This sad intelligence filled their house with mourning. Captain Wordsworth had always entertained the profoundest admiration for his brother. He fully appreciated, and, even at the time that the critics were most cynical and severe, predicted the success of the poems. More than this, the object of this very voyage, in which he was lost, was to increase the worldly means of his brother and sister. They were not unmindful of his noble conduct, and their grief occasioned by his melancholy fate was as vehement as it was sincere.
"Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus,
Tam cari capitis?"
is the spirit of every line in verse or prose that Wordsworth wrote on the man and his memory.
A few months after this sad catastrophe, our poet brought to a termination his long-life history, "The Prelude." It will be our duty hereafter to express an opinion on its merits. Wordsworth himself, in a letter to Sir G. Beaumont, writes: "It will not be much less than nine thousand lines—not hundred, but thousand lines long—an alarming length! and a thing unprecedented in literary history, that a man should talk so much about himself. It is not self-conceit, as you know well, that has induced me to do this, but real humility. I began the work because I was unprepared to treat any more arduous subject, and diffident of my own powers." In writing again to his kind and generous friend, the baronet, he speaks thus of it: "I have the pleasure to say that I finished my poem about a fortnight ago. I had looked forward to the day as a most happy one; and I was indeed grateful to God for giving me life to complete the work, such as it is. But it was not a happy day for me; I was dejected on many accounts: when I looked back upon the performance, it seemed to have a dead weight about it—the reality so far short of the expectation. It
