word, and kept his mouth peremptorily shut under his beard.  It was a sight worth taking the voyage for; and it was worth going a long round to see him standing on the shore,—­“reminding one of the first man, Adam,” (as was said of him,) in his best estate,—­the tall, broad frame, large head, marked features, and long hair; and the tread which shook the ground, and the voice which roused the echoes afar and made one’s heart-strings vibrate within.  These attributes made strangers turn to look at him on the road, and fixed all eyes on him in the ball-room at Ambleside, when any local object induced him to be a steward.  Every old boatman and young angler, every hoary shepherd and primitive housewife in the uplands and dales, had an enthusiasm for him.  He could enter into the solemnity of speculation with Wordsworth while floating at sunset on the lake; and not the less gamesomely could he collect a set of good fellows under the lamp at his supper-table, and take off Wordsworth’s or Coleridge’s monologues to the life.  There was that between them which must always have precluded a close sympathy; and their faults were just what each could least allow for in another.  Of Wilson’s it is enough to say that Scott’s injunction to him to “leave off sack, purge, and live cleanly,” if he wished for the Moral Philosophy Chair, was precisely what was needed.  It was still needed some time after, when, though a Professor of Moral Philosophy, he was seen, with poor Campbell, leaving a tavern one morning, in Edinburgh, haggard and red-eyed, hoarse and exhausted,—­not only the feeble Campbell, but the mighty Wilson,—­they having sat together twenty-four hours, discussing poetry and wine with all their united energies.  This sort of thing was not to the taste of Wordsworth or Southey, any more than their special complacencies were venerable to the humor of Christopher North.  Yet they could cordially admire one another; and when sorrows came over them, in dreary impartiality, they could feel reverently and deeply for each other.  When Southey lost his idolized boy, Herbert, and had to watch over his insane wife, always his dearest friend, and all the dearer for her helpless and patient suffering under an impenetrable gloom,—­when Wordsworth was bereaved of the daughter who made the brightness of his life in his old age,—­and when Wilson was shaken to the centre by the loss of his wife, and mourned alone in the damp shades of Elleray, where he would allow not a twig to be cut from the trees she loved,—­the sorrow of each moved them all.  Elleray was a gloomy place then, and Wilson never surmounted the melancholy which beset him there; and he wisely parted with it some years before his death.  The later depression in his case was in proportion to the earlier exhilaration.  His love of Nature and of genial human intercourse had been too exuberant; and he became incapable of enjoyment from either, in his last years.  He never recovered from an attack of pressure on the brain, and died paralyzed in the spring of 1854.  He had before gone from among us with his joy; and then we heard that he had dropped out of life with his griefs; and our beautiful region, and the region of life, were so much the darker in a thousand eyes.