I have been led, as I said at the beginning of my letter, to make this record, partly from your suggestion, and partly from a remark of Southey which I have lately seen, to the effect that Wordsworth was one of whom posterity would desire to know all that can be remembered.  You will not, I trust, deem the incidents I have set down trivial; or consider any detail too minute, the object of which was only to bring the living man before you.  Now that he has gone for ever from our sight in this world, I am led to look back to the interview with a deeper satisfaction; and it may be that this full account of it will have value hereafter.  To you it was due that I should make the record; by myself these remembrances will ever be cherished among my choicest possessions.

Believe me, my dear friend, yours faithfully,

Ellis Yarnall.[268]

[268] Memoirs, ii. 483-500.

(j) RECOLLECTIONS OF WORDSWORTH.

By Aubrey de Vere, Esq.

(Sent to the present Editor, and now first published)

PART I.

It was about eight years before his death that I had the happiness of making acquaintance with Wordsworth.  During the next four years I saw a good deal of him, chiefly among his own mountains, and, besides many delightful walks with him, I had the great honour of passing some days under his roof.  The strongest of my impressions respecting him was that made by the manly simplicity, and lofty rectitude, which characterised him.  In one of his later sonnets he writes of himself thus:  ’As a true man who long had served the lyre:’—­it was because he was a true man that he was a true poet; and it was impossible to know him without being reminded of this.  In any case he must have been recognised as a man of original and energetic genius; but it was his strong and truthful moral nature, his intellectual sincerity, the abiding conscientiousness of his imagination, which enabled that genius to do its great work, and bequeath to the England of the future the most solid mass of deep-hearted and authentic poetry which has been the gift to her of any poet since the Elizabethan age.  There was in his nature a veracity, which, had it not been combined with an idealising imagination not less remarkable, would to many have appeared prosaic; yet, had he not possessed that characteristic, the products of his imagination would have lacked reality.  They might still have enunciated a deep and sound philosophy; but they would have been divested of that human interest which belongs to them in a yet higher degree.  All the little incidents of the neighbourhood were to him important.