In 1829, Wordsworth made a tour in Ireland, with J. Marshall, Esq., M.P. of Leeds. All through his life Wordsworth had a horror of Popery; and this journey, with his Continental tours, tended to confirm it with still greater intensity. He hated Popery because it was the avowed enemy of freedom, and he would not sanction the Catholic Emancipation Bill, because he thought that by giving freedom to the Catholic religion, the Government were but paving the way for a frightful domination over the souls and bodies of men. Still he loved freedom--as his sonnets to “Liberty,” and his enthusiastic sympathies with republican France, at the outbreak of the first revolution sufficiently show. He was a Churchman, however, devotedly attached to the traditions, forms, and doctrines of the Church, and there was no moving him from these foundations. He attributed the distress and misery of Ireland to the priests--Catholic, of course--and to the false tenures of the land. The country, he said, had never been fully conquered, and this was another and a chief cause of the degradation of Ireland. The people were under the control--absolute control--of the priests, ready to do their bidding, let that bidding be what it might. And he trembled--as well he might--for the power of the Irish Church! God forgive us, we are all at the best but short-sighted mortals, and few can see the truth, save through the medium of prejudice. The Irish Church, if _my_ vision be clear, is one of the many stumbling blocks, and rubbish heaps in the way of Irish civilization; and certainly the Roman Catholic Church is another. This tour supplied Wordsworth with very few materials for poetry. The lines, however, in the fine poem on the “Power of Sound,” one of the _finest_ poems which Wordsworth has written, commencing “Thou too be heard, lone eagle!” were, he says, suggested near the Giant’s Causeway, where he saw a pair of eagles wheel over his head, and then dart off “as if to hide themselves in a blaze of sky made by the setting sun.” It was about this time also that the sweet poem, entitled “The Triad,” was written, in which the daughters of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, are bound together in the most musical and flowery forms, as the three Graces. Wordsworth often promised these fair children to send them down to immortality in his verses, but it was long before the mood seized him, and the _modus operandi_ was made plain to him. At last the ideas embodied in “The Triad” struck him, and the result is something finer than the most vivid sculpture. The poet commences-- “Shew me the noblest youth of present time, Whose trembling fancy would to love give birth; Some god or hero from the Olympian clime Returned to seek a consort upon earth; Or, in no doubtful prospect let me see, The brightest star of ages yet to be, And I will mate and match him blissfully.”