th maintained a stern
composure, and went his way, content that the world went quite another
road. When he knew him better, he found that no man gave you so
faithful and vivid a picture of any person or thing which he had seen
with his own eyes.

I inquired if Wordsworth came up to this description he had heard of
him as the best talker in England.

"Well," he replied, "it was true you could get more meaning out of
what Wordsworth had to say than from anybody else. Leigh Hunt would
emit more pretty, pleasant, ingenious flashes in an hour than
Wordsworth in a day. But in the end you would find, if well
considered, that you had been drinking perfumed water in one case, and
in the other you got the sense of a deep, earnest man, who had thought
silently and painfully on many things. There was one exception to your
satisfaction with the man. When he spoke of poetry he harangued about
meters, cadences, rhythms, and so forth, and one could not be at the
pains of listening to him. But on all other subjects he had more sense
in him of a sound and instructive sort than any other literary man in
England."

I suggested that Wordsworth might naturally like to speak of the
instrumental part of his art, and consider what he had to say very
instructive, as by modifying the instrument, he had wrought a
revolution in English poetry. He taught it to speak in unsophisticated
language and of the humbler and more familiar interests of life.

Carlyle said, "No, not so; all he had got to say in that way was like
a few driblets from the great ocean of German speculation on kindred
subjects by Goethe and others. Coleridge, who had been in Germany,
brought it over with him, and they translated Teutonic thought into a
poor, disjointed, whitey-brown sort of English, and that was nearly
all. But Wordsworth, after all, was the man of most practical mind of
any of the persons connected with literature whom he had encountered;
though his pastoral pipings were far from being of the importance his
admirers imagined. He was essentially a cold, hard, silent, practical
man, who, if he had not fallen into poetry, would have done effectual
work of some sort in the world. This was the impression one got of him
as he looked out of his stern blue eyes, superior to men and
circumstances."

I said I had expected to hear of a man of softer mood, more
sympathetic and less taciturn.

Carlyle said, "No, not at all; he was a man quite other than that; a
man of