‘As to the arbitrary, pitiless, godless wretches,’ he exclaimed, ’who have removed Nature’s landmarks by cutting roads through Alps and Apennines, until all things are reduced to the same dead level, they will he arraigned hereafter with the unjust:  they have robbed the best specimens of what men should be of their freeholds in the mountains; the eagle, the black cock, and the red deer they have tamed or exterminated.  The lover of Nature can nowhere find a solitary nook to contemplate her beauties.  Yesterday,’ he continued, ’at the break of day, I scaled the most rugged height within my reach; it looked inaccessible; this pleasant delusion was quickly dispelled; I was rudely startled out of a deep reverie by the accursed jarring, jingling, and rumbling of a caleche, and harsh voices that drowned the torrent’s fall.’

The stranger, now hearing a commotion in the street, sprang on his feet, looked out of the window, and rang the bell violently.

‘Waiter,’ he said, ’is that our carriage?  Why did you not tells us?  Come, lasses, be stirring; the freshness of the day is gone.  You may rejoice in not having to walk; there is a chance of saving the remnants of skin the sun has left on our chins and noses; to-day we shall he stewed instead of barbecued.’

On their leaving the room to get ready for their journey, my friend Roberts told me the strangers were the poet Wordsworth, his wife and sister.

Who could have divined this?  I could see no trace, in the hard features and weather-stained brow of the outer man, of the divinity within him.  In a few minutes the travellers reappeared; we cordially shook hands, and agreed to meet again at Geneva.  Now that I knew that I was talking to one of the veterans of the gentle craft, as there was no time to waste in idle ceremony, I asked him abruptly what he thought of Shelley as a poet.

‘Nothing,’ he replied as abruptly.

Seeing my surprise, he added, ’A poet who has not produced a good poem before he is twenty-five we may conclude cannot and never will do so.’

‘The “Cenci"!’ I said eagerly.

‘Won’t do,’ he replied, shaking his head, as he got into the carriage:  a rough-coated Scotch terrier followed him.

‘This hairy fellow is our flea-trap,’ he shouted out as they started off.

When I recovered from the shock of having heard the harsh sentence passed by an elder bard on a younger brother of the Muses, I exclaimed,

’After all, poets are but earth.  It is the old story,—­envy—­Cain and Abel.  Professions, sects, and communities in general, right or wrong, hold together, men of the pen excepted; if one of their guild is worsted in the battle, they do as the rooks do by their inky brothers—­fly from him, cawing and screaming; if they don’t fire the shot, they sound the bugle to charge.’

I did not then know that the full-fledged author never reads the writings of his contemporaries, except to cut them up in a review, that being a work of love.  In after years, Shelley being dead, Wordsworth confessed this fact; he was then induced to read some of Shelley’s poems, and admitted that Shelley was the greatest master of harmonious verse in our modern literature. (Pp. 4-8.)[274]