and more touching his humility in all that concerned Religion.  It used to remind me of what I once heard Mr. Rogers say, viz.  ’There is a special character of greatness about humility for it implies that a man can, in an unusual degree, estimate the greatness of what is above us.’  Fortunately his diffidence did not keep Wordsworth silent on sacred themes; his later poems include an unequivocal as well as beautiful confession of Christian faith; and one of them, ‘The Primrose of the Rock,’ is as distinctly Wordsworthian in its inspiration as it is Christian in its doctrine.  Wordsworth was a ‘high churchman,’ and also, in his prose mind, strongly anti-Roman Catholic, partly on political grounds; but that it was otherwise as regards his mind poetic is obvious from many passages in his Christian poetry, especially those which refer to the monastic system, and the Schoolmen, and his sonnet on the Blessed Virgin, whom he addresses as

    ‘Our tainted nature’s solitary boast.’

He used to say that the idea of one who was both Virgin and Mother had sunk so deep into the heart of Humanity, that there it must ever remain.

Wordsworth’s estimate of his contemporaries was not generally high.  I remember his once saying to me, ’I have known many that might he called very clever men, and a good many of real and vigorous abilities, but few of genius; and only one whom I should call “wonderful.”  That one was Coleridge.  At any hour of the day or night he would talk by the hour, if there chanced to be any sympathetic listener, and talk better than the best page of his writings; for a pen half paralysed his genius.  A child would sit quietly at his feet and wonder, till the torrent had passed by.  The only man like Coleridge whom I have known is Sir William Hamilton, Astronomer Royal of Dublin.’  I remember, however, that when I recited by his fireside Alfred Tennyson’s two political poems, ’You ask me why, though ill at ease,’ and ‘Of old sat Freedom on the heights,’ the old bard listened with a deepening attention, and when I had ended, said after a pause, ’I must acknowledge that those two poems are very solid and noble in thought.  Their diction also seems singularly stately.’  He was a great admirer of Philip van Artevelde.  In the case of a certain poet since dead, and never popular, he said to me, ’I consider his sonnets to be the best of modern times;’ adding, ’Of course I am not including my own in any comparison with those of others.’  He was not sanguine as to the future of English poetry.  He thought that there was much to be supplied in other departments of our literature, and especially he desired a really great History of England; but he was disposed to regard the roll of English poetry as made up, and as leaving place for little more except what was likely to be eccentric or imitational.

In his younger days Wordsworth had had to fight a great battle in poetry, for both his subjects and his mode of treating them were antagonistic to the maxims then current.  It was fortunate for posterity, no doubt, that his long ‘militant estate’ was animated by some mingling of personal ambition with his love of poetry.  Speaking in an early sonnet of