The above-written sonnet is the record of a delightful day spent by my father in 1833 with Wordsworth at Rydal, to which he went from the still more beautiful shores of Ulswater, where he had been sojourning at Halsteads.  He had been one of Wordsworth’s warmest admirers, when their number was small, and in 1842 he dedicated a volume of poems to him.[273] He taught me when a boy of 18 years old to admire the great bard.  I had been very enthusiastically praising Lord Byron’s poetry.  My father calmly replied, ‘Wordsworth is the great poet of modern times.’  Much surprised, I asked, ‘And what may his special merits be?’ The answer was, ’They are very various, as for instance, depth, largeness, elevation, and, what is rare in modern poetry, an entire purity.  In his noble “Laodamia” they are chiefly majesty and pathos.’  A few weeks afterwards I chanced to take from the library shelves a volume of Wordsworth, and it opened on ‘Laodamia.’  Some strong, calm hand seemed to have been laid on my head, and bound me to the spot, till I had come to the end.  As I read, a new world, hitherto unimagined, opened itself out, stretching far away into serene infinitudes.  The region was one to me unknown, but the harmony of the picture attested its reality.  Above and around were indeed

[273] A Song of Faith, Devout Exercises, and Sonnets (Pickering).  The Dedication closed thus:  ’I may at least hope to be named hereafter among the friends of Wordsworth.’

    ’An ampler ether, a diviner air,
    And fields invested with purpureal gleams;’

and when I reached the line,

    ‘Calm pleasures there abide—­majestic pains,’

I felt that no tenants less stately could walk in so lordly a precinct.  I had been translated into another planet of song—­one with larger movements and a longer year.  A wider conception of poetry had become mine, and the Byronian enthusiasm fell from me like a bond that is broken by being outgrown.  The incident illustrates poetry in one of its many characters, that of ‘the deliverer.’  The ready sympathies and inexperienced imagination of youth make it surrender itself easily despite its better aspirations, or in consequence of them, to a false greatness; and the true greatness, once revealed, sets it free.  As early as 1824 Walter Savage Landor, in his ‘Imaginary Conversation’ between Southey and Porson, had pronounced Wordsworth’s ‘Laodamia’ to be ’a composition such as Sophocles might have exulted to own, and a part of which might have been heard with shouts of rapture in the regions he describes’—­the Elysian Fields.