'It is delightful to see a life in such perfect harmony with all that his writings express· "true to the kindred points of heaven and home." You may remember how much I disliked that shallow theory of Mr. Moore's with regard to the unfitness of genius for domestic happiness. I was speaking of it yesterday to Mr. Wordsworth, and was pleased by his remark: “It is not because they possess genius that they make unhappy homes, but because they do not possess genius enough; a higher order of mind would enable them to see and feel all the beauty of domestic ties." His mind, indeed, may well inhabit an untroubled atmosphere, for, as he himself declares, no wounded affections, no embittered feelings, have ever been his lot; the current of his domestic life has flowed on, bright, and pure, and unbroken.

. . . 'Mr. Wordsworth's kindness has inspired me with a feeling of confidence, which it is delightful to associate with those of admiration and respect, before excited by his writings; and he has treated me with so much consideration, and gentleness, and care! they have been like balm to my spirit. ... I wish I had time to tell you of mornings which he has passed in reading to me, and of evenings when he has walked beside me, whilst I rode through the lovely vales of Grasmere and Rydal; and of his beautiful, sometimes half-unconscious recitation in a voice so deep and solemn, that it has often brought tears into my eyes. His voice has something quite breeze-like in the soft gradations of its swells and falls. . . . . We had been listening during one of these evening rides, to various sounds and notes of birds, which broke upon the stillness; and at last I said, "Perhaps there may be still deeper and richer music pervading all nature than we are permitted, in this state, to hear." He answered by reciting those glorious lines of Milton's:

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,

Unseen, both when we walk and when we sleep," etc.

and this in tones that seemed rising from such depths of veneration! His tones of solemn earnestness, sinking, almost dying away into a murmur of veneration, as if the passage were breathed forth from the heart, I shall never forget.'-H. R.]

CHAPTER LXIII.

REMINISCENCES: MISCELLANEOUS MEMORANDA.

I SHALL not endeavour to give an idea of Mr. Wordsworth's conversation. Such an attempt would be futile. No powers of description can adequately represent the effect produced by the aspect, especially in his latter days the broad full forehead, the silver hair, the deep and varied intonations of the voice, and the copious riverlike flow of words, sweeping along with a profusion of imagery, reflections, and incidents, in a majestic tide.

To sit down to represent this would be an act of presumption, like that attributed to the oriental monarch who, in a fit of splenetic revenge, cut up the magnificent river into a number of petty rivulets. I shall content myself with noting down some records of opinions which he expressed from time to time on literary subjects in my hearing, some of them nearly a quarter of a century ago.

'Remember, first read the ancient classical authors; then come to us; and you will be able to judge for yourself which of us is worth reading.

'The first book of Homer appears to be independent of the rest. The plan of the Odyssey is more methodical than that of the Iliad. The character of Achilles seems to me one of the grandest ever conceived. There

is something awful in it, particularly in the circumstance of his acting under an abiding foresight of his own death. One day, conversing with Payne Knight and Uvedale Price concerning Homer, I expressed my adiniration of Nestor's speech, as eminently natural, where he tells the Greek leaders that they are mere children in comparison with the heroes of old whom he had known. "But," said Knight and Price, "that passage is spurious!" However, I will not part with it. It is interesting to compare the same characters (Ajax, for instance) as treated by Homer, and then afterwards by the Greek dramatists, and to mark the difference of handling. In the plays of Euripides, politics come in as a disturbing force: Homer's characters act on physical impulse. There is more introversion in the dramatists: whence Aristotle rightly calls him τραγικώτατος. The tower-scene, where Helen comes into the presence of Priam and the old Trojans, displays one of the most beautiful pictures anywhere to be seen. Priam's speech on that occasion is a striking proof of the courtesy and delicacy of the Homeric age, or at least, of Homer himself.

'Catullus translated literally from the Greek; succceding Roman writers did not so, because Greek had then become the fashionable, universal language. They did not translate, but they paraphrased; the ideas remaining the same, their dress different. Hence the attention of the poets of the Augustan age was principally confined to the happy selection of the most appropriate words and elaborate phrases; and hence arises the difficulty of translating them.

'The characteristics ascribed by Horace to Pindar in his ode, "Pindarum quisquis," &c. are not found in his

1 Iliad, i. 260.

2 Iliad, iii. 156.

extant writings. Horace had many lyrical effusions of the Theban bard which we have not. How graceful is Horace's modesty in his "Ego apis Matinæ More modoque," as contrasted with the Dircæan Swan! Horace is my great favourite: I love him dearly.

I admire Virgil's high moral tone: for instance, that sublime "Aude, hospes, contemnere opes," &c. and "his dantem jura Catonem!" What courage and independence of spirit is there! There is nothing more imaginative and awful than the passage,

'In describing the weight of sorrow and fear on Dido's mind, Virgil shows great knowledge of human nature, especially in that exquisite touch of feeling,2

"Hoc visum nulli, non ipsi effata sorori."

The ministry of Confession is provided to satisfy the natural desire for some relief from the load of grief. Here, as in so many other respects, the Church of Rome adapts herself with consummate skill to our nature, and is strong by our weaknesses. Almost all her errors and corruptions are abuses of what is good.

'I think Buchanan's "Maiæ Calendæ " equal in sentiment, if not in elegance, to anything in Horace; but your brother Charles, to whom I repeated it the other day, pointed out a false quantity in it.3 Happily this had escaped me.'

'When I began to give myself up to the profession of a

1 En. viii. 352.

2 En. iv. 455.

3 If I remember right, it is in the third line,

'Ludisque dicatæ, jocisque ;'

poet for life, I was impressed with a conviction, that there were four English poets whom I must have continually before me as examples-Chaucer, Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton. These I must study, and equal if I could; and I need not think of the rest.'1

'I have been charged by some with disparaging Pope and Dryden. This is not so. I have committed much of both to memory. As far as Pope goes, he succeeds; but his Homer is not Homer, but Pope.'

'I cannot account for Shakspeare's low estimate of his own writings, except from the sublimity, the superhumanity, of his genius. They were infinitely below his conception of what they might have been, and ought to have been.'

'The mind often does not think, when it thinks that it is thinking. If we were to give our whole soul to anything, as the bee does to the flower, I conceive there would be little difficulty in any intellectual employment. Hence there is no excuse for obscurity in writing.'

666

Macbeth," is the best conducted of Shakspeare's plays. The fault of "Julius Cæsar," "Hamlet," and "Lear," is, that the interest is not, and by the nature of the case could not be, sustained to their conclusion. The death of Julius Cæsar is too overwhelming an incident for any stage of the drama but the last. It is an incident to which the mind clings, and from which it will not be torn away to share in other sorrows. The same may be said

a strange blunder, for Buchanan must have read Horace's, 'Quid dedicatum poscit Apollinem,'

a hundred times.

1 This paragraph was communicated by Mr. H. C. Robinson.