little his
neighbours had to do with the poet's genial seasons of "smooth
passions, smooth discourse, and joyous thought."

For those days Wordsworth was a considerable traveller. Between 1820
and 1837 he made long tours abroad, to Switzerland, to Holland, to
Belgium, to Italy. In other years he visited Wales, Scotland,
and Ireland. He was no mechanical tourist, admiring to order and
marvelling by regulation; and he confessed to Mrs. Fletcher that he
fell asleep before the Venus de Medici at Florence. But the product of
these wanderings is to be seen in some of his best sonnets, such as
the first on Calais Beach, the famous one on Westminster Bridge, the
second of the two on Bruges, where "the Spirit of Antiquity mounts to
the seat of grace within the mind--a deeper peace than that in deserts
found"--and in some other fine pieces.

In weightier matters than mere travel, Wordsworth showed himself no
mere recluse. He watched the great affairs then being transacted in
Europe with the ardent interest of his youth, and his sonnets to
Liberty, commemorating the attack by France upon the Swiss, the fate
of Venice, the struggle of Hofer, the resistance of Spain, give no
unworthy expression to some of the best of the many and varied motives
that animated England in her long struggle with Bonaparte. The sonnet
to Toussaint l'Ouverture concludes with some of the noblest lines in
the English language. The strong verses on the expected death of Mr.
Fox are alive with a magnanimous public spirit that goes deeper than
the accidents of political opinion. In his young days he had sent Fox
a copy of the _Lyrical Ballads_, with a long letter indicating his
sense of Fox's great and generous qualities. Pitt he admits that he
could never regard with complacency. "I believe him, however," he
said, "to have been as disinterested a man, and as true a lover of his
country, as it was possible for so ambitious a man to be. His first
wish (though probably unknown to himself) was that his country should
prosper under his administration; his next that it should prosper.
Could the order of these wishes have been reversed, Mr. Pitt would
have avoided many of the grievous mistakes into which, I think, he
fell." "You always went away from Burke," he once told Haydon, "with
your mind filled; from Fox with your feelings excited; and from Pitt
with wonder at his having had the power to make the worse appear the
better reason."

Of the poems composed un