One day I met Mr. M.T.  Sadler at the late Archbishop’s.  Sadler did not know me; and before dinner he began to launch forth in a critical dissertation on contemporary English Poetry.  ’Among living poets, your Grace may know there is one called Wordsworth, whose writings the world calls childish and puerile, but I think some of them wonderfully pathetic.’  ‘Now, Mr. Sadler,’ said the Archbishop, ’what a scrape you are in! here is Mr. Wordsworth:  but go down with him to dinner, and you will find that, though a great poet, he does not belong to the “genus irritabile."’ This was very happy.

After returning one day from church at Addington, I took the liberty of saying a few words on the sermon we had heard.  It was a very homely performance.  ’I am rather surprised, my Lord Archbishop, that when your Grace can have the choice of so many preachers in England, you do not provide better for yourself.’  ‘Oh!’ said he, ’I think I can bear bad preaching better than most people, and I therefore keep it to myself.’  This seemed to me a very pleasing trait in the gentle and loveable character of that admirable man.

Patriarchal usages have not quite deserted us of these valleys.  This morning (new year’s day) you were awakened early by the minstrels playing under the eaves, ‘Honour to Mr. Wordsworth!’ ’Honour to Mrs. Wordsworth!’ and so to each member of the household by name, servants included, each at his own window.  These customs bind us together as a family, and are as beneficial as they are delightful.  May they never disappear!

In my Ode on the ‘Intimations of Immortality in Childhood,’ I do not profess to give a literal representation of the state of the affections and of the moral being in childhood.  I record my own feelings at that time—­my absolute spirituality, my ‘all-soulness,’ if I may so speak.  At that time I could not believe that I should lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust.

Many of my poems have been influenced by my own circumstances when I was writing them.  ‘The Warning’ was composed on horseback, while I was riding from Moresby in a snow-storm.  Hence the simile in that poem,

    ’While thoughts press on and feelings overflow,
    And quick words round him fall like flakes of snow.’

In the ‘Ecclesiastical Sonnets,’ the lines concerning the Monk (Sonnet xxi.),

      ’Within his cell. 
    Round the decaying trunk of human pride. 
    At morn, and eve, and midnight’s silent hour,
    Do penitential cogitations cling: 
    Like ivy round some ancient elm they twine
    In grisly folds and strictures serpentine;
    Yet while they strangle, a fair growth they bring
    For recompence—­their own perennial bower;’—­

were suggested to me by a beautiful tree clad as thus described, which you may remember in Lady Fleming’s park at Rydal, near the path to the upper waterfall.