WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

"He had much to say of America, the more that it gave occasion for his favorite topic-that society is being enlightened by a superficial tuition out of all proportion to its being restrained by moral culture. 'Schools do no good. Tuition is not education.' He thinks more of the education of circumstances than of tuition. 'It is not a question whether there are offenses of which the law takes cognizance, but whether there are offenses of which the law does not take cognizance.' Sin is what he fears, and how society is to escape without gravest mischiefs from this source. He even said, what seemed a paradox, that they needed a civil war in America to teach the necessity of knitting the social ties stronger. 'There may be,' he said, 'in America some vulgarity in manner; but that's not important. That comes of the pioneer state of things. But I fear they are too much given to the making of money; and, secondly, to politics; that they make political distinction the end, and not the means. And I fear that they lack a class of men of leisure-in short, of gentlemen, to give a tone of honor to the community.' He was against taking off the tax on newspapers in England, which the reformers represent as a tax upon knowledge, for this reason, that they would be inundated with base prints. He wished to impress on me, and all good Americans, to cultivate the moral, the constructive, etc., and never to call into action the physical strength of the people, as had just now been done in England in the Reform Bill.

"The conversation turned upon books. Lucretius he esteems a far higher poet than Virgil; not in his system, which is nothing, but in his power of illustration. 'Faith is necessary to explain anything, and to reconcile the

foreknowledge of God with human evil.' Of Cousin, whose lectures we had all been reading in Boston, he knew only the name.

"I inquired if he had read Carlyle's critical articles and translations. He said he thought him sometimes insane. He proceeded to abuse Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister' heartily. 'It was full of all manner of fornication. It was like the crossing of flies in the air.' He had never gone further than the first book; so disgusted was he that he threw the book across the room. I said what I could for the better parts of the book; and he courteously promised to look at it again. He said that Carlyle wrote most obscurely. He was clever and deep, but he defied the sympathies of everybody. Even Coleridge wrote more clearly, though he had always wished that Coleridge would write more to be understood.

"He led me out into his garden, and showed me the gravel walk in which thousands of his lines were composed. His eyes are much inflamed; this is no loss except for reading, as he never writes prose, and of poetry he carries hundreds of lines in his head before writing them. He had just returned from a visit to Staffa, and within three days had made three sonnets on Fingal's Cave. 'If you are interested in my verses,' he said, 'perhaps you will like to hear these lines.' I gladly assented; and he recollected himself for a few moments, and then stood forth and repeated, one after another the three entire sonnets with great animation. I fancied the second and third more beautiful than his poems are wont to be. This recitation was so unlooked-for and surprising-he, the old Wordsworth, standing apart and reciting to me in a garden-walk, like a school-boy declaiming-that I at first was near to laugh; but recollecting

myself, that I had come thus far to see a poet, and that he was chanting poems to me, I saw that he was right and I was wrong, and gladly gave myself up to hear.

"I told him how much the few printed extracts had quickened the desire to possess his unpublished poems. He replied that he was never in haste to publish; partly because he corrected a good deal, and every alteration is ungraciously received after printing; but what he had written would be printed whether he lived or died. I said 'Tintern Abbey' appeared to be the favorite poem with the public, but more contemplative readers preferred the first books of the 'Excursion,' and the sonnets. He said, 'Yes, they are better."

Fifteen years after,

This interview with Wordsworth took place in the summer of 1833. that is in 1848, Emerson again visited Europe, this time to deliver, by special invitation, a series of lectures in the principal places of England and Scotland. He was now no longer an unknown young American, but a man of mature years and established reputation, to whom the best doors in the land were open. Happening to be a guest of Harriet Martineau, a near neighbor of Wordsworth, the two paid a visit to the poet, now almost four score years of age. Emerson has preserved some interesting notes of the last visit, characteristic of the two men. A quarter of a century seems to have made little change in Wordsworth. "We found him," says Emerson,

"asleep on the sofa. He was at first silent and indisposed, as an old man who had suddenly wakened up before he had ended his nap." But soon

he became full of talk on the French news and various other topics. "His face sometimes lighted up, but his conversation was not marked by special force or elevation. He had a weather-beaten face; his features corrugated, especially the large nose.

He was nationally bitter on the French; bitter on the Scotchmen too. 'No Scotchman,' he said, 'can write English.' He detailed two models on one or other of which all the sentences of the historian Robertson are framed. Nor could Jeffrey or the Edinburgh Reviewers write English; nor could Carlyle, who was 'a pest to the English tongue.' He added incidentally, 'Gibbon cannot write English."" Of Tennyson he spoke in terms of rather reluctant approval. In fact, Wordsworth had long wrapped himself up in the belief that there was very little poetry worth reading except his own. Personally, though one of the best of men, he was one of the most ungenial.

One would have supposed that, of all English poets, Wordsworth would have been the prime favorite with Emerson. He does indeed speak highly of him, but usually with a kind of constraint, as though he was half sorry to be obliged to praise him. But, in the end, at the close of the account of this last interview, he gives this fair and just estimate of the poet :

WORDSWORTH'S GENIUS.

"Who that reads him well will know that in following the strong bent of his genius he was careless of the many, careless also of the few, self-assured that he should create the taste by which he was to be enjoyed.' He lived long enough to witness the revolution he had wrought, and 'to see what he foresaw.' There are torpid places in his mind; there is something hard and sterile in his poetry; want of grace, want of variety, want of due catholic and cosmopolitan scope. He had conformities to English politics and traditions; he had egotistical peculiarities in the choice and treatment of his subjects. But let us say of him that, alone of his time, he treated the human mind well, and with absolute truth. His adherence to his poetic creed rested on real inspirations. The Ode on 'Immortality' is the high-water mark which the intellect has reached in this age. New means were employed, and new realms added to the empire of the muse by his courage."

THOMAS CARLYLE.

To see Carlyle was one of the main motives which led Emerson, after a six months' sojourn in Italy, to visit Great Britain. Carlyle was now thirty-eight years old, eight years the senior of Emerson. Destined for the ministry of the Kirk of Scotland, he had at the age of twenty-two found that he did not believe in the doctrines of the Church of his fathers, and could not honestly enter upon its ministry. He engaged in literary task-work with stubborn industry and fair suc