on with Emily, is raised as it were from its mere
animal nature into something mysterious and saint-like. He said he
should devote much labour to perfecting the execution of it in the mere
business parts, in which, from anxiety 'to get on' with the more
important parts, he was sensible that imperfections had crept in, which
gave the style a feebleness of character.

He talked of Milton, and observed how he sometimes indulged himself, in
the 'Paradise Lost,' in lines which, if not in time, you could hardly
call verse, instancing,

'And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old;'

and then noticed the sweet-flowing lines which followed, and with regard
to which he had no doubt the unmusical line before had been inserted.

'Paradise Regained' he thought the most perfect in _execution_ of
anything written by Milton; that and the 'Merchant of Venice,' in
language, he thought were almost faultless: with the exception of some
little straining in some of the speeches about the caskets, he said,
they were perfect, the genuine English expressions of the ideas of
their own great minds. Thomson he spoke of as a real poet, though it
appeared less in his 'Seasons' than in his other poems. He had wanted
some judicious adviser to correct his taste; but every person he had to
deal with only served to injure it. He had, however, a true love and
feeling for Nature, and a greater share of poetical imagination, as
distinguished from dramatic, than any man between Milton and him. As he
stood looking at Ambleside, seen across the valley, embosomed in wood,
and separated from us at sufficient distance, he quoted from Thomson's
'Hymn on Solitude,' and suggested the addition, or rather insertion, of
a line at the close, where he speaks of glancing at London from Norwood.
The line, he said, should have given something of a more favourable
impression:

'Ambition---- [242] and pleasure vain.'

_October 14th, Foxhow_.--We have had a delightful day to-day. The
weather being fine, Wordsworth agreed to go with us into Easedale; so we
got three ponies, for Mary and Madge, and Fred and Alley, alternately,
and walked from Grasmere, he _trudging_[243] before, with his green
gauze shade over his eyes, and in his plaid jacket and waistcoat. First,
he turned aside at a little farm-house, and took us into a swelling
field, to look down on the tumbling stream which bounded it, and which
we saw precipitated at a distance, in a broad white sheet, from th