" To this it must be added, that the increasing
weakness of the poet's eyes seriously limited his means of
information. He had never read much contemporary literature, and he
read less than ever now. He had no fresh or comprehensive knowledge
of the general condition of the country, and he really believed in
the prognostication which was uttered by many also who did _not_
believe in it, that with the Reform Bill the England which he knew
and loved would practically disappear. But there was nothing in him
of the angry polemic, nothing of the calumnious partisan. One of the
houses where Mr. Wordsworth was most intimate and most welcome was
that of a reforming member of parliament, who was also a manufacturer,
thus belonging to the two classes for which the poet had the
greatest abhorrence. But the intimacy was never for a moment shaken,
and indeed in that house Mr. Wordsworth expounded the ruinous
tendency of Reform and manufactures with even unusual copiousness,
on account of the admiring affection with which he felt himself
surrounded. The tone in which he spoke was never such as could give
pain or excite antagonism; and--if I may be pardoned for descending
to a detail which well illustrates my position--the only rejoinder
which these diatribes provoked was that the poet on his arrival was
sometimes decoyed into uttering them to the younger members of the
family, whose time was of less value, so as to set his mind free to
return to those topics of more permanent interest where his
conversation kept to the last all that tenderness, nobility, wisdom,
which in that family, as in many others familiar with the celebrated
persons of that day, won for him a regard and a reverence such as
was accorded to no other man.
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