Wordsworth frequently spoke of death, as if it were the taking of a new degree in the University of Life.  ‘I should like,’ he remarked to a young lady, ‘to visit Italy again before I move to another planet.’  He sometimes made a mistake in assuming that others were equally philosophical.  We were once breakfasting at the house of Mr. Rogers, when Wordsworth, after gazing attentively round the room with a benignant and complacent expression, turned to our host, and wishing to compliment him, said, ’Mr. Rogers, I never see this house, so perfect in its taste, so exquisite in all its arrangements, and decorated with such well-chosen pictures, without fancying it the very house imaged to himself by the Roman poet, when, in illustration of man’s mortality, he says, “Linquenda est domus."’ ‘What is that you are saying?’ replied Mr. Rogers, whose years, between eighty and ninety, had not improved his hearing.  ‘I was remarking that your house,’ replied Wordsworth, ’always reminds me of the Ode (more properly called an Elegy, though doubtless the lyrical measure not unnaturally causes it to be included among Horace’s Odes) in which the Roman poet writes “Linquenda est domus;” that is, since, ladies being present, a translation may be deemed desirable, The house is, or has to be, left; and again, “et placens uxor”—­and the pleasing wife; though, as we must all regret, that part of the quotation is not applicable on the present occasion.’  The Town Bard, on whom ‘no angle smiled’ more than the end of St. James’s-place, did not enter into the views of the Bard of the Mountains.  His answer was what children call ‘making a great face,’ and the ejaculation, ‘Don’t talk Latin in, the society of ladies.’  When I was going away he remarked, ’What a stimulus the mountain air has on the appetite!  I made a sign to Edmund to hand him the cutlets a second time.  I was afraid he would stick his fork into that beautiful woman who sat next him.’  Wordsworth never resented a jest at his own expense.  Once when we had knocked three times in vain at the door of a London house, I exclaimed, quoting his sonnet written on Westminster-bridge,

    ‘Dear God, the very houses seem asleep.’

He laughed heartily, then smiled gravely, and lastly recounted the occasion, and described the early morning on which that sonnet was written.  He did not recite more than a part of it, to the accompaniment of distant cab and carriage; and I thought that the door was opened too soon.

Wordsworth, despite his dislike to great cities, was attracted occasionally in his later years

    ’To the proud margin of the Thames,
    And Lambeth’s venerable towers,’