Scott at Melrose, in whose company they spent four days, from 19th to 23rd September. In a letter to Scott, dated from Grasmere, nearly a month later, to announce their safe return, Wordsworth freely expressed his pleasure: "My sister and I often talk of the happy days we spent in your company. Such things do not occur often in life. If we live, we shall meet again; that is my consolation when I think of these things. . . . Farewell! . . . Your sincere friend, for such I will call myself, though slow to use a word of such solemn meaning to anyone."

In October 1806, by the invitation and generosity of Sir George Beaumont, the Wordsworths and their family spent the winter at a farm-house in Coleorton, Leicestershire, where the poet employed himself with laying out grounds and planting a winter garden at the Hall for Lady Beaumont. A sonnet to her upon the subject is among his Miscellaneous Sonnets. Goethe, oddly enough, was occupied at the same time in the same congenial manner at Weimar.* It was probably late in the following summer that Wordsworth paid his visit to the Craven district of Yorkshire, with the scenery of which his White Doe of Rylstone is associated.

In 1814 came another tour in Scotland, this time in the company of Mrs Wordsworth and Miss Hutchinson. It was chiefly remarkable for the poem Yarrow Visited, which contrasted with the Yarrow Unvisited of nine years before. In 1831, Yarrow Revisited was added to the collection, on the occasion of a third Scottish journey, the immediate reason for which recalled the circumstances of 1803. As it was then that Wordsworth and Scott first met, so it was now that, in 1831, Wordsworth set off with his daughter to visit Sir Walter before he left for Italy. "How sadly * See Frau Gothein's Wordsworth, i. 184.

changed," runs the poet's note, "did I find him from the man I had seen so healthy, gay and hopeful. . . . On Tuesday morning, Sir Walter Scott accompanied us, and most of the party, to Newark Castle, on the Yar v. When we alighted from the carriages, he walked pretty stoutly, and had great pleasure in revisiting these his favourite haunts. Of that excursion, the verses Yarrow Revisited are a memorial. Notwithstanding the romance that pervades Sir Walter's works, and attaches to many of his habits, there is too much pressure of fact for these verses to harmonise, as much as I could wish, with the two preceding poems. On our return in the afternoon, we had to cross the Tweed, directly opposite Abbotsford. .. A rich, but sad light, of rather a purple than a golden hue, was spread over the Eildon hills at that moment; and thinking it probable that it might be the last time Sir Walter would cross the stream, I was not a little moved, and expressed some of my feelings in the sonnet beginning, 'A trouble, not of clouds,' etc."

Two days later, after "a serious conversation, tête-à-tête," Wordsworth and Scott parted; as is well known, the forebodings were fulfilled, and Sir Walter hurried back from Italy to die in 1832. I give the sonnet referred to in this note at length: it was read by Scott before his departure:

"A trouble, not of clouds, or weeping rain,
Nor of the setting sun's pathetic light
Engendered, hangs o'er Eildon's triple height :
Spirits of Power, assembled there, complain

For kindred Power, departing from their sight;
While Tweed, best pleased in chanting a blithe strain,
Saddens his voice again, and yet again.

Lift up your hearts, ye Mourners ! for the might
Of the whole world's good wishes with him goes;

C

Blessings and prayers, in nobler retinue
Than sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows,
Follow this wondrous Potentate.

Be true,

Ye winds of ocean, and the midland sea,

Wafting your charge to soft Parthenope!"

while Henry Crabb They finished up at the company of Mrs In 1828 he was in

Meanwhile, in 1820, Wordsworth had visited the Continent with his wife and sister. Mr Monkhouse went with them to the Alps and to Milan, Robinson joined them at Lucerne. Paris where they spent five weeks in Monkhouse and a Miss Horrocks. Belgium with Coleridge, in 1829 in Ireland. In 1833, came a kind of supplementary journey to the Abbotsford pilgrimage of two years before, in order to visit Staffa and Iona, which had then been necessarily omitted owing to the lateness of the season. Finally, in March 1837, a life-long wish of Wordsworth's was gratified by a tour among the cities of Italy. "I received," he records, "from Mr Moxon, the publisher of a large edition of my poems, a sum sufficient to enable me to gratify my wish without encroaching upon what I considered due to my family." Accordingly, he set off with H. C. Robinson, and the friends remained abroad until the following August. His poetic Memorials of this occasion Wordsworth considered inadequate; he would have liked to dwell on his enthusiasm for the Roman remains, as well as on the Petrarch associations,

"Between two and three hours did I run about, climbing the steep and rugged crags, from whose base the water of Vaucluse breaks forth. 'Has Laura's lover,' often said I to myself, 'ever sat upon this stone? Or has his foot ever pressed that turf?' Some, especially of the female sex, could have felt sure of it; my answer was (impute it to my years), 'I fear, not.' Is it not in fact obvious that many

of his love verses must have flowed, I do not say from a wish to display his own talent, but from a habit of exercising his intellect in that way, rather than from an impulse of his heart?" From this date the tranquil residence at Rydal Mount was practically uninterrupted.

Incidentally, something has already been said of Wordsworth's losses and gains by friendship during Friendships. his long life. We must revert to 1805 for almost the greatest sorrow which he suffered. On February 11th in that year, the cottage at Town-end was turned into a house of mourning by the news of the foundering of the East Indiaman, Earl of Abergavenny, of which John Wordsworth, the youngest and the favourite of the brothers, was Captain at the time. Evidence seemed to show that the loss of the ship was due to the pilot's mismanagement, while the heroism of the Captain's death was placed beyond a doubt. In this thought there was some consolation; but in many poems and letters, both presently and in after years, Wordsworth's deep grief was evinced. John, he had always felt, was the most sympathetic of his brothers in temperament: "Of all human beings," he wrote in a kind of necrologe to Sir George Beaumont, "of all human beings whom I ever knew, he was the man of the most rational desires, the most sedate habits, and the most perfect self-command." His death added the discipline of sorrow to the poet's experience of life.

The friendship with Sir George Beaumont, to whom Wordsworth had turned in his hour of bereavement, dated

from two years before. It had been brought about by the good offices of Coleridge, and it grew in intimacy and mutual esteem until Beaumont's death in 1827. Sir George was a descendant of Francis Beaumont, the dramatist, and had inherited or acquired his ancestor's taste for culture. To

the men of talent of his times he acted the part of a Mæcenas, with more of the connoisseur and less of the patron about him. Wilkie and Landseer, Coleridge and Scott, Southey, who called him the most fortunate of men, and Byron, who came to sneer, gathered at his house; Haydon and the veteran Sir Joshua were often to be met there. Beaumont was a painter himself, and Wordsworth's lines on his "Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm" are among his most happily inspired. Another taste which they had in common was for landscape-gardening, and the poet's operations at Sir George's country house in Coleorton led to a long interchange of letters. He completed his task by composing suitable inscriptions for various points of interest in the grounds.

Besides the acquaintances to whom Sir George Beaumont introduced him, Wordsworth, when in London in 1820, at the height of his reputation, met many distinguished men. One evening, of which Lamb records that he supped in Parnassus, there were assembled round Crabb Robinson's table in Gloucester Place five immortals, -Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Thomas Moore, and Samuel Rogers. He knew, too, and sustained in various degrees as associates or correspondents, Carlyle, Haydon, Hazlitt, De Quincey, John Wilson, Thomas Arnold, Rowan Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth, Aubrey de Vere, and Sir Humphrey Davy; but he was really not intimate with any. Scott died in 1832, Coleridge in 1834, and Southey in 1843. To the two former sufficient reference has perhaps been made; death is always a great tranquilliser, and Coleridge's death came as a heavy blow to the surviving friend their early sympathy stood out in more bold relief than the later differences which had divided them.

But with increasing age, and after the loss of Beaumont,