ar more capacious in its powers and opportunities,
than in Milton's days. It was not, unquestionably, a perfect life, even as
a man's, far less as a poet's. He did feel and resent, more than beseemed
a great man, the pursuit and persecution of the hounds, whether "gray" and
swift-footed, or whether curs of low degree, who dogged his steps. His
voice from his woods sounded at times rather like the moan of wounded
weakness, than the bellow of masculine wrath. He should, simply, in reply
to his opponents, have written on at his poems, and let his prefaces
alone. "If they receive your first book ill," wrote Thomas Carlyle to a
new author, "write the second better--so much better as to shame them."
When will authors learn that to answer an unjust attack, is, merely to
give it a keener edge, and that all injustice carries the seed of oblivion
and exposure in itself? To use the language of the masculine spirit just
quoted, "it is really a truth, one never knows whether praise be really
good for one--or whether it be not, in very fact, the worst poison that
could be administered. Blame, or even vituperation, I have always found a
safer article. In the long run, a man _has_, and _is_, just what he _is_
and _has_--the world's notion of him has not altered him at all, except,
indeed, if it have poisoned him with self-conceit, and made a _caput
mortuum_ of him."

The sensitiveness of authors--were it not such a _sore_ subject--might admit
of some curious reflections. One would sometimes fancy that Apollo, in an
angry hour, had done to his sons, what fable records him to have done to
Marsyas--_flayed_ them alive. Nothing has brought more contempt upon
authors than this--implying, as it does, a lack of common courage and
manhood. The true son of genius ought to rush before the public as the
warrior into battle, resolved to hack and hew his way to eminence and
power, not to whimper like a schoolboy at every scratch--to acknowledge
only home thrusts--large, life-letting-out blows--determined either to
conquer or to die, and, feeling that battles should be lost in the same
spirit in which they are won. If Wordsworth did not fully answer this
ideal, others have sunk far more disgracefully and habitually below it.

In private, Wordsworth, we understand, was pure, mild, simple, and
majestic--perhaps somewhat austere in his judgments of the erring, and,
perhaps, somewhat narrow in his own economics. In accordance, we suppose,
with that part