his own powers, which was strong, though far from
exaggerated, rendered more striking and more touching his humility in
all that concerned Religion. It used to remind me of what I once heard
Mr. Rogers say, viz. 'There is a special character of _greatness_ about
humility for it implies that a man can, in an unusual degree, estimate
the _greatness_ of what is above us.' Fortunately his diffidence did not
keep Wordsworth silent on sacred themes; his later poems include an
unequivocal as well as beautiful confession of Christian faith; and one
of them, 'The Primrose of the Rock,' is as distinctly Wordsworthian in
its inspiration as it is Christian in its doctrine. Wordsworth was a
'high churchman,' and also, in his prose mind, strongly anti-Roman
Catholic, partly on political grounds; but that it was otherwise as
regards his mind poetic is obvious from many passages in his Christian
poetry, especially those which refer to the monastic system, and the
Schoolmen, and his sonnet on the Blessed Virgin, whom he addresses as

'Our tainted nature's solitary boast.'

He used to say that the idea of one who was both Virgin and Mother had
sunk so deep into the heart of Humanity, that there it must ever remain.

Wordsworth's estimate of his contemporaries was not generally high. I
remember his once saying to me, 'I have known many that might he called
very _clever_ men, and a good many of real and vigorous _abilities_, but
few of genius; and only one whom I should call "wonderful." That one was
Coleridge. At any hour of the day or night he would talk by the hour, if
there chanced to be _any_ sympathetic listener, and talk better than the
best page of his writings; for a pen half paralysed his genius. A child
would sit quietly at his feet and wonder, till the torrent had passed
by. The only man like Coleridge whom I have known is Sir William
Hamilton, Astronomer Royal of Dublin.' I remember, however, that when I
recited by his fireside Alfred Tennyson's two political poems, 'You ask
me why, though ill at ease,' and 'Of old sat Freedom on the heights,'
the old bard listened with a deepening attention, and when I had ended,
said after a pause, 'I must acknowledge that those two poems are very
solid and noble in thought. Their diction also seems singularly
stately.' He was a great admirer of _Philip van Artevelde_. In the case
of a certain poet since dead, and never popular, he said to me, 'I
consider his sonnets to be the best of