A lover, I repeat, in any passionate sense of the word, Wordsworth could not have been. And, moreover, it is remarkable that a woman who could dispense with that sort of homage in her suitor is not of a nature to inspire such a passion. That same meekness which reconciles her to the tone of superiority and freedom in the manner of her suitor, and which may afterwards in a wife become a sweet domestic grace, strips her of that too charming irritation, captivating at once and tormenting, which lurks in feminine pride. If there be an enchantress's spell yet surviving in this age of ours, it is the haughty grace of maidenly pride--the womanly sense of dignity, even when most in excess, and expressed in the language of scorn--which tortures a man and lacerates his heart, at the same time that it pierces him with admiration:-- "Oh, what a world of scorn looks beautiful In the contempt and anger of her lip!" And she who spares a man the agitations of this thraldom robs him no less of its divinest transports. Wordsworth, however, who never could have laid aside his own nature sufficiently to have played _his_ part in such an impassioned courtship, by suiting himself to this high sexual pride with the humility of a lover, quite as little could have enjoyed the spectacle of such a pride, or have viewed it in any degree as an attraction: it would to him have been a pure vexation. Looking down even upon the lady of his heart, as upon the rest of the world, from the eminence of his own intellectual superiority--viewing her, in fact, as a child--he would be much more disposed to regard any airs of feminine disdain she might assume as the impertinence of girlish levity than as the caprice of womanly pride; and much I fear that, in any case of dispute, he would have called even his mistress, "Child! child!" and perhaps even (but this I do not say with the same certainty) might have bid her hold her tongue. If, however, no lover, in a proper sense,--though, from many exquisite passages, one might conceive that at some time of his life he was, as especially from the inimitable stanzas beginning-- "When she I loved was strong and gay, And like a rose in June," or perhaps (but less powerfully so, because here the passion, though profound, is less the _peculiar_ passion of love) from the impassioned lamentation for "the pretty Barbara," beginning-- "'Tis said that some have died for love: And here and there, amidst unhallow'd ground In the cold north," &c.,--