"Here, on the contrary," says our author, "he looked out from his study windows upon the sublime hills of Seat Sandal and Arthur's Chair, and upon pastoral cottages at their feet; and all around he heard hourly the murmurings of happy life, the sound of female voices, and the innocent laughter of children. But apparently he was not happy: opium, was it, or what was it, that poisoned all natural pleasure at its sources? He burrowed continually deeper into scholastic subtleties and metaphysical abstractions; and, like that class described by Seneca, in the luxurious Rome of his days, he lived chiefly by candle-light. At two or four o'clock in the afternoon he would make his first appearance. Through the silence of the night, when all other lights had disappeared in the quiet cottages of Grasmere, his lamp might be seen invariably by the belated traveller, as he descended the long steep from Dunmailraise; and at seven or eight o'clock in the morning, when man was going forth to his labour, this insulated son of reverie was retiring to bed."

"Very few books," we are told, "sufficed him; he was careless habitually of all the current literature, or, indeed, of any literature that could not be considered as enshrining the very ideal, capital, and elementary grandeur of the human intellect. In this extreme limitation of his literary sensibilities, he was as much assisted by that accident of his own intellectual condition - viz. extreme, intense, unparalleled onesidedness [einseitigkeit] - as by any peculiar sanity of feeling. Thousands of books that have given rapturous delight to millions of ingenuous minds, for Wordsworth were absolutely a dead letter, closed and sealed from his sensibilities and his powers of appreciation, not less than colour from a blind man's eye. Even the few books which his peculiar mind had made indispensable to him, were not in such a sense indispensable as they would have been to a man of more sedentary habits. He lived in the open air, and the enormity of pleasure which both he and his sister drew from the common appearances of nature, and their everlasting variety - variety so infinite, that if no one leaf of a tree or shrub ever exactly resembled another in all its filaments and their arrangement, still less did any one day ever repeat another in all its pleasurable elements. This pleasure was to him in the stead of many libraries:-