iscoursed
wild poems to us,--musical romances from Dreamland; but the luxury to
himself and us was bought by injury to others which was altogether
irreparable, and pardonable only on the ground that the balance of his
mind was destroyed by a fatal intellectual, in addition to physical
intemperance. In him we see an extreme case of a life of contemplation
uncontrolled by will and unchecked by action. His faculty of will
perished, and his prerogative of action died out. His contemplations
must necessarily be worth just so much the less to us as his mental
structure was deformed,--extravagantly developed in one direction, and
dwarfed in another.

The singularity in Wordsworth's case, on the other hand, is that his
contemplative tendencies not only coexisted with, but were implicated
with, the most precise and vivid apprehension of small realities. There
was no proportion in his mind; and vaticination and twaddle rolled
off his eloquent tongue as chance would have it. At one time he would
discourse like a seer, on the slightest instigation, by the hour
together; and next, he would hold forth with equal solemnity, on the
pettiest matter of domestic economy. I have known him take up some
casual notice of a "beck" (brook) in the neighborhood, and discourse
of brooks for two hours, till his hearers felt as if they were by the
rivers of waters in heaven; and next, he would talk on and on, till
stopped by some accident, on his doubt whether Mrs. Wordsworth gave a
penny apiece or a half-penny apiece for trapped mice to a little girl
who had undertaken to clear the house of them. It has been common to
regret that he held the office of Stamp-Distributor in the District; but
it was probably a great benefit to his mind as well as his fortunes. It
was something that it gave him security and ease as to the maintenance
of his family; but that is less important than its necessitating a
certain amount of absence from home, and intercourse with men on
business. He was no reader in mature life; and the concentration of his
mind on his own views, and his own genius, and the interests of his home
and neighborhood, caused some foibles, as it was; and it might have been
almost fatal, but for some office which allowed him to gratify his love
of out-door life at the same time that it led him into intercourse
with men in another capacity than as listeners to himself, or peasants
engrossed in their own small concerns.

Southey was not contemplativ