change in our institutions, and this he deemed both needless and dangerous; but he used to say that while he was a decided Conservative, he remembered that to preserve our institutions we must be ever improving them.  He was, indeed, from first to last, preeminently a patriot, an impassioned as well as a thoughtful one.  Yet his political sympathies were not with his own country only, but with the progress of Humanity.  Till disenchanted by the excesses and follies of the first French revolution, his hopes and sympathies associated themselves ardently with the new order of things created by it; and I have heard him say that he did not know how any generous-minded young man, entering on life at the time of that great uprising, could have escaped the illusion.  To the end his sympathies were ever with the cottage hearth far more than with the palace.  If he became a strong supporter of what has been called ’the hierarchy of society,’ it was chiefly because he believed the principle of ‘equality’ to be fatal to the well-being and the true dignity of the poor.  Moreover, in siding politically with the Crown and the coronets, he considered himself to be siding with the weaker party in our democratic days.

[271] See his Sonnet on the seat of Dante, close to the Duomo at Florence (Poems of Early and Late Years).

The absence of love-poetry in Wordsworth’s works has often been remarked upon, and indeed brought as a charge against them.  He once told me that if he had avoided that form of composition, it was by no means because the theme did not interest him, but because, treated as it commonly has been, it tends rather to disturb and lower the reader’s moral and imaginative being than to elevate it.  He feared to handle it amiss.  He seemed to think that the subject had been so long vulgarised, that few poets had a right to assume that they could treat it worthily, especially as the theme, when treated unworthily, was such an easy and cheap way of winning applause.  It has been observed also that the Religion of Wordsworth’s poetry, at least of his earlier poetry, is not as distinctly ‘Revealed Religion’ as might have been expected from this poet’s well-known adherence to what he has called emphatically ’The lord, and mighty paramount of Truths.’  He once remarked to me himself on this circumstance, and explained it by stating that when in youth his imagination was shaping for itself the channel in which it was to flow, his religious convictions were less definite and less strong than they had become on more mature thought, and that when his poetic mind and manner had once been formed, he feared that he might, in attempting to modify them, have become constrained.  He added that on such matters he ever wrote with great diffidence, remembering that if there were many subjects too low for song, there were some too high.  Wordsworth’s general confidence in his own powers, which was strong, though far from exaggerated, rendered more striking