struggle, if such it prove, but the termination of that career of mortality. My tearful feelings are more for Mrs. Wordsworth than for his departure. The stupor and dejection which have long been upon him, when he was not roused by the presence of strangers, have been the precursor of dissolution and beginning of the stage of final decay.

I have read your reflections on Baptism with deep attention and interest, and shall read them again and often. They come home to me more than other remarks ever did. Still, they cannot, and I think never will, move me from my standing-place, because indeed that has been chosen with all the powers of my heart and mind, after the deepest and fullest consideration which I can give to the subject. It seems to me that the tendency of your reasoning is rather to withdraw the mind from what, after all, must be the foundation of all reasoning in religion, from the real sense of Scripture, interpreted according to the generally admitted rules of human language, and from the spiritual ideas, of which all true religion consists, combined and arranged according to the laws of thought. I hold the very highest doctrine of Baptism which is consistent, as I think, with a right, scriptural, spiritual, substantial view of regeneration, with that view of regeneration which Scripture presents. The mystical view involves the belief that a soul in which the heart and understanding, the will and moral being, are wholly unaltered from the state in Adam, a soul which passes from the neutral state of unconscious infancy into positive immorality and ungodliness, pervading the whole character, has in baptism undergone that regeneration, that new birth in the Spirit, of which our Lord spoke to Nicodemus, that such a soul is really and inwardly incorporated into Christ, and a branch of the true Vine. Now, it needs not long discussions. If you can look at this belief, and not feel shocked by it, if it does not seem to you contrary to the moral sense, contrary to

the tenor of Holy Writ, and a profanation of sacred language, the direct and obvious sense of which denotes something essentially different, namely, a cordial, earnest, and unalterable acceptance of the Gospel of Christ, or of what the Gospel contains virtually and substantially, with such a spiritualization of the heart and life as constitutes the good Christian in character and conduct, I think we never can see alike on this point. There is a world-wide difference between a converted and an unconverted spirit: it is the greatest soul-difference conceivable. Now, I think the former alone, and not the latter at all, is internally, and in the primary sense, regenerate. No other view of regeneration than this appears to me reconcilable, fairly, with the declaration concerning being "born of God" in the Epistle of St. John, and indeed with whatever is said on the subject in the Bible.

IX.

Death of Mr. Wordsworth-Sense of Intimacy with her Father, produced by her Continual Study of his Writings.

To E. QUILLINAN, Esq.

1850. My dear Friend,-Your letter of this morning has made me but a little more sad and serious than I felt before, and have been feeling since the later reports. Thank God, that our dear and honoured friend was spared severe suffering! For days I have been haunted and depressed with the fear that he had to go through a stage of protracted anguish. He could afford the torpor of the dying bed. His work was done, and gloriously done, before, and will survive, I think, as long as those hills amid which he lived and thought, at least if this continues to be a land of cultivated intellects, of poets and students of poetry.

Still, though relieved and calmed, I feel stunned to think that my dear old friend is no more in this world. It seems as if the present life were passing away, and leaving me for a while behind. The event renews to me

all my great irremediable losses. Henry, my mother, Fanny, Hartley, my Uncle and Aunt Southey, my father -in some respects so great a loss, yet in another way less felt than the rest, and more with me still. Indeed, he seems ever at my ear, in his books, more especially his marginalia-speaking not personally to me, and yet in a way so natural to my feelings, that finds me so fully, and awakens such a strong echo in my mind and heart, that I seem more intimate with him now than I ever was in life. This sort of intercourse is the more to me because of the withdrawal of my nearest friends of youth, whom I had known in youth. Still, the heart often sinks, and craves for more immediate stuff of the heart. My children are much. I trust that dear Mrs. Wordsworth will find hers, those still left to her, sufficient to make life dear and interesting to her.

He is "gone to Dora! "* Yes; may we all meet where she is! She has been spared this parting. Would it have come so soon, had she not been severed from his side?

Will you convey to dear Mrs. Wordsworth, when it is desirable, my deep sympathy and assurance of my earnest prayer for her support and consolation, and in respect of the revered departed all the blessedness that our Father in heaven has to bestow on His faithful servants that are returned to His house of many mansions. Believe me, dear friend, yours in deep sympathy and most faithfully, SARA COLERIDGE.

Archdeacon Hare says to me, in a letter of late date :— "I have a letter saying that his remaining days are few.

* Mrs. Wordsworth, with a view of letting him know what the opinion of his medical advisers was concerning his case, said gently to him, "William, you are going to Dora!" More than twenty-four hours afterwards one of his nieces came into the room, and was drawing aside the curtain of his chamber, and then, as if awakening from a quiet sleep, he said, "Is that Dora?"-Memoirs of Wordsworth, vol. ii. p. 506. Mr. Wordsworth died on the 23rd April, 1850.-E. C.

If it is indeed so, a glory is passing away from the earth. O what sweet odours of thankful love will mount with his departing spirit from thousands of hearts whose affections he has enlightened, and enlarged, and purified! This world will seem so much poorer without him; and yet his mind will still live in it as long as our language lives; and the treasures which he has been hoarding up for so many years will be found out amongst us!"

X.

"Now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face."

To Miss FENWICK, Bath.

10, Chester Place, May 6th, 1850.-Dearest Miss Fenwick, —I shall be thankful to see any letters from Rydal that you can forward. How dear Mrs. Wordsworth is to bear the trial of separation, and parting sorrow, and fatigue undergone in the last illness, is perhaps yet to appear. I trust we may augur well from the long-prepared state of her mind, and her living faith in the resurrection, and our reunion with departed friends.

Still, in some respects, the more we dwell upon that prospect, the more we strive to realize it, the deeper is the trial to our weak bodily frame. We know that another state of existence must be far other than this-that a spiritual world cannot be like an earthly world. We cannot penetrate the shades that hang over the state of souls on their departure. The subject that is spoken of under the name of the "intermediate state," of this what brief notices we have, and how ambiguous! How the best and wisest men differ about the interpretation of them! The more we think of the state after death, the deeper is the awe with which we must contemplate it; and sometimes, in weakness, we long for the happy, bright imaginations of childhood, when we saw the other world vividly pictured, a bright and perfect copy of the world in which we now

live, with sunshine and flowers, and all that constituted our earthly enjoyment! In after years we strive to translate these images into something higher. We say, All this we shall have, but in some higher form: "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven, neither shall corruption inherit incorruption." All this beauty around us is perishable its outward form and substance is corruption; but there is a soul in it, and this shall rise again; and so our beloved friends that are removed, we shall see them again, but changed-altered into what we now cannot conceive or imagine, with celestial bodies fit for a celestial sphere.

XI.

Breaking of Old Ties-The Times on Mr. Wordsworth's Poetry— True Cause of its Different Reception on the Continent, and in America.

To Mrs. H. M. JONES, Hampstead.

April, 1850.-I have been feeling and thinking much, as you will have anticipated, about the last days and hours of my dear and honoured old friend Mr. Wordsworth. I feel as if life were passing away from me in some sort; so many friends of my childhood and youth removed, so few of that generation left. It seems as if a barrier betwixt me and the grave were cast down. Happily for me, friends of my married life and children have risen up to prevent me from feeling solitary in the world. Still there is something in the breaking of these old ties that specially brings the shortness and precariousness of our tenure here before us. Hartley and Mr. Wordsworth were great figures in my circle of early friends, and leave a large blank to my mind's eye.

Many thanks, dear friend, for sending me the Times. The article on the departed dear and revered poet, the great poet, I think, of his age, is respectful, though not up to the measure of what his warmest admirers think and feel.