But to Coleridge his mind constantly reverted;
he called him "the most wonderful man he had ever known," and he
kept him as the ideal auditor of his own poems, long after Coleridge
had listened to the _Prelude_,--
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted.
In 1836, moreover, died one for whom Coleridge, as well as Wordsworth,
had felt a very high respect and regard--Sarah Hutchinson, Mrs.
Wordsworth's sister, and long the inmate of Wordsworth's household.
This most valued friend had been another instance of the singular
good fortune which attended Wordsworth in his domestic connexions;
and when she was laid in Grasmere churchyard, the stone above her
tomb expressed the wish of the poet and his wife that, even as her
remains were laid beside their dead children's, so their own bodies
also might be laid by hers.
And now, while the inner circle of friends and relations began, to
pass away, the outer circle of admirers was rapidly spreading.
Between the years 1830 and 1840 Wordsworth passed from the apostle
of a clique into the most illustrious man of letters in England. The
rapidity of this change was not due to any remarkable accident, nor
to the appearance of any new work of genius.
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