and a conscience.  Wordsworth married in 1802; and then the two poets passed through their share of the experience of human life, a few miles apart, meeting occasionally on some mountain ridge or hidden dale, and in one another’s houses, drawn closer by their common joys and sorrows, but never approximating in the quality of their genius, or in the stand-points from which they respectively looked out upon human affairs.  They had children, loved them, and each lost some of them; and they felt tenderly for each other when each little grave was opened.  Southey, the most amiable of men in domestic life, gentle, generous, serene, and playful, grew absolutely ferocious about politics, as his articles in the “Quarterly Review” showed all the world.  Wordsworth, who had some of the irritability and pettishness, mildly described by himself as “gentle stirrings of the mind,” which occasionally render great men ludicrously like children, and who was, moreover, highly conservative after his early democratic fever had passed off, grew more and more liberal with advancing years.  I do not mean that he verged towards the Reformers,—­but that he became more enlarged, tolerant, and generally sympathetic in his political views and temper.  It thus happened that society at a distance took up a wholly wrong impression of the two men,—­supposing Southey to be an ill-conditioned bigot, and Wordsworth a serene philosopher, far above being disturbed by troubles in daily life, or paying any attention to party-politics.  He showed some of his ever-growing liberality, by the way, in speaking of this matter of temper.  In old age, he said that the world certainly does get on in minor morals:  that when he was young “everybody had a temper”; whereas now no such thing is allowed; amiability is the rule; and an imperfect temper is an offence and a misfortune of a distinctive character.

Among the letters which now and then arrived from strangers, in the early days of Wordsworth’s fame, was one which might have come from Coleridge, if they had never met.  It was full of admiration and sympathy, expressed as such feelings would be by a man whose analytical and speculative faculties predominated over all the rest.  The writer was, indeed, in those days, marvellously like Coleridge,—­subtile in analysis to excess, of gorgeous imagination, bewitching discourse, fine scholarship, with a magnificent power of promising and utter incapacity in performing, and with the same habit of intemperance in opium.  By his own account, his “disease was to meditate too much and observe too little.”  I need hardly explain that this was De Quincey; and when I have said that, I need hardly explain further that advancing time and closer acquaintance made the likeness to Coleridge bear a smaller and smaller proportion to the whole character of the man.