ABSTRACT
There are many portraits of Wordsworth. Upon that which longest represented him to the public—the portrait by Pickersgill, of which the original is at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and which was engraved as a frontispiece for several editions of the works,—I cannot but pronounce a condemnatory verdict, remembering all the while that it drew from the poet a sonnet both beautiful and touching. Whilst, of course, it conveys some idea of the general form, it fails to impart the characteristic expression of strength, and gives, instead, an attempt at the sentimental, which suggests the epithet of ‘maudlin.’ I can have little doubt that that frontispiece, conveying a false impression of the poet, has even conduced with many to a misinterpretation of his poetry. The bust by Chantrey, an engraving of which appears in the one volume edition of the poems, is a work of thought and elevation, but is not a striking likeness: that by Angus Fletcher is much more so, being, as I conceive, truer both to the form and bearing of the head. A miniature by Miss Gillies, also engraved, gives a pleasing aspect of the poet in his less earnest conversational and domestic mood, but, if amiable, it, as well as Pickersgill’s, is weak. Far otherwise is it with the portrait by Haydon: this alone deserves to be the historic portrait of Wordsworth: it represents him musing on the side of Helvcllyn, the mountain mists floating around him. Nothing can be truer to the original than the droop of the head 280weighed down by the thoughts and feelings over which the active imagination is pleasurably brooding; and if there be some want of finish and refinement in the modelling of the features, there is a grandeur at the same time poetical and truthful in the fine development of the temple and crown—in the visionary look, and in the hanging under-lip, quivering with the coming verse. Mrs. Bowning has celebrated it in a fine sonnet, commencing with the words “Wordsworth upon Helvellyn!” and concluding, “This is the Poet and his Poetry.” There is a good engraving from it of the head by Lupton. I have seen, but not near enough to judge of it, the sitting statue by Theed, which is in the Baptistery of Westminster Abbey. But one criticism at once suggested itself to me. It supposes the poet composing with a pencil in his hand. Now, this conveys an idea in exact opposition to what was the habit of the poet. Almost all his poems, as I have heard from himself, were composed out of doors, as he either freely traversed hill and vale, or paced some favourite level strip, such as that at Lancrigg, or that in the fir-grove consecrated to the memory of his brother, or a terrace in his garden. It was in such places that, to use his own words, he “scatter’d to the winds The vocal raptures of fresh poesy.”
