as he described them, the coarse rushes their ancient melodies."*

sigh forth Robinson mentions that Wordsworth, his wife, and Miss Hutchinson were in London in December, 1817. He met them at a dinner at which Charles Lamb and Coleridge and his son Hartley were present. The amiable and indefatigable lion-hunter called on them at the Rev. Dr. Christopher Wordsworth's, in Lambeth, and" spent a couple of hours with them very agreeably." The poet had brought manuscripts of new poems with him and was inclined to print one or two small volumes. On December 30, Robinson spent the evening at Lamb's, where he "found a large party collected round the two poets, but Coleridge had the larger number." Hazlitt was not alone in charging Wordsworth with deserting the principles of his younger days, and doubtless there was much controversy on this topic. The attitude of Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth was the more noticeable because of its contrast with the outspoken radicalism of Byron and Shelley. On November 6, Robinson had written:

"I went to Godwin's. Mr. Shelley was there. His youth, and a resemblance to Southey, particularly in his voice, raised a pleasing impression, which was not altogether destroyed by his conversation, though it is vehement, and arrogant, and intolerant. He was very abusive towards Southey, whom he spoke of as having sold himself to the Court. And this he maintained with the usual party slang. His pension and his Laureateship, his early zeal and his recent virulence, are the proofs of gross corruption. On every topic but that of violent party feeling, the friends of Southey are under no difficulty in defending him. Shelley spoke of Wordsworth with less bitterness, but with an insinuation of his insincerity."

* I had the good fortune, in the summer of 1914, to cross the pass in company with Mr. Charles Walmsley, of Ambleside, whose delight in the correspondence between the poem and the scene it so truthfully depicts it was a pleasure to witness. He told me that in Wordsworth's day the road was unfenced, although flocks of sheep were even then

Imprisoned 'mid the formal props
Of restless ownership.

1817]

*

SHELLEY ON WORDSWORTH

279

It was probably much more than an insinuation, for Shelley had not hesitated, in a sonnet "To Wordsworth," published with "Alastor," in 1816, to make the charge in plain terms. In his journals for 1814 and 1815, he recorded the fact that he had read "The Excursion." Whether the disapproval expressed in the sonnet was due to anything he found in that poem, or merely to the talk against Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey in Leigh Hunt's circle, can only be guessed. The sonnet is as follows:

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know

That things depart which never may return:

Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar;
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,—
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,

Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

Shelley had been at Chestnut Cottage about six weeks before he met Southey. The inhabitant of Chestnut Cottage thought monstrous small things of his neighbour at Greta Hall, while distance-and ignorance of the facts-lent enchantment to the name of Wordsworth, as the following extract from a letter will show:†

Southey has changed. I shall see him soon, and I shall reproach him for his tergiversation. He to whom Bigotry, Tyranny, Law was hateful, has become the votary of these idols in a form the most disgusting.The Church of England, its Hell and all, has become the subject of his panegyric; the war in Spain, that prodigal waste of human blood to aggrandize the fame of statesmen, is his delight. The Constitution of England-with its Wellesley, its Paget, and its Prince-are

See Mrs. Shelley's Note on the Early Poems, on p. 524 of the Oxford edition of Shelley's "Complete Poetical Works," 1907.

"

† To Elizabeth Hitchener, December 15, 1811. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley," edited by Roger Ingpen, 1912, p. 197.

I

inflated with the prostituted exertions of his Pen. feel a sickening distrust when I see all that I had considered good, great, or imitable, fall around me into the gulf of error. But we will struggle on its brink to the last, and if compelled to fall-we shall have at all events the consolation of knowing that we have struggled with a nature that is bad, and that this nature, [not ?] the imbecility of our proper cowardice, has involved us in the ignominy of defeat. Wordsworth (a quondam associate of Southey) yet retains the integrity of his independence, but his poverty is such that he is frequently obliged to beg for a shirt to his back."

On January 7, 1812, he wrote: "Wordsworth and Coleridge I have yet to see." But he had met Southey, whom he pronounced narrow-minded, " corrupted by the world, contaminated by custom."

One of Southey's political adversaries had gone so far as to reprint his poem "Wat Tyler," written more than twenty years before, in order to prove him a renegade from his old opinions. This outrage was much discussed and drew from Coleridge a defence of his brotherin-law, in The Courier. Wordsworth, in turn, declared that the charge against Southey, "of being too obsequious to the throne, the aristocracy, and persons in office or in place, the charge of being a tool of power," was "a most false and foul accusation, for a more disinterested and honourable man than Robert Southey does not live."*

On December 28, 1817, the artist Haydon gave a dinner, to which, as Keats wished to know Wordsworth, both the poets were invited, besides Charles Lamb and Monkhouse, a kinsman of Mrs. Wordsworth. After dinner other friends came in, and probably it was as gay an evening as Wordsworth ever spent. The following extracts are from Haydon's account:†

"On December 28th the immortal dinner came off in my painting room, with Jerusalem‡ towering up above

"

Letters of the Wordsworth Family," II. 103.

t Life of B. R. Haydon," by Tom Taylor.

Haydon's picture of Christ's Entrance into Jerusalem. Wordsworth and Keats had sat as models for minor figures in this large painting. Hazlitt, Voltaire, and Sir Isaac Newton were also represented. The painting is now in the Art Museum, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to which it was removed from the Roman Catholic cathedral.

Detail from Haydon's "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem." The figure in the centre is Wordsworth. Immediately above him is Keats. Behind Wordsworth are Voltaire and Newton.

[Vol. II., p. 280