in this passage.  How came he here? thought I, or what can he be doing?  I then describe him, whether ill or well is not for me to judge with perfect confidence; but this I can confidently affirm, that though I believe God has given me a strong imagination, I cannot conceive a figure more impressive than that of an old man like this, the survivor of a wife and ten children, travelling alone among the mountains and all lonely places, carrying with him his own fortitude and the necessities which an unjust state of society has laid upon him.  You speak of his speech as tedious.  Every thing is tedious when one does not read with the feelings of the author.  ‘The Thorn’ is tedious to hundreds; and so is ‘The Idiot Boy’ to hundreds.  It is in the character of the old man to tell his story, which an impatient reader must feel tedious.  But, good heavens! such a figure, in such a place; a pious, self-respecting, miserably infirm and pleased old man telling such a tale!”

Ed.

[Footnote A:  It is unfortunate that in this, as in many other similar occasions in these delightful volumes by the poet’s nephew, the reticence as to names—­warrantable perhaps in 1851, so soon after the poet’s death—­has now deprived the world of every means of knowing to whom many of Wordsworth’s letters were addressed.  Professor Dowden asks about it—­and very naturally: 

  “Was it the letter to Mary and Sara” (Hutchinson) “about ’The
  Leech-Gatherer,’ mentioned in Dorothy’s Journal of 14th June
  1802?”

Ed.]

* * * * *

“I GRIEVED FOR BUONAPARTE”

Composed May 21, 1802.—­Published 1807 [A]

[In the cottage of Town-end, one afternoon in 1801, my sister read to me the sonnets of Milton.  I had long been well acquainted with them, but I was particularly struck on that occasion with the dignified simplicity and majestic harmony that runs through most of them—­in character so totally different from the Italian, and still more so from Shakespeare’s fine sonnets.  I took fire, if I may be allowed to say so, and produced three sonnets the same afternoon, the first I ever wrote, except an irregular one at school.  Of these three the only one I distinctly remember is ‘I grieved for Buonaparte, etc.’; one of the others was never written down; the third, which was I believe preserved, I cannot particularise.—­I.F.]

One of the “Sonnets dedicated to Liberty,” afterwards called “Poems dedicated to National Independence and Liberty.”  From the edition of 1815 onwards, it bore the title ’1801’.—­Ed.

  I grieved for Buonaparte, with a vain
  And an unthinking grief!  The tenderest mood [1]
  Of that Man’s mind—­what can it be? what food
  Fed his first hopes? what knowledge could he gain? 
  ’Tis not in battles that from youth we train 5
  The Governor who must be wise and good,
  And temper with the sternness of the brain