He had no musical ear, no power of distinguishing tunes, yet was rapt into ecstatic fervor by the {343} near and sweet warbling of a bird. Books he loved only for their uses; he favored no finical "keeping" of them, but plunged into an uncut volume with a smeared fruit-knife--if need were. Southey dreaded his visits to his Keswick library, saying he was "like a bear in a tulip garden." He was parsimonious too; generosity in praise, or in purse, was unknown to him; and he had stiff school-mastery ways with youngish men--craving oblation and large tokens of respect. De Quincey said he never offered to carry a lady's shawl; hardly offered a hand to help her over a stile. He was not mobile, not adaptive, not gossipy; last of men for a picnic or a tea-party. His shaking of hands was "feckless;" which to a Scottish ear means a hand-shake not to be run after and with no heartiness in its grip. That home of Rydal Mount was a modest and charming one; within--severely simple; in abstemiousness the poet was almost an anchorite: without--a terrace walk, a velvety stretch of turf, mossy vases, a dial, a few patches of flowers, grayish house-walls on which the clambering vines took hold, quaint stone chimney-tops on which the {344} lichens clung and around which the swallows played, views of Rydal Water, glimpses of Windermere, of Nab-scar, and of nearer heights crowned with foliage. Wordsworth was never a man of large means; his poems gave only small moneyed returns; nor did he care overmuch for expensive indulgences; travelling was his greatest and most coveted luxury. All new scenes in nature came to his eye as so many new phases of his oldest and tenderest friend. For a considerable period he was in receipt of a small revenue from a local Commissionership of Stamps, and during the last eight years of his life received a pension of £300 from the Government. A year after the grant, upon the death of Dr. Southey, he was, through the urgence of friends, and at the solicitation of Sir Robert Peel, induced to accept the post of Poet Laureate--going up to London, at the age of seventy-three, to kiss the hand of the young Queen, in recognition of that honor. This young Queen, then in her twenty-fourth year, was her present gracious lady, Victoria, who had succeeded to her bluff sailor-uncle, {345} William IV., in 1837, and to her sorrier uncle, George IV., who had died in 1830.