Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/434

420 morning's walk. His aversion to any employment at his writing-desk was inconquerable. This is his own confession: "My writing-desk is to me a place of punishment; and as my penmanship sufficiently testifies, I always bend over it with some degree of impatience."

He was not much more diligent with books than with his pen; and not only was averse to poring long over their contents, but treated their exteriors very unceremoniously. Southey, whose whole soul was in his library, compared Wordsworth among books to a bear in a tulip-garden; and was horrified one morning by his cutting the pages of a volume of a costly edition of Burke with a knife greasy with butter. Wordsworth seems to have indulged a proud feeling of superiority at not being supposed to owe much to the aid of book lore. To Archdeacon Wrangham he writes almost exultingly: "My reading powers were never very good, and now they are much diminished, especially by candle-light; and as to buying books, I can affirm that in new books I have not spent five shillings for the last five years, i.e. in reviews, magazines, pamphlets, &c., &c., so that there would be an end of Mr. Longman and Mr. Cadell, &c., if nobody had more power or inclination to buy than myself. And as to old books, my dealings in that way, for want of means, have been very trifling. Nevertheless, small and paltry as my collection is, I have not read a fifth part of it."

Wordsworth was fond of gardening, and of paintings he was not a bad judge.

Of his moral character, it would be impossible to speak in terms too eulogistic. We have the testimony of Southey, who speaks of him as follows:

"Wordsworth's residence and mine are fifteen miles asunder, a sufficient distance to preclude any frequent interchange of visits. I have known him nearly twenty years, and for about half that time, intimately. The