I might go on here, and enter more at length into details of his personal character, but the task is too difficult a one, and is perhaps, after all, better left unattempted. A most intimate and highly-valued friend of my father's, whom I wished to have supplied me with some passages on these points, remarks very justly, that "any portraiture of him, by the pen as by the pencil, will fall so far short both of the truth and the ideal which the readers of his poetry and his letters will have formed for themselves, that they would be worse than superfluous." And, indeed, perhaps I have already said too much. I can not, however, resist quoting here some lines by the friend above alluded to, which describe admirably in brief my father's whole character: "Two friends Lent me a further light, whose equal hate On all unwholesome sentiment attends, Nor whom may genius charm where heart infirm attends. "In all things else contrarious were these two: The one a man upon whose laureled brow Gray hairs were growing! glory ever new Shall circle him in after years as now; For spent detraction may not disavow The world of knowledge with the wit combined, The elastic force no burden e'er could bow, The various talents and the single mind, Which give him moral power and mastery o'er mankind. "His sixty summers--what are they in truth? By Providence peculiarly blest, With him the strong hilarity of youth Abides, despite gray hairs, a constant guest, His sun has veered a point toward the west, But light as dawn his heart is glowing yet-- That heart the simplest, gentlest, kindliest, best, Where truth and manly tenderness are met With faith and heavenward hope, the suns that never set."[4] What further I will venture to say relates chiefly to the external circumstances of his life at Keswick. His greatest relaxation was in a mountain excursion or a pic-nic by the side of one of the lakes, tarns, or streams; and these parties, of which he was the life and soul, will long live in the recollections of those who shared them. An excellent pedestrian (thinking little of a walk of twenty-five miles when upward of sixty), he usually headed the "infantry" on these occasions, looking on those gentlemen as idle mortals who indulged in the luxury of a mountain pony; feeling very differently in the bracing air of Cumberland to what he did in Spain in 1800, when he delighted in being "gloriously lazy," in "sitting sideways upon an ass," and having even a boy to "propel" the burro.