"I heard the skylark warbling in the sky; And I bethought me of the playful hare: Even such a happy child of earth am I; Even as these blissful creatures do I fare: Far from the world I walk and from all care, But there may come another day to me-- Solitude, pain of heart, distress and poverty. "My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought. As if life's business were a summer mood; As if all needful things would come unsought To genial faith, still rich in genial good. But how can he expect that others should Build for him, sow for him, and at his call Love him, who for himself will take no care at all? "I thought of Chatterton, the marvelous boy. The sleepless soul that perished in his pride; Of him who walked in glory and in joy, Following his plough along the mountain side. By our own spirits are we deified: We poets in our youth begin in gladness, But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness." But this sad and common fate of poets, was not to visit Wordsworth. The devotion he had vowed to nature was to remain hallowed, happy, and unbroken to the end. His lot was to be the very _ideal_ of the poetic lot. He was to live amid his native mountains, guarantied against care and poverty; at liberty to roam at will amid beauty and solitude; to work out his deepest thoughts in stately verse, and in his old age to receive there the reverence of his countrymen. He had the interest of the Lowther family. By that he was appointed distributor of stamps for the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland; in his case a mere sinecure, for the business of the office is easily executed by one or more experienced clerks. Since then, two out of his three children have married well. His son, a clergyman, to a daughter of Mr. Curwen, formerly M.P., and his daughter, to Mr. Quillinan. His second son has succeeded him in his stamp-distributorship. He has succeeded Southey in the laureateship, and has had, superadded, a pension of three or four hundred a-year. Perhaps none of the purely poetic tribe have labored less for fortune, and few have been more fortunate. The early experience of himself and his poetic cotemporaries is very instructive to all who seek to realize a reputation; it is, to have faith, to persevere, and believe nature and not critics. Never was a fiercer onslaught made than by the Edinburgh Review, on the whole race of poets who then arose. With the same fatality which has since led that journal to declare that no steamer would be able to cross the Atlantic, and that Grey, the author of the railway system, was a madman, and ought to be put into Bedlam, it denounced the whole class of young poets, who were destined to revive real poetry in the land, as it afterward did Lord Byron, as drivelers, and fools. Scotland, having stoned to death its own Burns, made a determined attempt to annihilate all the rising poetry of England. It