’The poets, who on earth have made us heirs
    Of truth, and pure delight, by heavenly lays,’

he concludes,

    ’Oh! might my name be numbered among theirs,
    Then gladly would I end my mortal days.’

He died at eighty, and general fame did not come to him till about fifteen years before his death.  This perhaps might have been fifteen years too soon, if he had set any inordinate value on it.  But it was not so.  Shelley tells us that’ Fame is love disguised;’ and it was intellectual sympathy that Wordsworth had always valued far more than reputation.  ‘Give me thy love; I claim no other fee,’ had been his demand on his reader.  When Fame had laid her tardy garland at his feet he found on it no fresher green than his ‘Rydalian laurels’ had always worn.  Once he said to me, ’It is indeed a deep satisfaction to hope and believe that my poetry will be, while it lasts, a help to the cause of virtue and truth—­especially among the young.  As for myself, it seems now of little moment how long I may be remembered.  When a man pushes off in his little boat into the great seas of Infinity and Eternity, it surely signifies little how long he is kept in sight by watchers from the shore.’

Such are my chief recollections of the great poet, whom I knew but in his old age, but whose heart retained its youth till his daughter Dora’s death.  He seemed to me one who from boyhood had been faithful to a high vocation; one who had esteemed it his office to minister, in an age of conventional civilisation, at Nature’s altar, and who had in his later life explained and vindicated such life-long ministration, even while he seemed to apologise for it, in the memorable confession,

    ’But who is innocent?  By grace divine,
    Not otherwise, O Nature, are we thine.’[272]

[272] ‘Evening Voluntary.’

It was to Nature as first created, not to Nature as corrupted by ‘disnatured’ passions, that his song had attributed such high and healing powers.  In singing her praise he had chosen a theme loftier than most of his readers knew—­loftier, as he perhaps eventually discovered, than he had at first supposed it to be.  Utterly without Shakspeare’s dramatic faculty, he was richer and wider in the humanities than any poet since Shakspeare.  Wholly unlike Milton in character and in opinions, he abounds in passages to be paralleled only by Milton in solemn and spiritual sublimity, and not even by Milton in pathos.  It was plain to those who knew Wordsworth that he had kept his great gift pure, and used it honestly and thoroughly for that purpose for which it had been bestowed.  He had ever written with a conscientious reverence for that gift; but he had also written spontaneously.  He had composed with care—­not the exaggerated solicitude which is prompted by vanity, and which frets itself to unite incompatible excellences; but the diligence which shrinks from no toil while eradicating blemishes that