and almost wearisome, and found his divine reflections and unfathomabilities stinted, scanty, uncertain, palish.  From these and many other disparagements, one gladly passes to the picture of the poet as he was in the flesh at a breakfast-party given by Henry Taylor, at a tavern in St. James’s Street, in 1840.  The subject of the talk was Literature, its laws, practices, and observances:—­“He talked well in his way; with veracity, easy brevity and force; as a wise tradesman would of his tools and workshop, and as no unwise one could.  His voice was good, frank, and sonorous, though practically clear, distinct, and forcible, rather than melodious; the tone of him business-like, sedately confident; no discourtesy, yet no anxiety about being courteous:  a fine wholesome rusticity, fresh as his mountain breezes, sat well on the stalwart veteran, and on all he said and did.  You would have said he was a usually taciturn man, glad to unlock himself to audience sympathetic and intelligent, when such offered itself.  His face bore marks of much, not always peaceful, meditation; the look of it not bland or benevolent, so much as close, impregnable, and hard; a man multa tacere loquive paratus, in a world where he had experienced no lack of contradictions as he strode along!  The eyes were not very brilliant, but they had a quiet clearness; there was enough of brow, and well shaped; rather too much of cheek (’horse-face,’ I have heard satirists say), face of squarish shape and decidedly longish, as I think the head itself was (its ‘length’ going horizontal); he was large-boned, lean, but still firm-knit, tall, and strong-looking when he stood; a right good old steel-gray figure, with rustic simplicity and dignity about him, and a vivacious strength looking through him which might have suited one of those old steel-gray Markgrafs [Graf = Grau,’Steel-gray’] whom Henry the Fowler set up to ward the ‘marches,’ and do battle with the intrusive heathen, in a stalwart and judicious manner.”

Whoever might be his friends within an easy walk, or dwelling afar, the poet knew how to live his own life.  The three fine sonnets headed Personal Talk, so well known, so warmly accepted in our better hours, so easily forgotten in hours not so good between pleasant levities and grinding preoccupations, show us how 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.