that holy office, and that the struggle between his conscience and
his impulses would have made life a torture. He also shrank from the
law. He had studied military history with great interest, and the
strategy of war; and he always fancied that he had talents for
command; and he at one time thought of a military life; but then he
was without connexions, and he felt if he were ordered to the West
Indies his talents would not save him from the yellow fever, and he
gave that up." He therefore repaired to London, and lived there for
a time on a small allowance and with no definite aim. His relations
with the great city were of a very slight and external kind. He had
few acquaintances, and spent his time mainly in rambling about the
streets. His descriptions of this phase of his life have little
interest. There is some flatness in an enumeration of the
nationalities observable in a London crowd, concluding thus:--

Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese,
And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.

But Wordsworth's limitations were inseparably connected with his
strength. And just as the flat scenery of Cambridgeshire had only
served to intensify his love for such elements of beauty and
grandeur as still were present in sky and fen, even so the
bewilderment of London taught him to recognize with an intenser joy
such fragments of things rustic, such aspects of things eternal, as
were to be found amidst that rush and roar. To the frailer spirit of
Hartley Coleridge the weight of London might seem a load impossible
to shake off. "And what hath Nature," he plaintively asked,--

And what hath Nature but the blank void sky
And the thronged river toiling to the main?