This beautiful poem, so full of calm affection, and intellectual homage, is a fair sample of Wordsworth’s love poems, as well as a charming tribute to his wife’s loveliness and virtue. In early life, it is thought by De Quincy and others, that the poet had experienced a tragical termination to an early love, and that the poems of which “Lucy” is the theme, were addressed to the object of this love; but Wordsworth always maintained a mysterious silence about the whole affair, and would never resolve the riddle of this attachment. The “Lucy” poems, however, beautiful as they are, are chiefly valuable as exhibiting the _kind_ of passion which _love_ showed itself in Wordsworth. Passion, in the proper meaning of the word--viz., deep, fiery, intense, and all-embracing feeling, was certainly not Wordsworth’s. His love was calm, intellectual, and emotional--but it was not passion. All his love seems to have passed through his head before it touched his heart. And yet he loved his wife, and lived, as I said before, very happily with her. Mrs. Wordsworth, however, was a true household woman, and had not acquired that faculty of walking which Wordsworth and his sister possessed, in so eminent a degree. In about a year, therefore, after his marriage--that is, August 14, 1803,--we find Wordsworth parting from his wife, and making a tour into Scotland, with his sister and Coleridge, taking Carlisle on the way. When they arrived at Longtown, they found a guide-post pointing out two roads,--one to Edinburgh, the other to Glasgow. They took the latter road, and entered Scotland by crossing the river Sark. Edinburgh was no favourite place with Wordsworth, and for reasons which are sufficiently obvious. The tourists then passed through Gretna Green to Annan, leaving the Solway Frith, and the Cumberland hills to their left hand. On Thursday the 18th August, they went to the churchyard where Burns is buried; a bookseller accompanied them, of whom Miss Wordsworth had bought some little books for Johnny, the poet’s first child. He showed them first the outside of Burns’ house, where he had lived the last three years of his life, and where he died. It had a mean appearance, and was in a bye situation, white-washed, and dirty about the doors, as all Scotch houses are; flowering plants in the windows. They went on to visit his grave. He lies in a corner of the churchyard, and his second son, Francis Wallace, is beside him. There was no stone to mark the spot. The greatest bard that had sung in Britain for some centuries, lay buried there like a dog. A hundred guineas, however, had been collected to build a monument over his ashes. “There,” said the bookseller to the visitors, pointing to a pompous monument, a few yards off, “there lies Mr. John Bushby, a remarkably clever man; he was an attorney, and hardly ever lost a cause he undertook. Burns made many a lampoon upon him; and there they rest as you see.” Yes, indeed, there they rested; and that was the deep, sad