has accompanied him, as I have, on his midnight walks into the cheap
lodging-houses provided for London's lowest poor, cannot have failed to
learn lessons never to be forgotten. Newgate and Smithfield were lifted
out of their abominations by his eloquent pen, and many a hospital is
to-day all the better charity for having been visited and watched by
Charles Dickens. To use his own words, through his whole life he did
what he could "to lighten the lot of those rejected ones whom the world
has too long forgotten and too often misused."

These inadequate, and, of necessity, hastily written, records must stand
for what they are worth as personal recollections of the great author
who has made so many millions happy by his inestimable genius and
sympathy. His life will no doubt be written out in full by some
competent hand in England; but however numerous the volumes of his
biography, the half can hardly be told of the good deeds he has
accomplished for his fellow-men.

And who could ever tell, if those volumes were written, of the subtle
qualities of insight and sympathy which rendered him capable of
friendship above most men,--which enabled him to reinstate its ideal,
and made his presence a perpetual joy, and separation from him an
ineffaceable sorrow?

WORDSWORTH.

_"His mind is, as it were, coeval with the primary forms of things; his
imagination holds immediately from nature, and 'owes no allegiance' but
'to the elements.' ....He sees all things in himself."_--Hazlitt.

V. WORDSWORTH.

That portrait looking down so calmly from the wall is an original
picture of the poet Wordsworth, drawn in crayon a few years before he
died. He went up to London on purpose to sit for it, at the request of
Moxon, his publisher, and his friends in England always considered it a
perfect likeness of the poet. After the head was engraved, the artist's
family disposed of the drawing, and through the watchful kindness of my
dear old friend, Mary Russell Mitford, the portrait came across the
Atlantic to this house. Miss Mitford said America ought to have on view
such a perfect representation of the great poet, and she used all her
successful influence in my behalf. So there the picture hangs for
anybody's inspection at any hour of the day.

I once made a pilgrimage to the small market-town of Hawkshead, in the
valley of Esthwaite, where Wordsworth went to school in his ninth year.
The thoughtful boy was lodged in the house