ever from having painted a portrait of him in which anybody could
believe while reading the _Ode on Intimations of Immortality--Ode_ as
it was simply called when it was first published--or _I wandered lonely
as a cloud_, or the sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge. Nor does the
portrait of a stern, unbending egotist satisfy us when we remember the
life-long devotion that existed between him and Dorothy, and the fact
that Coleridge loved him, and that Lamb and Scott were his friends. He
may have been a niggard of warm-heartedness to the outside world, but it
is clear from his biography that he possessed the genius of a good heart
as well as of a great mind.

And he was as conspicuous for the public as for the private virtues. His
latest biographer has done well to withdraw our eyes from the portrait
of the old man with the stiffened joints and to paint in more glowing
colours than any of his predecessors the early Wordsworth who rejoiced
in the French Revolution, and, apparently as a consequence, initiated a
revolution in English poetry. The later period of the life is not
glossed over; it is given, indeed, in cruel detail, and Professor
Harper's account of it is the most lively and fascinating part of his
admirable book. But it is to the heart of the young revolutionary, who
dreamed of becoming a Girondist leader and of seeing England a republic,
that he traces all the genius and understanding that we find in the
poems.

"Wordsworth's connection," he writes, "with the English 'Jacobins,' with
the most extreme element opposed to the war or actively agitating in
favour of making England a republic, was much closer than has been
generally admitted." He points out that Wordsworth's first books of
verse, _An Evening Walk_, and _Descriptive Sketches_, were published by
Joseph Johnson, who also published Dr. Priestley, Horne Tooke, and Mary