Ever since he wrote Wordsworth has been the patron saint of introspective souls. In his poetry they have found not merely suggestion but a creed. The poet himself was at heart an enthusiast and a revolutionary, and his worship of quiet beauty and subjective refinement was the expression of a design broader and deeper in its scope than many of his followers have been willing to adopt. He revealed not merely the æsthetic significance of the contemplative life which substitutes soul analysis, with God in nature as a guide, for the grosser interests of the flesh, but also the unholiness of class distinctions and of the indifference of man to his fellow-man as distinguished from himself. The followers of Wordsworth were, for the most part, prompt to accept the first without including the second and equally fundamental tenet of his philosophy. What, a quarter of a century ago, was the ordinary practice of the cultivated and refined, who had been stirred either directly or indirectly by the teaching of the great poet to adopt contemplation as the key-note of their daily lives? Their greatest number was in beautiful, rural England; but the spiritual atmosphere breathed by them soon found its way across the Atlantic, and served to exalt and modify the ever moral inclinations of New England. Picture, if you will, the model country house of the English country gentleman of comfortable means and refined tastes. To begin with, the structure itself is charming; time has bestowed upon it picturesqueness, and art has made it beautiful with the simple but effective arrangement of vines and flowers. There is nothing of the vileness of earth at hand to mar or offend. The proprietor himself, an elder son, has been left with a competence; no riches, but sufficient to enable him to pursue his literary or other refined interests without molestation from pecuniary cares. The interior is tasteful and æsthetically satisfying; the spacious, comfortable rooms contain all that is desirable in the way of upholstery, ornaments, books, and pictures. The large drawing-room windows command a fair expanse of velvet lawn, flanked by stately trees. Beyond lies an undulating acreage of ancestral metes and bounds, rich in verdure and precious with associations. Here lives our gentleman the greater portion of the year; lives aspiringly according to his Wordsworthian creed. He eschews or uses with admirable moderation the coarser pleasures and vanities of life. Unselfishness, gentleness, and nicety of thought and speech are the custom of his household. He himself finds congenial occupation in literary or scientific research, in the hope of adding some book or monograph to the world's store of art or knowledge. His wife, in co-operation with the church, plays a gracious part among their tenants or among the village sick and poor, teaching her daughters to dispense charity in the form of soup, coals, jellies, and blankets. Parents and children alike, jealously intending to attain