uth presume to use the great and
venerated personality of WORDSWORTH as a sort of painter's model;
one from which this or the other particular feature may be selected
and turned to account: had I intended more, above all, such a
boldness as portraying the entire man, I should not have talked
about "handfuls of silver and bits of ribbon". These never
influenced the change of politics in the great poet; whose
defection, nevertheless, accompanied as it was by a regular face
about of his special party, was to my juvenile apprehension, and
even mature consideration, an event to deplore. But just as in the
tapestry on my wall I can recognise figures which have _struck out_
a fancy, on occasion, that though truly enough thus derived, yet
would be preposterous as a copy, so, though I dare not deny the
original of my little poem, I altogether refuse to have it
considered as the "very effigies" of such a moral and intellectual
superiority.

Faithfully yours,

ROBERT BROWNING.'

The Editor cannot close this Preface without expressing his sense of the
greatness of the trust confided to him, and the personal benefit it has
been to himself to have been brought so near to WILLIAM WORDSWORTH as he
has been in working on this collection of his Prose. He felt almost
awed as he handled the great and good man's MSS., and found himself
behind the screen (as it were), seeing what he had seen, touching what
he had touched, knowing what he had known, feeling what he had felt.
Reverence, even veneration is an empty word to utter the emotion excited
in such communion; these certainly, but something tenderer and more
human were in head and heart. It was a grand, high-thoughted,
pure-lived, unique course that was run in those sequestered vales. The
closer one gets to the man, the greater he proves, the truer, the
simpler; and it is a benediction to the race, amid so many fragmentary
and jagged and imperfect lives, to have one so rounded and completed, so
august and so genuine:

'Summon Detraction to object the worst
That may be told, and utter all it can;
It cannot find a blemish to be enforced
Against him, other than he was a man,
And built of flesh and blood, and did live here,
Within the region of infirmity;
Where all perfections never did appear
To meet in any one so really,
But that his frailty ever did bewray