pelisse lined with fur, and a dog's-skin bonnet, such as was worn by
the peasants, I walked daily on the ramparts or on a sort of public
ground or garden, in which was a pond. Here I had no companion but a
kingfisher, a beautiful creature that used to glance by me. I
consequently became much attached to it. During these walks I
composed _The Poet's Epitaph_."

Seldom has there been a more impressive instance of the contrast,
familiar to biographers, between the apparent insignificance and the
real importance of their hero in undistinguished youth. To any one
considering Wordsworth as he then was,--a rough and somewhat
stubborn young man, who, in nearly thirty years of life, had seemed
alternately to idle without grace and to study without advantage,--
it might well have seemed incredible that he could have anything new
or valuable to communicate to mankind. Where had been his experience?
Or where was the indication of that wealth of sensuous emotion which
in such a nature as Keats' seems almost to dispense with experience
and to give novelty by giving vividness to such passions as are
known to all? If Wordsworth were to impress mankind it must be, one
might have thought, by travelling out of himself altogether--by
revealing some such energy of imagination as can create a world of
romance and adventure in the shyest heart. But this was not so to be.
Already Wordsworth's minor poems had dealt almost entirely with his
own feelings, and with the objects actually before his eyes; and it
was at Goslar that he planned, and on the day of his quitting Goslar
that he began, a much longer poem, whose subject was to be still
more intimately personal, being the development of his own mind. This
poem, dedicated to Coleridge, and written in the form of a
confidence bestowed on an intimate friend, was finished in 1805, but
was not published till after the poet's death. Mrs. Wordsworth then