tour of France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany, traveling, like our friend Bayard Taylor, mostly on foot, diving into forests, lingering by lakes, penetrating into the cottages of Italian peasants and rude German boors, and alternating the whole by a residence in the great European cities. This seems to have occupied nearly two years of his life; its immediate, but not its only result, was the publication of his “Descriptive Sketches in Verse,” indicating accurate observation rather than shaping imagination, and undistinguished by any marked peculiarities of thought or diction. We next hear of him at Bristol, the companion of Coleridge and Southey, and discussing with those eager and daring spirits the essential falsehood of current poetry as a representation of nature. The sensible conclusion of all three was this—that the worn-out epithets and images then in vogue among the rhymers, were meaningless; that poetry was to be sought in nature and man; and that the language of poetry was not a tinsel rhetoric, but an impassioned utterance of thoughts and emotions awakened by a direct contact of the mind with the objects it described. Of these propositions, the last was one of primary importance, and in a mind so grave, deep and contemplative as Wordsworth’s, with an instinctive ambition to be one of “Nature’s Privy Council,” and dive into the secrets of those visible forms which had ever thrilled his soul with a vague and aching rapture, the mere critical opinion passed into a motive and an inspiration.