As for myself, it seems now of little moment how long I may be remembered.

When a man pushes off in his little boat into the great seas of Infinity and Eternity, it surely signifies little how long he is kept in sight by watchers from the shore.' Such are my chief recollections of the great poet, whom I knew but in his old age, but whose heart retained its youth till his daughter Dora's death.

He seemed to me one who from boyhood had been faithful to a high vocation; one who had esteemed it his office to minister, in an age of conventional civilisation, at Nature's altar, and who had in his later life explained and vindicated such life-long ministration, even while he seemed to apologise for it, in the memorable confession, 'But who is innocent?
By grace divine, Not otherwise, O Nature, are we thine.'[272] [272] 'Evening Voluntary.' It was to Nature as first created, not to Nature as corrupted by 'disnatured' passions, that his song had attributed such high and healing powers.

In singing her praise he had chosen a theme loftier than most of his readers knew--loftier, as he perhaps eventually discovered, than he had at first supposed it to be.

Utterly without Shakspeare's dramatic faculty, he was richer and wider in the humanities than any poet since Shakspeare.