First as to man: his interests and sympathies, stimulated to excess by the political convulsions he had passed through, now found healthier objects in the laboring poor whom he conversed with in the fields, and in the vagrants he met on lonely roads. These became his daily schools. In many an exquisite poem he has embalmed the incidents and characters he saw or heard of at that time. His early upbringing combined with after experience and reflection to make him esteem simple and humble life more than artificial. The homely ways of the people he had spent his boyhood with—village dames, hardy dalesmen and shepherds—concurred with his own native bias to make him love and esteem what is permanent, not what is accidental in human life, the inner, not the outer man of men, the essential soul, not its trappings of birth, fortune, and position. This native bias had been deepened by all he had seen, felt, and thought during the revolutionary ferment, and now became the fixed habit and purpose of his mind, part of his permanent self. For in humble men, when not wholly crushed or hardened by penury, he seemed to see the primary passions and elementary feelings of human nature existing as it were in their native bed—freer, stronger, more unalloyed than in men of so-called position and education, who, as he thought, were often overlaid by artifice and conventionality. The formalities which pass by the name of education he thought have little to do with real feeling and just sense, and intercourse with the talking world does little to improve men. He therefore turned away from artificial to natural man, and resolved to let the world know what he had seen and found in men and women whose outside was least attractive. “Of these, said I, shall be my song, of these Will I record the praises, making verse; Deal boldly with substantial things, in truth And sanctity of passion, speak of these That justice may be done, obeisance paid Where it is due.” Much more might be said of his views of man, as they ultimately became, for his insight into the heart and its workings, though confined to certain lines, and reflective, not dramatic, was within these lines true and deep. But we must now turn to consider, secondly, what were his views about Nature, when they were fully matured. He now came to hold with conscious conviction, what formerly he had only felt, hardly knowing that he felt it, that Nature had A self-subsistence, existing outside of man’s thoughts and feelings, and wholly independent of them; A unity of life and power pervading it through all its parts, and binding them together into a living whole; A true life of her own, which streamed through and stimulated his life—a spirit which, itself invisible, spoke through visible things to his spirit. That this life had qualities inherent in it:— Calmness, which stilled and refreshed man; Sublimity, which raised him to noble and majestic thoughts;