great Poet's heart has been in an especial manner opened in private
correspondence. No other American has he honoured in the same degree;
and by no one else in this country has the knowledge and appreciation of
his poetry been so much extended. The love which has so long animated
you has been such, that multitudes have been influenced to seek for joy
and refreshment from the same pure source.

I have been led, as I said at the beginning of my letter, to make this
record, partly from your suggestion, and partly from a remark of Southey
which I have lately seen, to the effect that Wordsworth was one of whom
posterity would desire to know all that can be remembered. You will not,
I trust, deem the incidents I have set down trivial; or consider any
detail too minute, the object of which was only to bring the living man
before you. Now that he has gone for ever from our sight in this world,
I am led to look back to the interview with a deeper satisfaction; and
it may be that this full account of it will have value hereafter. To you
it was due that I should make the record; by myself these remembrances
will ever be cherished among my choicest possessions.

Believe me, my dear friend, yours faithfully,

Ellis Yarnall.[268]

[268] _Memoirs_, ii. 483-500.

(j) RECOLLECTIONS OF WORDSWORTH.

By Aubrey de Vere, Esq.

_(Sent to the present Editor, and now first published)_

PART I.

It was about eight years before his death that I had the happiness of
making acquaintance with Wordsworth. During the next four years I saw a
good deal of him, chiefly among his own mountains, and, besides many
delightful walks with him, I had the great honour of passing some days
under his roof. The strongest of my impressions respecting him was that
made by the manly simplicity, and lofty rectitude, which characterised
him. In one of his later sonnets he writes of himself thus: 'As a true
man who long had served the lyre:'--it was because he was a _true_ man
that he was a true poet; and it was impossible to know him without being
reminded of this. In any case he must have been recognised as a man of
original and energetic genius; but it was his strong and truthful moral
nature, his intellectual sincerity, the abiding conscientiousness of his
imagination, which enabled that genius to do its great work, and
bequeath to the England of the future the most solid mass of
deep-hearted and authentic poetry which has been the gift to her of a