Manchester, July 16. 1830.

....Though I am busy, I feel rather melancholy; and I am continually reminded how sad my life would be without the society and affection of those we love, and how terribly awful the dispensation of death must be to those who cannot anticipate a future reunion, and regard it as the utter extinction of all human interests and affections.  I am solacing myself with Wordsworth.  Do you know, I shall become a thorough convert to him.  Much of his poetry is delicious, and I perfectly adore his philosophy.  To me he seems the purest, the most elevated, and the most Christian of poets.  I delight in his deep and tender piety, and his spirit of exquisite sympathy with whatever is lovely and grand in the breathing universe around us. (Vol. i. p. 86.)

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(m) ANECDOTE OF CRABBE.

FROM ‘DIARY OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.’

Talking of Wordsworth, he [W.] told Anne a story, the object of which, as she understood it, was to show that Crabbe had no imagination.  Crabbe, Sir George Beaumont, and Wordsworth were sitting together in Murray’s room in Albemarle-street.  Sir George, after sealing a letter, blew out the candle which had enabled him to do so, and exchanging a look with Wordsworth, began to admire in silence the undulating thread of smoke which slowly arose from the expiring wick, when Crabbe put on the extinguisher.  Anne laughed at the instance, and inquired if the taper was wax; and being answered in the negative, seemed to think that there was no call on Mr. Crabbe to sacrifice his sense of smell to their admiration of beautiful and evanescent forms.  In two other men I should have said, ‘Why, it is affectations,’ with Sir Hugh Evans [’Merry Wives of Windsor,’ act i. scene 1]; but Sir George is the man in the world most void of affectation; and then he is an exquisite painter, and no doubt saw where the incident would have succeeded in painting.  The error is not in you yourself receiving deep impressions from slight hints, but in supposing that precisely the same sort of impression must arise in the mind of men otherwise of kindred feeling, or that the common-place folk of the world can derive such inductions at any time or under any circumstances.[275]

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(n) LATER OPINION OF LOUD BROUGHAM.

I am just come from breakfasting with Henry Taylor to meet Wordsworth; the same party as when he had Southey—­Mill, Elliot, Charles Villiers.  Wordsworth may be bordering on sixty; hard-featured, brown, wrinkled, with prominent teeth and a few scattered gray hairs, but nevertheless not a disagreeable countenance; and very cheerful, merry, courteous, and talkative, much more so than I should have expected from the grave and didactic character of his writings.  He held forth on poetry, painting, politics, and metaphysics, and with a great deal of eloquence; he is more conversible