his nature.  He was himself a wild poem; and he discoursed 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 contemplative or speculative, and it could only have been because he lived at the Lakes and was Coleridge’s brother-in-law that he was implicated with the two speculative poets at all.  It has been carelessly reported by Lake tourists that Southey was not beloved among his neighbors, while Wordsworth was; and that therefore the latter was the better man, in a social sense.  It should be remembered that Southey was a working man, and that the other two were not; and, moreover, it should never