of the age. For himself, he did undoubtedly choose the
"better part;" nor do we mean to insinuate that any man ought to
contaminate himself for the sake of his art, but that the poet of a period
will necessarily come so near to its peculiar sins, sufferings, follies,
and mistakes, as to understand them, and even to feel the force of their
temptations, and though he should never yield to, yet must have a
"fellow-feeling" of its prevailing infirmities.

The death of this eminent man took few by surprise. Many anxious eyes have
for a while been turned toward Rydal mount, where this hermit stream was
nearly sinking into the ocean of the Infinite. And now, to use his own
grand word, used at the death of Scott, a "trouble" hangs upon Helvellyn's
brow, and over the waters of Windermere. The last of the Lakers has
departed. That glorious country has become a tomb for its more glorious
children. No more is Southey's tall form seen at his library window,
confronting Skiddaw--with a port as stately as its own. No more does
Coleridge's dim eye look down into the dim tarn, heavy laden, too, under
the advancing thunder-storm. And no more is Wordsworth's pale and lofty
front shaded into divine twilight, as he plunges at noon-day amidst the
quiet woods. A stiller, sterner power than poetry has folded into its
strict, yet tender and yearning embrace, those

"Serene creators of immortal things."

Alas! for the pride and the glory even of the purest products of this
strange world! Sin and science, pleasure and poetry, the lowest vices, and
the highest aspirations, are equally unable to rescue their votaries from
the swift ruin which is in chase of us all.

"Golden lads and girls all must
Like chimney-sweepers come to dust."

But Wordsworth has left for himself an epitaph almost superfluously
rich--in the memory of his private virtues--of the impulse he gave to our
declining poetry--of the sympathies he discovered in all his strains with
the poor, the neglected, and the despised--of the version he furnished of
Nature, true and beautiful as if it were Nature _describing herself_--of
his lofty and enacted ideal of his art and the artist--of the "thoughts,
too deep for tears," he has given to meditative and lonely hearts--and,
above all, of the support he has lent to the cause of the "primal duties"
and eldest instincts of man--to his hope of immortality, and his fear of
God. And now we bid him farewell, in his own wo