that the common practice was an improper attempt to curry favour.

In April, 1842, the volume entitled" Poems, chiefly of Early and Late Years, including The Borderers, a Tragedy," was published by Edward Moxon.

The Wordsworths spent part of May and June, 1842, in London. Robinson called on them on May 12, and was careful to record the poet's express statement, emphasizing it afterwards in a note to the original entry, that the lines beginning "She was a phantom of delight' were written about his wife: "Wordsworth said that the poems, Our walk was far among the ancient trees,' then, 'She was a phantom of delight,' next,' Let other bards of angels sing,' and finally the two Sonnets' To a Painter'in the new volume (of which Sonnets the first is only of value as leading to the second), should be read in succession, as exhibiting the different phases of his affection to his wife." As we have seen, this declaration has not cleared away all doubts.

Shortly afterwards, as we learn from a letter of Robinson's, dated May 21, 1842, he gave a dinner in honour of his distinguished friend, which was chiefly remarkable because no other great celebrities were present. "The poet made himself very agreeable," Robinson wrote, " talking at his ease with everyone. Indeed, he has been remarkably pleasant during his visit to London; and has dined every day, except when he condescended to wander into the terra incognita of Russell Square, with bishops and privy councillors, peers, and archbishops."

News of the death of Dr. Thomas Arnold reached Robinson, and probably Wordsworth also, who was with him, at a fashionable concert at Miss Coutts's, on June 13, 1842.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE SAGE OF RYDAL

IN melancholy days after his wife's death Thomas Carlyle forced himself to write what he remembered about Wordsworth. The whole narration, in his "Reminiscences," has, of course, an amazing mordant vividness, and when one considers that certain of its details had been borne in memory more than twenty-five years, one feels how intense and dominating Carlyle's genius for portraiture was. The petulant tone may be set down to his disconsolate mood, and readily forgiven. But it is apparent that under no circumstances was he likely to have got on well with his subject, for he had met the poet in an unbalanced state of mind, determined not to like him, and yet desirous of learning what manner of man he was. Since their intercourse, such as it was, appears to have begun about the year 1840, and to have been renewed, perhaps, in 1842, I will quote here a few of Carlyle's most vigorous lines:

His works I knew; but never considerably reverenced, could not, on attempting it. A man recognizably of strong intellectual powers, strong character; given to meditation, and much contemptuous of the unmeditative world and its noisy nothingnesses; had a fine limpid style of writing and delineating, in his small way; a fine limpid vein of melody, too, in him (as of an honest rustic fiddle, good, and well handled, but wanting two or more of the strings, and not capable of much !)— in fact, a rather dull, hard-tempered, unproductiveand almost wearisome kind of man; not adorable, by any means, as a great Poetic Genius, much less as the Trismegistus of such; whom only a select few could even read, instead of misreading, which was the opinion his

worshippers confidently entertained of him! Privately I had a real respect for him withal, founded on his early Biography, which Wilson of Edinburgh had painted to me as of antique greatness, signifying: ' Poverty and Peasanthood, then; be it so. But we consecrate ourselves to the muses, all the same, and will proceed on those terms, Heaven aiding!' This, and what of faculty I did recognize in the man, gave me a clear esteem of him, as of one remarkable and fairly beyond common:-not to disturb which, I avoided speaking of him to his worshippers; or, if the topic turned up, would listen with an acquiescing air. But to my private self his divine reflections and unfathomabilities seemed stinted, scanty; palish and uncertain; perhaps in part a feeble reflex (derived at second hand through Coleridge) of the immense German fund of such ?-and I reckoned his Poetic Storehouse to be far from an opulent or wellfurnished apartment."

Two things are to be noted in this passage: that Wordsworth, like many another great man, had been badly served by his "worshippers "; and that Carlyle's attention had been drawn-by them probably, rather than by his own unaided eyes-to Wordsworth's very human moralizings and profundities, rather than to his truly divine simplicities and veracities. That Carlyle knew how to appreciate these when he discovered them, we learn a few pages later, and the interesting point is that he found them in the man and his talk, while saying nothing about the poems of early date in which they abound. He had seen Wordsworth as early as 1836, but the decisive meeting, he thought, was at a breakfast given by Sir Henry Taylor at a tavern in St. James's Street one summer morning, in 1840 perhaps. To this we owe the following unforgettable description of “the robust veteran man":

"He talked well in his way; with veracity, easy brevity and force; as a wise tradesman would of his tools and workshop,-as no unwise one could. His voice was good, frank and sonorous, though practically clear, distinct and forcible, rather than melodious; the tone of him business-like, sedately confident, no discourtesy, yet no anxiety about being courteous; a fine,

1840]

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wholesome rusticity, fresh as his mountain breezes, sat well on the stalwart veteran, and on all he said and did. You would have said he was a usually taciturn man; glad to unlock himself, to audience sympathetic and intelligent, when such offered itself. His face bore marks of much, not always peaceful, meditation; the look of it not bland or benevolent, so much as close, impregnable and hard; a man multa tacere loquive paratus, in a world where he had experienced no lack of contradictions as he strode along! The eyes were not very brilliant, but they had a quiet clearness; there was enough of brow, and well shaped; rather too much of cheek (horse-face,' I have heard satirists say), face of squarish shape and decidedly longish, as I think the head itself was (its length going horizontal): he was largeboned, lean, but still firm-knit, tall, and strong-looking when he stood: a right good old steel-grey figure, with a fine rustic simplicity and dignity about him, and a veracious strength looking through him," etc.

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On this and other visits of Wordsworth to London Carlyle saw him a number of times. The thing happened which in these last years almost invariably happened: his interlocutor put Wordsworth upon the comparative merits of poets, and was shocked to find that he spoke with limited praise even of the best, while hinting that he himself was transcendent and unlimited. An extraordinarily curious statement occurs in Carlyle's sketch. He says Wordsworth " had been in France in the earlier or secondary stage of the Revolution; had witnessed the struggle of Girondins and Mountain, in particular the execution of Gorsas, the first Deputy sent to the Scaffold '; and testified strongly to the ominous feeling which that event produced in everybody, and of which he himself still seemed to retain something: 'Where will it end, when you have set an example in this kind?' I knew well about Gorsas; but had found, in my readings, no trace of the public emotion his death excited; and perceived now that Wordsworth might be taken as a true supplement to my Book, on this small point." As he had only recently, in 1837, finished his "French Revolution," it seems unlikely that Carlyle would have confused the name of Gorsas with another;

but Gorsas was guillotined October 7, 1793, and Wordsworth had returned to England before the execution of the King, in January. Either Carlyle was mistaken in his report, or Wordsworth, as I have sometimes surmised, made, between 1792 and 1802, a visit to France of which the traces have disappeared.

Carlyle was deeply impressed with the sagacity, distinctness, and credibility of Wordsworth's little biographic portraitures" of noted men in England of the Revolutionary and the subsequent time "Never," he declares," or never but once, had I seen a stronger intellect, a more luminous and veracious power of insight, directed upon such a survey of fellow-men and their contemporary journey through the world. A great deal of Wordsworth lay in the mode and tone of drawing; but you perceived it to be faithful, accurate, and altogether lifelike, though Wordsworthian." He speaks, too, of Wordsworth's "rock-like indifference to the babble "at dinner-parties; his silence, or, when he chose to speak," the braced rustic vivacity, willingness, and solid precision," which rang long afterwards in the listener's ear.

In July, 1842, Wordsworth resigned the office of stamp-distributor which he had held for nearly thirty years, in favour of his son William, who had acted under him for more than a third of that time. He thus surrendered the direct use of over £400, or more than half his income. But negotiations, in which he himself, Lord Lonsdale, W. E. Gladstone, and Lord Monteagle, were active, had been in progress for several weeks, with the object of securing a pension on the Civil List. It seems to have been chiefly through Gladstone's exertions that these attempts succeeded. Wordsworth's letter of thanks to him is interesting. It is dated October 17, 1842, and runs :

"I do not lose a moment in letting you know that Sir Robert Peel has made me an offer of a pension of £300 per annum for my life, and in terms which have above measure enhanced the satisfaction I feel upon the occasion.

I will not run the risk of offending you by a