it diverted him from the most painful of all efforts, that of trying anew the spell which had at last failed him, and perceiving in the disappointed eyes of his old admirers that the magic of his imagination was a thing of the past.  The last day of real enjoyment at Abbotsford—­for when Sir Walter returned to it to die, it was but to catch once more the outlines of its walls, the rustle of its woods, and the gleam of its waters, through senses already darkened to all less familiar and less fascinating visions—­was the 22nd September, 1831.  On the 21st, Wordsworth had come to bid his old friend adieu, and on the 22nd—­the last day at home—­they spent the morning together in a visit to Newark.  It was a day to deepen alike in Scott and in Wordsworth whatever of sympathy either of them had with the very different genius of the other, and that it had this result in Wordsworth’s case, we know from the very beautiful poem,—­“Yarrow Revisited,”—­and the sonnet which the occasion also produced.  And even Scott, who was so little of a Wordsworthian, who enjoyed Johnson’s stately but formal verse, and Crabbe’s vivid Dutch painting, more than he enjoyed the poetry of the transcendental school, must have recurred that day with more than usual emotion to his favourite Wordsworthian poem.  Soon after his wife’s death, he had remarked in his diary how finely “the effect of grief upon persons who like myself are highly susceptible of humour” had been “touched by Wordsworth in the character of the merry village teacher, Matthew, whom Jeffrey profanely calls a half-crazy, sentimental person."[59] And long before this time, during the brightest period of his life, Scott had made the old Antiquary of his novel quote the same poem of Wordsworth’s, in a passage where the period of life at which he had now arrived is anticipated with singular pathos and force.  “It is at such moments as these,” says Mr. Oldbuck, “that we feel the changes of time.  The same objects are before us—­those inanimate things which we have gazed on in wayward infancy and impetuous youth, in anxious and scheming manhood—­they are permanent and the same; but when we look upon them in cold, unfeeling old age, can we, changed in our temper, our pursuits, our feelings,—­changed in our form, our limbs, and our strength,—­can we be ourselves called the same? or do we not rather look back with a sort of wonder upon our former selves as beings separate and distinct from what we now are?  The philosopher who appealed from Philip inflamed with wine to Philip in his hours of sobriety, did not claim a judge so different as if he had appealed from Philip in his youth to Philip in his old age.  I cannot but be touched with the feeling so beautifully expressed in a poem which I have heard repeated:—­

    ’My eyes are dim with childish tears,
      My heart is idly stirr’d,
    For the same sound is in my ears
      Which in those days I heard. 
    Thus fares it still in our decay,
      And yet the wiser mind
    Mourns less for what age takes away
      Than what it leaves behind.’"[60]