requisite for their attainment; and the best test of an end being good
is the purity of the means, which, by the laws of God and our nature,
must be employed in order to secure it. Even the interests of eternity
become distorted the moment they are looked at through the medium of
impure means. Scarcely had I written this, when I was told by a person
in the Treasury, that it is intended to carry the Reform Bill by a new
creation of peers. If this be done, the constitution of England will be
destroyed, and the present Lord Chancellor, after having contributed to
murder it, may consistently enough pronounce, in his place, its _eloge
funebre_!

[122] As revolutionary.

I turn with pleasure to the sonnets you have addressed to me and if I
did not read them with unqualified satisfaction it was only from
consciousness that I was unworthy of the enconiums they bestowed upon
me.

Among the papers I have lately been arranging are passages that would
prove as forcibly as anything of mine that has been published, you were
not mistaken in your supposition that it is the habit of my mind
inseparably to connect loftiness of imagination with that humility of
mind which is best taught in Scripture.

Hoping that you will be indulgent to my silence, which has been, from
various causes, protracted contrary to my wish,

Believe me to be, dear Sir,
Very faithfully yours,
WM. WORDSWORTH.[123]

[123] _Memoirs_, ii. 252-4.

76. _Of Poetry and Prose: Milton and Shakspeare: Reform, &c._

LETTER TO PROFESSOR HAMILTON, DUBLIN.

Nov. 22. 1831.

MY DEAR MR. HAMILTON,

You send me showers of verses, which I receive with much pleasure, as do
we all; yet have we fears that this employment may seduce you from the
path of Science, which you seem destined to tread with so much honour to
yourself and profit to others. Again and again I must repeat, that the
composition of verse is infinitely more of an art than men are prepared
to believe; and absolute success in it depends upon innumerable
minutiae, which it grieves me you should stoop to acquire a knowledge
of. Milton talks of 'pouring easy his unpremeditated verse.' It would be
harsh, untrue, and odious, to say there is anything like cant in this;
but it is not true to the letter, and tends to mislead. I could point
out to you five hundred passages in Milton upon which labour has been
bestowed, and twic