I recollect, too, the pleasure he expressed when I said to him, ’You are now sitting in Dante’s chair.’  It faces the south transept of the cathedral at Florence.

I have been often asked whether Mr. W. wrote anything on the journey, and my answer has always been, ‘Little or nothing.’  Seeds were cast into the earth, and they took root slowly.  This reminds me that I once was privy to the conception of a sonnet, with a distinctness which did not once occur on the longer Italian journey.  This was when I accompanied him into the Isle of Man.  We had been drinking tea with Mr. and Mrs. Cookson, and left them when the weather was dull.  Very soon after leaving them we passed the church tower of Bala Sala.  The upper part of the tower had a sort of frieze of yellow lichens.  Mr. W. pointed it out to me, and said, ‘It’s a perpetual sunshine.’  I thought no more of it, till I read the beautiful sonnet,

’Broken in fortune, but in mind entire;’[245]

and then I exclaimed, I was present at the conception of this sonnet, at least of the combination of thought out of which it arose.

I beg to subscribe myself, with sincere esteem,

                   Faithfully yours,
                         H.C.  ROBINSON.[246]

[245] See Memoirs, ii. 246.

[246] Ibid. ii. 329-32.

* * * * *

(d) REMINISCENCES OF WORDSWORTH.

BY LADY RICHARDSON, AND MRS. DAVY, OF THE OAKS, AMBLESIDE.

(1.) LADY RICHARDSON.

Lancrigg, Easedale, August 26. 1841.

Wordsworth made some striking remarks on Goethe in a walk on the terrace yesterday.  He thinks that the German poet is greatly overrated, both in this country and his own.  He said, ’He does not seem to me to be a great poet in either of the classes of poets.  At the head of the first class I would place Homer and Shakspeare, whose universal minds are able to reach every variety of thought and feeling without bringing their own individuality before the reader.  They infuse, they breathe life into every object they approach, but you never find themselves.  At the head of the second class, those whom you can trace individually in all they write, I would place Spenser and Milton.  In all that Spenser writes you can trace the gentle affectionate spirit of the man; in all that Milton writes you find the exalted sustained being that he was.  Now in what Goethe writes, who aims to be of the first class, the universal, you find the man himself, the artificial man, where he should not be found; so consider him a very artificial writer, aiming to be universal, and yet constantly exposing his individuality, which his character was not of a kind to dignify.  He had not sufficiently clear moral perceptions to make him anything but an artificial writer.