But Rossetti would not see that this last couplet denoted the point of artistic vision at which the poet of nature identified himself with her, in setting aside or superseding all proprieties of mere speech. To him Wordsworth’s Idealism (which certainly had the German trick of keeping close to the ground) only meant us to understand that the forsaken woman through whose mouth the words are spoken (in _The Affliction of Margaret_ ------ of ------) saw _the breeze shake the tree_ afar off. And this attitude towards Wordsworth Rossetti maintained down to the end. I remember that sometime in March of the year in which he died, Mr. Theodore Watts, who was paying one of his many visits to see him in his last illness at the sea-side, touched, in conversation, upon the power of Wordsworth’s style in its higher vein, and instanced a noble passage in the _Ode to Duty_, which runs: Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear The Godhead’s most benignant grace; Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face; Flowers laugh before thee on their beds; And fragrance in thy footing treads; Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong. Mr. Watts spoke with enthusiasm of the strength and simplicity, the sonorousness and stately march of these lines; and numbered them, I think, among the noblest verses yet written, for every highest quality of style. But Rossetti was unyielding, and though he admitted the beauty of the passage, and was ungrudging in his tribute to another passage which I had instanced-- O joy that in our embers-- he would not allow that Wordsworth ever possessed a grasp of the great style, or that (despite the Ode on Immortality and the sonnet on _Toussaint L’Ouverture_, which he placed at the head of the poet’s work) vital lyric impulse was ever fully developed in his muse. He said: As to Wordsworth, no one regards the great Ode with more special and unique homage than I do, as a thing absolutely alone of its kind among all greatest things. I cannot say that anything else of his with which I have ever been familiar (and I suffer from long disuse of all familiarity with him) seems at all on a level with this.