modern times;' adding, 'Of course
I am not including my own in any comparison with those of others.' He
was not sanguine as to the future of English poetry. He thought that
there was much to be supplied in other departments of our literature,
and especially he desired a really great History of England; but he was
disposed to regard the roll of English poetry as made up, and as leaving
place for little more except what was likely to be eccentric or
imitational.

In his younger days Wordsworth had had to fight a great battle in
poetry, for both his subjects and his mode of treating them were
antagonistic to the maxims then current. It was fortunate for posterity,
no doubt, that his long 'militant estate' was animated by some mingling
of personal ambition with his love of poetry. Speaking in an early
sonnet of

'The poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth, and pure delight, by heavenly lays,'

he concludes,

'Oh! might my name be numbered among theirs,
Then gladly would I end my mortal days.'

He died at eighty, and general fame did not come to him till about
fifteen years before his death. This perhaps might have been fifteen
years too soon, if he had set any inordinate value on it. But it was not
so. Shelley tells us that' Fame is love disguised;' and it was
intellectual sympathy that Wordsworth had always valued far more than
reputation. 'Give me thy love; I claim no other fee,' had been his
demand on his reader. When Fame had laid her tardy garland at his feet
he found on it no fresher green than his 'Rydalian laurels' had always
worn. Once he said to me, 'It is indeed a deep satisfaction to hope and
believe that my poetry will be, while it lasts, a help to the cause of
virtue and truth--especially among the young. As for myself, it seems
now of little moment how long I may be remembered. When a man pushes off
in his little boat into the great seas of Infinity and Eternity, it
surely signifies little how long he is kept in sight by watchers from
the shore.'

Such are my chief recollections of the great poet, whom I knew but in
his old age, but whose heart retained its youth till his daughter Dora's
death. He seemed to me one who from boyhood had been faithful to a high
vocation; one who had esteemed it his office to minister, in an age of
conventional civilisation, at Nature's altar, and who had in his later
life explained and vindicated such life-long ministration, even while he
seemed