morals, as guarding them from doing evil that good may come, or thinking that any ends can be so good as to justify wrong means for attaining them.  In fact, means, in the concerns of this life, are infinitely more important than ends, which are to be valued mainly according to the qualities and virtues requisite for their attainment; and the best test of an end being good is the purity of the means, which, by the laws of God and our nature, must be employed in order to secure it.  Even the interests of eternity become distorted the moment they are looked at through the medium of impure means.  Scarcely had I written this, when I was told by a person in the Treasury, that it is intended to carry the Reform Bill by a new creation of peers.  If this be done, the constitution of England will be destroyed, and the present Lord Chancellor, after having contributed to murder it, may consistently enough pronounce, in his place, its eloge funebre!

[122] As revolutionary.

I turn with pleasure to the sonnets you have addressed to me and if I did not read them with unqualified satisfaction it was only from consciousness that I was unworthy of the enconiums they bestowed upon me.

Among the papers I have lately been arranging are passages that would prove as forcibly as anything of mine that has been published, you were not mistaken in your supposition that it is the habit of my mind inseparably to connect loftiness of imagination with that humility of mind which is best taught in Scripture.

Hoping that you will be indulgent to my silence, which has been, from various causes, protracted contrary to my wish,

Believe me to be, dear Sir,
Very faithfully yours,
WM. WORDSWORTH.[123]

[123] Memoirs, ii. 252-4.

76. Of Poetry and Prose:  Milton and Shakspeare:  Reform, &c.

LETTER TO PROFESSOR HAMILTON, DUBLIN.

Nov. 22. 1831.

MY DEAR MR. HAMILTON,

You send me showers of verses, which I receive with much pleasure, as do we all; yet have we fears that this employment may seduce you from the path of Science, which you seem destined to tread with so much honour to yourself and profit to others.  Again and again I must repeat, that the composition of verse is infinitely more of an art than men are prepared to believe; and absolute success in it depends upon innumerable minutiae, which it grieves me you should stoop to acquire a knowledge of.  Milton talks of ‘pouring easy his unpremeditated verse.’  It would be harsh, untrue, and odious, to say there is anything like cant in this; but it is not true to the letter, and tends to mislead.  I could point out to you five hundred passages in Milton upon which labour has been bestowed, and twice five hundred more to which additional labour would have been serviceable.  Not that I regret the absence of such labour, because no poem contains more proofs