It was about eight years before his death that I had the happiness of making acquaintance with Wordsworth.

During the next four years I saw a good deal of him, chiefly among his own mountains, and, besides many delightful walks with him, I had the great honour of passing some days under his roof.

The strongest of my impressions respecting him was that made by the manly simplicity, and lofty rectitude, which characterised him.

In one of his later sonnets he writes of himself thus: 'As a true man who long had served the lyre:'-- it was because he was a _true_ man that he was a true poet; and it was impossible to know him without being reminded of this.

In any case he must have been recognised as a man of original and energetic genius; but it was his strong and truthful moral nature, his intellectual sincerity, the abiding conscientiousness of his imagination, which enabled that genius to do its great work, and bequeath to the England of the future the most solid mass of deep-hearted and authentic poetry which has been the gift to her of any poet since the Elizabethan age.