wrote, in a letter to Southey,--“Let the age continue to love its own darkness; I shall continue to write, with, I trust, the light of heaven upon me.” Jeffrey, in the pride and arrogance of his position, as Executioner General of the Courts of Critical Assize, boasted that HE--poor devil!--had _crushed_ the “Excursion;” and the boast was repeated to Southey:--“Tell him,” said he, Southey “that he could as soon crush Skiddaw!” Bernard Barton,--a writer whose chief merit consists in a letter written to Wordsworth, expressive of his homage and reverence for the Bard of Rydal--alludes, in the said letter, to Jeffrey: “He has taken,” says Wordsworth, in reply, “a perpetual retainer, from his own incapacity, to plead against my claims to public approbation.” So, we see, that the good poet could hit hard if he liked; although he rarely descended to this literary pugilism, thinking it beneath the dignity of his art and character. It was Wordsworth’s custom to compose in the open air; and as his servant once said to a visitor, “This, sir, is my master’s library--his study is out of doors.” He had a great and sickening dread of writing; and his sister, or some other member of his family was always at hand to perform for him the office of amanuensis. In the year 1807, when on a visit to his wife’s brother at Stockton-on-Tees, the weather being very boisterous, and the winds rough, he used to pace up and down under the lee of a row of corn-stacks in a field near that town--and it was here that he composed the earlier part of “White Doe of Ryletone,” chaunting his verses aloud to the astonished stacks. The poem was not published until 1815, and has been much misinterpreted, and consequently abused. The truth is, that Wordsworth wrote always upon principle, and a carefully premeditated plan; there was always a high purpose in his poems, both moral and intellectual. His poetical canons were likewise his own, and his mode of treating a subject was always in conformity with them, or illustrations of them. Superficial readers, who had been accustomed to the _objective_ poetry of Scott, could not understand Wordsworth, therefore; for he was studiously _subjective_, and the interest of his poems hangs nearly always upon the development of mere spiritual forces, and their progress, if I may so speak, _outwards_, in the subjugation of the external world or in the strengthening of the soul to bear the ills and mishaps of life with a sublime fortitude. “The White Doe” is a memorable example of this spiritual aim. “Every thing,” says Wordsworth, ‘attempted by the principal personages in this poem _fails_, so far as its object is external and substantial; so far as it is moral and spiritual it _succeeds_. The heroine of the poem knows that her duty is not to interfere with the current of events, either to forward or delay them; but “To abide The shock, and finally secure O’er pain and grief a triumph pure.”