a son, brother, husband, father, master, friend, he moves with firm
yet light steps, alike unostentatious and alike exemplary. As a writer,
he has uniformly made his talents subservient to the best interests of
humanity, of public virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever been
the cause of pure religion and of liberty, of national independence and
of national illumination.

When future critics shall weigh out his guerdon of praise and censure,
it will be Southey the poet only that will supply them with the scanty
materials for the latter. They will not fail to record that as no man
was ever a more constant friend, never had poet more friends and
honourers among the good of all parties, and that quacks in education,
quacks in politics, and quacks in criticism, were his only enemies.

_III.--Wordsworth's Early Poems_

During the last year of my residence at Cambridge I became acquainted
with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication, entitled "Descriptive
Sketches," and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic
genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced. In the whole
poem there is a harshness and acerbity, combined with words and images
all aglow, which might recall gorgeous blossoms rising out of a hard and
thorny rind and shell, within which the rich fruit was elaborating. The
language was not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and
contorted, as by its own impatient strength. It not seldom, therefore,
justified the complaint of obscurity.

I was in my twenty-fourth year when I had the happiness of knowing Mr.
Wordsworth personally, and by that time the occasional obscurities which
had arisen from an imperfect control over the resources of his native
language had almost wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect
of arbitrary and illogical phrases, at once arbitrary and fantastic,
which alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius. There was only
evident the union of deep feeling with profound thought; and the
original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the
depth and height of the ideal world, around forms, incidents, and
situations of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the
lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dewdrops.

To find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the
Ancient of Days and all His works With feelings as fresh as if all had
then sprung forth at the first creative fiat, characterises th