We have Emerson's notes written immediately after two different visits to Wordsworth, paid with a year's interval. After the second, he writes: "He was nationally bitter on the French: bitter on Scotchmen too. No Scotchman, he said, can write English.... His opinions of French, English, Irish, and Scotch seemed rashly formalised from little anecdotes of what had befallen himself and members of his family, in a diligence or stage-coach." After his first visit (in 1833) Emerson writes: "He had much to say of America, the more that it gave occasion for his favourite topic--that society is being enlightened by a superficial tuition, out of all proportion to its being restrained by moral culture. Schools do no good. Tuition is not education.... He wished to impress on me and all good Americans to cultivate the moral, the conservative, &c.... He proceeded to abuse Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_ heartily. It was full of all manner of fornication. It was like the crossing of flies in the air. He had never gone farther than the first part; so disgusted was he that he threw the book across the room.... He cited his sonnet 'On the Feelings of a High-minded Spaniard' which he preferred to any other (I so understood him), and 'The Two Voices'; and quoted, with evident pleasure, the verses addressed to the Skylark." These jottings give us an excellent idea of what Wordsworth was in ordinary intercourse: the contemptuous verdicts passed on all foreign races, the objection to modern civilisation (the same which the Mohammedans in Asia and Africa prefer against it to this day) that it is compatible with great immorality; the eulogy on conventional morality as the society-preserving element (true morality being the most radical element in existence), the displeasure with Goethe (which reminds us of Novalis), and the recital of his own verses as finale! Emerson sums up his impressions in the following words: "His face sometimes lighted up, but his conversation was not marked by special force or elevation.... He honoured himself by his simple adherence to truth, and was very willing not to shine; but he surprised by the hard limits of his thought. To judge from a single conversation, he made the impression of a narrow and very English mind; of one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and conformity."