sister to Tintern and Chepstow. The _Lines written above Tintern
Abbey_ have become, as it were, the _locus classicus_ or consecrated
formulary of the Wordsworthian faith. They say in brief what it is
the work of the poet's biographer to say in detail.

As soon as this volume was published Wordsworth and his sister
sailed for Hamburg, in the hope that their imperfect acquaintance
with the German language might be improved by the heroic remedy of a
winter at Goslar. But at Goslar they do not seem to have made any
acquaintances, and their self-improvement consisted mainly in
reading German books to themselves. The four months spent at Goslar,
however, were the very bloom of Wordsworth's poetic career. Through
none of his poems has the peculiar loveliness of English scenery and
English girlhood shone more delicately than through those which came
to him as he paced the frozen gardens of that desolate city. Here it
was that he wrote _Lucy Gray_, and _Ruth_, and _Nutting_, and the
_Poet's Epitaph_, and other poems known now to most men as
possessing in its full fragrance his especial charm. And here it was
that the memory of some emotion prompted the lines on _Lucy_. Of the
history of that emotion he has told us nothing; I forbear, therefore,
to inquire concerning it, or even to speculate. That it was to the
poet's honour I do not doubt; but who ever learned such secrets
rightly? Or who should wish to learn? It is best to leave the
sanctuary of all hearts inviolate, and to respect the reserve not
only of the living but of the dead. Of these poems, almost alone,
Wordsworth in his autobiographical notes has said nothing whatever.
One of them he suppressed for years, and printed only in a later
volume. One can, indeed, well imagine that there may be poems which
a man may be willing to give to the world only in the hope that their
pathos will be, as it were, protected by its own intensity, and that