The incident illustrates poetry in one of its many characters, that of 'the deliverer.' The ready sympathies and inexperienced imagination of youth make it surrender itself easily despite its better aspirations, or in consequence of them, to a false greatness; and the true greatness, once revealed, sets it free.

As early as 1824 Walter Savage Landor, in his 'Imaginary Conversation' between Southey and Porson, had pronounced Wordsworth's 'Laodamia' to be 'a composition such as Sophocles might have exulted to own, and a part of which might have been heard with shouts of rapture in the regions he describes'-- the Elysian Fields.
Wordsworth frequently spoke of death, as if it were the taking of a new degree in the University of Life.

'I should like,' he remarked to a young lady, 'to visit Italy again before I move to another planet.' He sometimes made a mistake in assuming that others were equally philosophical.

We were once breakfasting at the house of Mr.Rogers, when Wordsworth, after gazing attentively round the room with a benignant and complacent expression, turned to our host, and wishing to compliment him, said, 'Mr.Rogers, I never see this house, so perfect in its taste, so exquisite in all its arrangements, and decorated with such well-chosen pictures, without fancying it the very house imaged to himself by the Roman poet, when, in illustration of man's mortality, he says, "Linquenda est domus."' 'What is that you are saying ?' replied Mr.
Rogers, whose years, between eighty and ninety, had not improved his hearing.

'I was remarking that your house,' replied Wordsworth, 'always reminds me of the Ode (more properly called an Elegy, though doubtless the lyrical measure not unnaturally causes it to be included among Horace's Odes) in which the Roman poet writes "Linquenda est domus;" that is, since, ladies being present, a translation may be deemed desirable, _The house is_, or _has to be, left_; and again, "et placens uxor"-- and the pleasing wife; though, as we must all regret, that part of the quotation is not applicable on the present occasion.' The Town Bard, on whom 'no angle smiled' more than the end of St.James's-place, did not enter into the views of the Bard of the Mountains.