It seemed as if he drank it up,
He felt with spirit so profound:'

"This was the way in which Wordsworth paid his tribute to a

"'Soul of God's best earthly mould.'"

The sweet voice left a trance-like silence after it, which may have
lasted twenty heart-beats. Then I said, We all thank you for your
charming quotation. How much more wholesome a picture of humanity than
such stuff as the author of the "Night Thoughts" has left us:

"Heaven's Sovereign saves all beings but Himself
That hideous sight, a naked human heart."

Or the author of "Don Juan," telling us to look into

"Man's heart, and view the hell that's there!"

I hope I am quoting correctly, but I am more of a scholar in Wordsworth
than in Byron. Was Parson Young's own heart such a hideous spectacle to
himself?

If it was, he had better have stripped off his surplice. No,--it was
nothing but the cant of his calling. In Byron it was a mood, and he
might have said just the opposite thing the next day, as he did in his
two descriptions of the Venus de' Medici. That picture of old Matthew
abides in the memory, and makes one think better of his kind. What nobler
tasks has the poet than to exalt the idea of manhood, and to make the
world we live in more beautiful?