Hamilton, Astronomer Royal of Dublin.” I remember, however, that when I recited by his fireside Alfred Tennyson’s two political poems, “You ask me why, though ill at ease,” and “Of old sat Freedom on the heights,” the old bard listened with a deepening attention, and, when I had ended, said after a pause, “I must acknowledge that those two poems are very solid and noble in thought. Their diction also seems singularly stately.” He was a great admirer of Philip van Artevelde. In the case of a certain poet since dead, and little popular, he said to me: “I consider his sonnets to be certainly the best of modern times”; adding, “Of course I am not including my own in any comparison with those of others.” He was not sanguine as to the future of English poetry. He thought that there was much to be supplied in other departments of our literature, and especially he desired a really great history of England; but he was disposed to regard the roll of English poetry as made up, and as leaving place for little more except what was likely to be eccentric or imitational.

In his younger days Wordsworth had had to fight a great battle in poetry; for both his subjects and his mode of treating them were antagonistic to the maxims then current. It was fortunate for posterity, no doubt, that his long “militant estate” was animated by some mingling of personal ambition with his love of poetry. Speaking in an early sonnet of

“The poets, who on earth have made us heirs

Of truth, and pure delight, by heavenly lays,”

he concludes:

“Oh! might my name be numbered among theirs,

Then gladly would I end my mortal days.”

He died at eighty, and general fame did not come to him till about fifteen years before his death. This might perhaps have been fifteen years too soon, if he had set any inordinate value on it. But it was not so. Shelley tells us that “Fame is love disguised”; and it was intellectual sympathy that Wordsworth had always valued far more than reputation. “Give me thy love; I claim no other fee,” had been his demand on his reader. When fame had laid her tardy garland at his feet, he found on it no fresher green than his “Rydalian laurels” had always worn. Once he said to me: “It is indeed a deep satisfaction to hope and believe that my poetry will be, while it lasts, a help to the cause of virtue and truth, especially among the young. As for myself, it seems now of little moment how long I may be remembered. When a man pushes off in his little boat into the great seas of Infinity and Eternity, it surely signifies little how long he is kept in sight by watchers from the shore.”

Such are my chief recollections of the great poet, whom I knew but in his old age, but whose heart retained its youth till his daughter Dora’s death. He seemed to me one who from boyhood had been faithful to a high vocation; one who had esteemed it his office to minister, in an age of conventional civilization, at nature’s altar, and who had in his later life explained and vindicated such lifelong ministration, even while he seemed to apologize for it, in the memorable confession,