was accorded to no other man. To those, indeed, who realized how deeply he felt these changes,-- how profoundly his notion of national happiness was bound up with a lovely and vanishing ideal,--the prominent reflection was that the hopes and principles which maintained through all an underlying hope and trust in the future must have been potent indeed. It was no easy optimism which prompted the lines written in 1837--one of his latest utterances--in which he speaks to himself with strong self-judgment and resolute hope. On reading them one shrinks from dwelling longer upon an old man's weakness and a brave man's fears. If this great world of joy and pain Revolve in one sure track; If Freedom, set, revive again, And Virtue, flown, come back,-- Woe to the purblind crew who fill The heart with each day's care, Nor learn, from past and future, skill To bear and to forbear. The poet had also during these years more of private sorrow than his tranquil life had for a long time experienced. In 1832 his sister had a most serious illness, which kept her for many months in a state of great prostration, and left her, when the physical symptoms abated, with her intellect painfully impaired, and her bright nature permanently overclouded. Coleridge, too, was nearing his end. "He and my beloved sister," writes Wordsworth, in 1832, "are the two beings to whom my intellect is most indebted, and they are now proceeding, as it were, _pari passu_, along the path of sickness, I will not say towards the grave, but I trust towards a blessed immortality." In July, 1834, "every mortal power of Coleridge was frozen at its marvellous source," And although the early intimacy had scarcely been maintained,--though the "comfortless and hidden well" had, for a time at least, replaced the "living murmuring fount of love" which used to spring beside Wordsworth's door,--yet the loss was one which the surviving poet deeply felt. Coleridge was the only contemporary man of letters with whom Wordsworth's connexion had been really close; and when Wordsworth is spoken of as one of a group of poets exemplifying in various ways the influence of the Revolution, it is not always remembered how very little he had to do with the other famous men of his time. Scott and Southey were valued friends, but he thought little of Scott's poetry, and less of Southey's. Byron and Shelley he seems scarcely to have read; and he failed altogether to appreciate Keats. But to Coleridge his mind constantly reverted; he called him "the most wonderful man he had ever known," and he kept him as the ideal auditor of his own poems, long after Coleridge had listened to the _Prelude_,-- A song divine of high and passionate thoughts To their own music chanted.