66 a-year, he wanted to make it five; and would go to "the West Indies; but he died on the passage of sea 66 sickness, and obstinacy in taking an emetic." I said to him, "You are accused of owing a great deal to Wordsworth. Certainly there are some stanzas in the Third Canto of 'Childe Harold' that smell strongly of the Lakes: for instance 66 66 66 'I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling!' 66 Very possibly," replied he. Shelley, when I was in Switzerland, used to dose me with Wordsworth physic even to nausea and I do remember then reading some things of his with pleasure. He had once a feeling of Nature, which he carried almost to a deification of it:"that's why Shelley liked his poetry. 66 66 66 "It is satisfactory to reflect, that where a man becomes a hireling and loses his mental independence, he loses also "the faculty of writing well. The lyrical ballads, jaco“binical and puling with affectation of simplicity as they 66 66 were, had undoubtedly a certain merit*: and Wordsworth, though occasionally a writer for the nursery-masters and "misses, • Who took their little porringer, "now and then expressed ideas worth imitating; but, like "brother Southey, he had his price; and since he is turned 66 66 tax-gatherer, is only fit to rhyme about lasses and waggoners. Shelley repeated to me the other day a stanza "from Peter Bell' that I thought inimitably good. It is "the rumination of Peter's ass, who gets into a brook, and 66 .66 sees reflected there a family-circle, or tea-party. But you shall have it in his own words: Is it a party in a parlour, Cramm'd just as you on earth are cramm'd? "Or Wordsworth unexcised, unhired, who then "Season'd his pedlar poems with democracy." Don Juan, Canto III. Stanza 93. "There was a time when he would have written better; "but perhaps Peter thinks feelingly. 66 66 The republican trio, when they began to publish in "common, were to have had a community of all things, like the ancient Britons; to have lived in a state of nature, "like savages, and peopled some 'island of the blest' with children in common, like A very pretty Arcadian "notion! It amuses me much to compare the Botany Bay 66 Eclogue, the Panegyric of Martin the Regicide, and "'Wat Tyler,' with the Laureate Odes, and Peter's Eulogium on the Field of Waterloo. There is something more than rhyme in that noted stanza containing 66 66 66 "I offended the par nobile mortally, -past all hope of forgiveness-many years ago. I met, at the Cumberland * Wordsworth's Thanksgiving Ode. "Lakes, Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd, who had just been 66 writing The Poetic Mirror,' a work that contains imi“tations of all the living poets' styles, after the manner " of 'Rejected Addresses.' The burlesque is well done, particularly that of me, but not equal to Horace Smith's. "I was pleased with Hogg; and he wrote me a very witty letter, to which I sent him, I suspect, a very dull reply. 66 66 66 66 Certain it is that I did not spare the Lakists in it; and he told me he could not resist the temptation, and had shewn "it to the fraternity. It was too tempting; and as I could never keep a secret of my own, as you know, much less that of other people, I could not blame him. I remember saying, among other things, that the Lake poets were such fools as not to fish in their own waters; but this was "the least offensive part of the epistle." 66 66 66 "Bowles is one of the same little order of spirits, "who has been fussily fishing on for fame, and is equally 66 66 waspish and jealous. What could Coleridge mean by praising his poetry as he does? "It was a mistake of mine, about his making the woods "of Madeira tremble, &c.; but it seems that I might have told him that there were no woods to make trem"ble with kisses, which would have been quite as great 66 a blunder. "I met Bowles once at Rogers's, and thought him a pleasant, gentlemanly man—a good fellow, for a parson. "When men meet together after dinner, the conversation "takes a certain turn. I remember he entertained us "with some good stories. The reverend gentleman pre"tended, however, to be much shocked at Pope's letters to Martha Blount. 66 "I set him and his invariable principles at rest. He "did attempt an answer, which was no reply; at least, nobody read it. I believe he applied to me some lines in Shakspeare.* A man is very unlucky who has 66 66 a name that can be punned upon; and his own did 66 not escape. 66 "I have been reading 'Johnson's Lives,' a book I am very fond of. I look upon him as the profoundest of * "I do remember thee, my Lord Biron," &c. |