must be a good man; and a good man
ought to be a happy man.' To know Wordsworth was to feel sure that if he
had been a great poet, it was not merely because he had been endowed
with a great imagination, but because he had been a good man, a great
man, and a man whose poetry had, in an especial sense, been the
expression of a healthily happy moral being.

AUBREY DE VERE.

Curragh Chase, March 31, 1875.

P.S. Wordsworth was by no means without humour. When the Queen on one
occasion gave a masked ball, some one said that a certain youthful poet,
who has since reached a deservedly high place both in the literary and
political world, but who was then known chiefly as an accomplished and
amusing young man of society, was to attend it dressed in the character
of the father of English poetry, grave old Chaucer. 'What,' said
Wordsworth, 'M. go as Chaucer! Then it only remains for me to go as M.!'

* * * * *

PART II.

SONNET--RYDAL WITH WORDSWORTH.

BY THE LATE SIR AUBREY DE VERE.

'What we beheld scarce can I now recall
In one connected picture; images
Hurrying so swiftly their fresh witcheries
O'er the mind's mirror, that the several
Seems lost, or blended in the mighty all.
Lone lakes; rills gushing through rock-rooted trees:
Peaked mountains shadowing vales of peacefulness:
Glens echoing to the flashing waterfall.
Then that sweet twilight isle! with friends delayed
Beside a ferny bank 'neath oaks and yews;
The moon between two mountain peaks embayed;
Heaven and the waters dyed with sunset hues:
And he, the Poet of the age and land,
Discoursing as we wandered hand in hand.'

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