Those who knew Wordsworth only from his poetry might have supposed that he dwelt ever in a region too serene to admit of human agitations.  This was not the fact.  There was in his being a region of tumult as well as a higher region of calm, though it was almost wholly in the latter that his poetry lived.  It turned aside from mere personal excitements; and for that reason, doubtless, it developed more deeply those special ardours which belong at once to the higher imagination and to the moral being.  The passion which was suppressed elsewhere burned in his ’Sonnets to Liberty,’ and added a deeper sadness to the ’Yew-trees of Borrowdale.’  But his heart, as well as his imagination, was ardent.  When it spoke most powerfully in his poetry it spoke with a stern brevity unusual in that poetry, as in the poem ’There is a change and I am poor,’ and the still more remarkable one, ’A slumber did my spirit seal,’ a poem impassioned beyond the comprehension of those who fancy that Wordsworth lacks passion, merely because in him passion is neither declamatory nor, latently, sensual.  He was a man of strong affections, strong enough on one sorrowful occasion to withdraw him for a time from poetry.[270]

[270] ‘For us the stream of fiction ceased to flow’ (Dedicatory Stanzas to ’The White Doe of Rylstone’).

Referring once to two young children of his who had died about forty years previously, he described the details of their illnesses with an exactness and an impetuosity of troubled excitement, such as might have been expected if the bereavement had taken place but a few weeks before.  The lapse of time appeared to have left the sorrow submerged indeed, but still in all its first freshness.  Yet I afterwards heard that at the time of the illness, at least in the case of one of the two children, it was impossible to rouse his attention to the danger.  He chanced to be then under the immediate spell of one of those fits of poetic inspiration which descended on him like a cloud.  Till the cloud had drifted he could see nothing beyond.  Under the level of the calm there was, however, the precinct of the storm.  It expressed itself rarely but vehemently, partaking sometimes of the character both of indignation and sorrow.  All at once the trouble would pass away, and his countenance bask in its habitual calm, like a cloudless summer sky.  His indignation flamed out vehemently when he heard of a base action.  ’I could kick such a man across England with my naked foot,’ I heard him exclaim on such an occasion.  The more impassioned part of his nature connected itself especially with his political feelings.  He regarded his own intellect as one which united some of the faculties which belong to the statesman with those which belong to the poet; and public affairs interested him not less deeply than poetry.  It was as patriot, not poet, that he ventured to claim fellowship with Dante.[271] He did not accept the term ‘Reformer,’ because it implied an organic