friend, Professor Reed, he gives him a short account of a visit to London to pay his respects to the Queen. "The reception given me by the Queen, at her ball, was most gracious. Mrs. Everett, the wife of your minister, among many others, was a witness to it, without knowing who I was. It moved her to the shedding of tears. This effect was in part produced, I suppose, by American habits of feeling, as pertaining to a republican government. To see a grey-haired man of seventy-five years of age, kneeling down, in a large assembly, to kiss the hand of a young woman, is a sight for which institutions essentially democratic do not prepare a spectator of either sex, and must naturally place the opinions upon which a republic is founded, and the sentiments which support it, in strong contrast with a government based and upheld as ours is."
He says, in the same letter, of his Laureate successor: "I saw Tennyson in London several times. He is decidedly the first of our living poets, and I hope will give the world still better things. You will be pleased to hear that he expressed, in the strongest terms, his gratitude to my writings. To this I was far from indifferent, though persuaded that he is not much in sympathy with what I should myself most value in my attempts, viz., the spirituality with which I have endeavoured to invest the material universe, and the moral relations under which I have wished to exhibit its most ordinary appearances." After Wordsworth's muse became official, she grew stubbornly silent. An occasional poem, he wrote and sent in manuscript to a friend, but such effusions were "short and far between."
He had established a great reputation, he enjoyed, if not wealth, a competence very comfortable: he had always hated his writing-desk, and his kind amanuensis lay on a
