confuse a poem’s meaning, and frustrate its purpose.  He regarded poetry as an art; but he also regarded Art not as the compeer of Nature, much less her superior, but as her servant and interpreter.  He wrote poetry likewise, no doubt, in a large measure, because self-utterance was an essential law of his nature.  If he had a companion, he discoursed like one whose thoughts must needs run on in audible current; if he walked alone among his mountains, he murmured old songs.  He was like a pine grove, vocal as well as visible.  But to poetry he had dedicated himself as to the utterance of the highest truths brought within the range of his life’s experience; and if his poetry has been accused of egotism, the charge has come from those who did not perceive that it was with a human, not a mere personal interest that he habitually watched the processes of his own mind.  He drew from the fountain that was nearest at hand what he hoped might be a refreshment to those far off.  He once said, speaking of a departed man of genius, who had lived an unhappy life and deplorably abused his powers, to the lasting calamity of his country, ’A great poet must be a great man; and a great man must be a good man; and a good man ought to be a happy man.’  To know Wordsworth was to feel sure that if he had been a great poet, it was not merely because he had been endowed with a great imagination, but because he had been a good man, a great man, and a man whose poetry had, in an especial sense, been the expression of a healthily happy moral being.

AUBREY DE VERE.

Curragh Chase, March 31, 1875.

P.S.  Wordsworth was by no means without humour.  When the Queen on one occasion gave a masked ball, some one said that a certain youthful poet, who has since reached a deservedly high place both in the literary and political world, but who was then known chiefly as an accomplished and amusing young man of society, was to attend it dressed in the character of the father of English poetry, grave old Chaucer.  ‘What,’ said Wordsworth, ‘M. go as Chaucer!  Then it only remains for me to go as M.!’

* * * * *

PART II.

SONNET—­RYDAL WITH WORDSWORTH.

BY THE LATE SIR AUBREY DE VERE.

    ’What we beheld scarce can I now recall
    In one connected picture; images
    Hurrying so swiftly their fresh witcheries
    O’er the mind’s mirror, that the several
    Seems lost, or blended in the mighty all. 
    Lone lakes; rills gushing through rock-rooted trees: 
    Peaked mountains shadowing vales of peacefulness: 
    Glens echoing to the flashing waterfall. 
    Then that sweet twilight isle! with friends delayed
    Beside a ferny bank ’neath oaks and yews;
    The moon between two mountain peaks embayed;
    Heaven and the waters dyed with sunset hues: 
    And he, the Poet of the age and land,
    Discoursing as we wandered hand in hand.’