hears!" yet if read in the closet would not convince a single soul who was sincerely seeking the truth, and was not decidedly of the speaker's mind beforehand.

IV.

Death of Mrs. Joanna Baillie.

To Mrs. H. M. JONES, Hampstead.

February 24th, 1850, Chester Place.-Your note has affected me very much. Dear Mrs. Joanna Baillie, that unique Female Dramatist, thorough gentlewoman, and (last and best) good Christian, gone at last, leaving not her like, in some remarkable respects, behind her! You were privileged, dear friend, to have that sight of the dear face after death, and to see that "friendly look," so consolatory to survivors, and so precious a treasure for memory. Her aged sister must feel desolate indeed. Blessed are they, says a famous old poet, whom an unbroken link keeps ever together. But this is not the lot of humanity, for death comes at last to break every chain, whether a hated or a loved one.

V.

Mr. Carlyle's "Latter-Day Pamphlets" compared with his "Chartism" -Ideal Aristocracy-English Government.

To Rev. HENRY MOORE, Eccleshall Vicarage.

It

March 15th, 1850, Chester Place.-Carlyle's " Latter-Day Pamphlets," I own, I like less than any of his former works. It has all his animation and felicity of language in particular expressions, and there is much truth contained in it. But the general aim and purpose is, to my mind, less satisfactory than in any of his former writings. has all his usual faults in an exaggerated form. His faults I take to be repetition, and the saying in a roundabout, queer way, as if it were a novel announcement, what everybody knows, without any suggestion of a remedy for the evils he so vividly describes. "Chartism" had finer passages than any in these papers. Yet that was decried, and

these are almost universally received with favour. The address to the horses in "Chartism," beside being new, was far better turned, more seriously pathetic in its humour, than the repetition of the thought in "The Present Times." Then I cannot bear the depreciation of Howard, and the sneers at the Americans. His former works have all been devoted to exalting and elevating, defending and raising from the dust. The great drift of these is of a depreciatory, pulling-down character. As for the Irish, I would be right glad to see them coerced for their good, only they should be treated as children, not slaves, and the great mass of the barbarous English, too, especially the class of little, prejudiced, pig-headed, hard-handed, leather-hearted farmers, who are grinding the poor labourers, and grinding their own nobles to ninepence by mismanagement and asinine methods of tilling the ground. But who is to do these things. Who is to bell the cat? Then Carlyle tells us, as he told me in conversation long ago, that the few wise ought to govern the many foolish. But who doubts that? This is a kind of aristocratic sentiment which is common to all mankind who think at all. But we shall be none a bit the nearer to this millennial state of wise-man government, by sneering, as Carlyle does, at the attempts of mankind to do things carefully, and justly, and methodically, sneering at all that by introducing the words "bombazeen, horse-hair, red tape, periwigs, pasteboard," and so forth.

I, for my part, believe that the English government does approximate to this nearer than any other, that Pitt and Percival, Peel and Russell, upon the whole, have governedso far as they individually governed-as well as any man in the country would have done. Among men of letters have been many wiser, speculatively, and cleverer for some things. But it does not follow that they would have done better as Premiers, or could have filled such a place.

MR. WORDSWORTH.

VI.

337

Illness of Mr. Wordsworth.

To E. QUILLINAN, Esq.

March 25th, 1850.-My dear Friend, I have just heard from dear Miss Fenwick of our beloved Mr. Wordsworth's illness. It is most painful to hear of this trouble, and not be able to be of use in any way. I am full of anxiety and sorrow. I have been dwelling much of late on dear Mr. Wordsworth and his state of health and spirits. My thoughts hover around him. He is the last, with dear Mrs. Wordsworth, of that loved and honoured circle of elder friends who surrounded my childhood and youth; and I can imagine no happiness in any state of existence without the restoration of that circle.

But I must not write more to you now. My earnest prayers for dearest Mr. Wordsworth's restoration will be preferred, both in selfish feeling and in sympathy.

Believe me, with most affectionate regards to dear Mrs. Wordsworth, and dearest love, whether it can be given or no, to the beloved sufferer.-Yours, in much friendship and sympathy, SARA COLERIDGE.

VII.

Hopes of Mr. Wordsworth's Recovery-His Natural Cheerfulness— Use of Metaphysical Studies.

To E. QUILLINAN, Esq.

Good Friday, 1850.-My dear Friend, I must write a few lines, though in haste, to thank you for your welcome letter, and tell you of my joy in dearest Mr. Wordsworth's safety and his beloved wife's happiness. May he be restored to his former measure of strength, and may this crisis work a change for the better in his spirits! I have often mourned to think that he was no longer glad as of yore. He used to be so cheerful and happy-minded a man. No mind could be more sufficient to itself, more teeming with matter of delight, fresh, gushing founts rising up

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perpetually in the region of the imagination, streams of purity and joy from the realm of the higher reason—joy and strength and consolation, both in his own contemplations for his own peculiar satisfaction, and in the sense of the joy and strength and solace which he imparted to thousands of other minds. No mind was ever richer within itself, and more abundant in material of happiness, independent of chance and change, save such as affected the mind in itself. I felt with grief that his powers of life and animal spirits must have been impaired from what I heard of his fits of unjoyousness.

A visitor has taken away all my letter-writing time, so that all I meant to say must be screwed up into narrow room.

But one thing I must disown. Where upon earth, or under the earth (in the apartment of some gnome, I suppose, that lives under Loughrigg, in a darksome grot), did you learn that I supposed that you "who do not study metaphysics all day long" cannot understand S. T. C.? All the most valuable part of my father's writings can, of course, be understood, as the writings of Jeremy Taylor, or Milton, or Gibbon, or Pascal, or Dante, or Shakespeare, without specific study of mental metaphysics or any other science. Still, I do think that some careful study of psychology, some systematic metaphysical training, ought to form a part of every gentleman's education, and more especially of every man who is destined for one of the learned professions, and still more especially for men who undertake to write on controversial divinity. A writer on doctrine and the rationale of religious belief ought at least to know those principles of psychology and other branches of metaphysics in which all schools agree, and to have had some exercise of thought in this particular direction, and of course such a study must improve the faculty of insight into all works of reasoning which treat of the higher subjects of human thought.

A Relapse-Regeneration in the Scriptural Sense implies a Moral

TO AUBREY DE VERE, Esq.

Change.

10, Chester Place, April, 1850.-My dear Friend,—I am much pleased at your wishing me to send invitations to Mr. and Mrs. T. and Mrs. J. M., and at your intention of attending at St. Mark's on the 18th yourself, and of what you say of the Institution, that it is one of the signs of life in the times. All this is saddened to me by thoughts of dear Mr. Wordsworth, and of his dear afflicted wife, his partner for nearly fifty years. How she will seem to live in waiting for death and to rejoin him and her beloved Dora!-if he goes now. For myself, I feel as I did in my own great bereavement and affliction, the thoughts and feelings which the event and all its accompaniments induce are, in the poet's own words, too deep for tears; they are deeper than the region of mere sorrow for an earthly loss or temporary parting. Sorrow for the death of those nearest to us, in whom our life has been most bound up, is absorbed in the gulf of all our deepest and most earnest reflections-thoughts about life and existence here and hereafter, which are more earnest, more real, and permanent, and solid, and enduring, than any particular thoughts and sorrows and troubles which our course here brings with it, or which contains them all virtually. The particular becomes merged in the general, happily, and when we seem most bereft, most afflicted by the inevitable law of death and corporeal decay, we are only led to feel that this is but a part of the universal doom, that the loss and calamity which has come upon us at this time is but what, in a very short time, and in some form or other, we must bear. My grief respecting my dear old friend has been to see him grow old. To my mind he has been dying this long time-not the man he was. I see in this, his final