this the voluntary, gradual, contemplative character of Wordsworth's intellectual nature is quite unequal. Wherever there is extended surface in his subject, there there is want of unity in the poem-inadequacy to blend a variety of elements into a single picture. There is no whole landscape in all Wordsworth's exquisite studies of nature. There is no variety of moral influences in all his many beautiful contemplations of character. There is no distinct centre of interest in any but his very simplest narratives. Indeed, he can deal with facts successfully only when they are simple enough to embody but a single idea: as in the case of Peter Bell and the Idiot Boy. If they have any character of accident about them, this reappears in his poems in all the accidental, discontinuous, and straggling form of its original existence. Almost any one of Wordsworth's fact-poems will immediately occur to the mind in illustration of this-"Simon Lee," "Alice Fell," the story of the traveller lost on Helvellyn, and many others. They are anecdotes, with passages often of surpassing beauty, but still untransmuted anecdotes,-here a bit of fact-there a gleam of natural loveliness-then a layer more of fact, and so forth. He neither throws himself into the narrative, so as to give you the active spirit of life inside it, as Scott did; nor does he give solely the contemplative view of it, as in his simplest ballads he can do with so much beauty; but he sprinkles a little macadam of stony fact along the fair upland path of his imagination. Thus, in the early editions of "The Thorn," he anxiously recorded the size of the infant's grave:

"I've measured it from side to side,

'Tis three feet long and two feet wide" -inevitably suggesting that the poet was an undertaker speculating on the size of the hidden coffin.

Yet these spots of prosiness are eminently characteristic of Wordsworth. He had vividly acute senses, and delighted in the mere physical use of them; they both relieved him from the strain of contemplation, and suggested new food for contemplation. "I speak," he says in the Prelude,

"in recollection of a time

When the bodily eye-in every stage of life
The most despotic of our senses-gained
Such strength in me, as often held my mind
In absolute dominion.

I roam'd from hill to hill, from rock to rock,
Still craving combination of new forms;
New pleasure; wider empire for the sight,
Proud of her own endowments; and rejoiced
To lay the inner faculties asleep."

The truth of this statement is obvious to any one who reads

his earliest poems; and these vivid senses continued to the last to work quite in separation from the poetic spirit within him; so that no poet gives us so strong a feeling of the contrast between the inward and the outward as Wordsworth; he dives into himself between his respirations, that he may exclude for a little while the tyranny of the senses, and so not waste his life in the mere animal pleasure of breathing. A geometrician would say, that while all other poetry moves on the plain of life, Wordsworth's is poetry of double curvature, and winds in and out continually beneath and above it. Mr. Hood, in one of the most thoughtful parts of his book, states, that the sense of hearing is the finest sense Wordsworth has, and gave rise to the finest poetry of nature he ever wrote. The latter statement is, we think, true; but the inference from it, that the ear is the finest of Wordsworth's senses, is probably an error. There is no indication that he had any fine faculty for music; and we think the reasoning by which Mr. Hood arrived at his inference is almost an inversion of the truth. It is because the ear cannot and did not fill and distract the contemplative mind so much as the eye,-because sound appeals directly to the interpreting spirit, and has so little substantive significance of its own,-that Wordsworth's poetry on sounds has, perhaps, less discontinuity, more fusion, than his poetry on sight. Vision absorbed him, and would not allow his "inward eye" to see until sight was exchanged for memory; and even then his poems on visible things have two distinct portions -the descriptive portion, or the strophe dedicated to the eye, and the meditative antistrophe, which belongs to the mind. But when he listened, the sound only served to keep his mind fixed on a single centre, while it allowed him full scope for free meditation. It was not easy for him to macadamise his poetry with little abrupt matter-of-fact sounds. There is no poem like that "To the Cuckoo"-of all his poems Wordsworth's own darling. Whether "through water, earth, and air, the soul of happy sound was spread," or the "far-distant hills into the tumult sent an alien sound of melancholy not unnoticed," there was ever expression enough to stir the depths of Wordsworth's watchful heart without enslaving his senses.

But it is by no means due only to the imperfect unity between Wordsworth's spirit and senses, and his disposition to save up all he saw for his poetry just as he saw it, that these little constant specks of incongruous material so often annoy us; the same thing occurs quite as often in his meditative poems. There was a rigidity in his mind, the offspring probably of the intense meditation he was wont to concentrate on single centres of thought. Hazlitt has thus finely described the general expression of his personal appearance:

"The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's cottage. I think I see him now. He answered in some degree to his friend's description of him, but was more gaunt and Don-Quixote like. He was quaintly dressed (according to the costume of that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian-jacket and striped pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge, in his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a severe, worn pressure of thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw something in objects more than the outward appearance), an intense high narrow forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose and feeling, and a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of his face. Chantrey's bust wants the marking traits; but he was teased into making it regular and heavy. Haydon's head of him, introduced into the Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem, is the most like his drooping weight of thought and expression. He sat down, and talked very naturally and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the northern burr, like the crust on wine."

We seem to feel here that in Wordsworth, as well as in Peter Bell, there were many of

"The unshaped half-human thoughts

Which solitary nature feeds

'Mid summer storms or winter's ice."

We half apply to him that fine verse—

"There was a hardness in his cheek,

There was a hardness in his eye,
As though the man had fixed his face
In many a solitary place

Against the wind and open sky."

Indeed, he expressly tells us that this tendency to severity was the leaning of his mind; but that he had been led to more delicate and sensitive thoughts by his sister's influence

"She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,

And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart the fountain of sweet tears,
And love, and thought, and joy."

Naturally the rigidity of his mind was clearly great, and hence, probably, his great deficiency in humour, which cannot exist without a certain flexibility of both feeling and thought, allowing of rapid transitions from one point of view to another. It was not only that he had "fixed his face in many a solitary place against the wind and open sky," but in the intellectual spaces it was the same. Against the infinite solitudes of the eternal world he had intently fixed his spirit, till it too had something of the rigid attitude of the mystic, and was crossed at times by the dark

spots which constant gazing at a great brightness will always produce. He paid for the frequency of

"that blessed mood

In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world

Is lightened that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood,
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things"-

-he paid, we say, for the frequency of this mood by a want of ease and delicacy in the lesser movements of his intellectual nature, which rendered him often unable to bring the minutiæ even of his finest poems into harmony with their spirit. Thus he often mistook the commonplace observations of his superficial understanding for the deeper thoughts of his heart; he had no living feeling that told him when he was dividing things with the blunt edge of common sense, and when he was wielding that fine sword of the imagination by which the poet divides asunder soul and spirit to the eye of contemplation as surely as that greater sword divides for judgment. He would rise and fall in the same poem from clear vision to the obscure gropings of common sense from obscure groping to clear vision-and not feel the incongruity. No one can help shrinking at the sudden discord, when, in the lovely poem, "She was a phantom of delight," we read

"And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine,
A being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveller between life and death."

It is a jar to the mind, like coming down three steps without notice to stumble over this "machine" in the midst of such a poem; you think of an automaton at once, or Madame Tussaud's breathing figure. There are numbers of little poems completely written in this machine-mood; but the trial is severe when such a crag starts up to bruise you in the midst of perfect loveliness. We should not grumble if that "worthy short-lived youth" commemorated in another sonnet had been thus spoken of as a superseded mechanism; but that "a dancing shape, an image gay,' should be associated with any notion of the kind, suggests a meaning for the exquisite line "to haunt, to startle, and waylay," the farthest possible, we should imagine, from the mind of the poet in writing it.

Many of these small discords which interrupt the harmony

of Wordsworth's poetry are due to the harmless egotism by which a man of moods so solitary and of genius so decisive was almost necessarily haunted. The smallest memoranda of his own mind or life he will often preserve in his poetry, with a kind of blind faith that they have a universal meaning. Thus, in one of his sonnets, he tells us elaborately how he gazed one day at the sea, and saw many ships; and his mind gradually began to take a particular interest in one of them, and how this one sailed northwards. One of his most thoughtful admirers suggested that this sonnet was perhaps trivial; but Wordsworth confuted her in a long letter, in which he proved that the sonnet was a poetic illustration of a universal law of mind, by virtue of which man must either find or make a unity in all that he contemplates; and if there be no determining reason, then the "liberty of indifference," as the metaphysicians call it, will come into play, and he will select a unit of thought arbitrarily, as the poet here chose for special interest a special ship, of which he truly observes, that it "was naught to me, nor I to her." "I must say," says Wordsworth of this gently remonstrant admirer, "that even she has something yet to receive from me. I say this with confidence, from her thinking that I have fallen below myself in the sonnet beginning, With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh."" It might be replied, perhaps, that the same reasoning would prove him to be justified in using poetry to illustrate the simple conversion of propositions, or that a touching sonnet might be made on the "Illicit process of the Major." The best and even the most poetical defence we can make for such caprices is, that they are venial egotisms; for it is certainly more poctic to exhibit life-even egotistic life-in any fashion than to illustrate merely formal laws. And we should not have alluded to this at all, but that Hazlitt has set up a theory, founded in some measure, perhaps, on these little personal egotisms, to prove that Wordsworth's poetic power is born of egotism, and is part and parcel of his complete want of universality.

"Mr. Wordsworth is the last man to look abroad into universality,' if that alone constituted genius: he looks at home into himself, and is content with riches fineless.' He would in the other case be 'poor as winter,' if he had nothing but general capacity to trust to. He is the greatest, that is, the most original poet of the present day, only because he is the greatest egotist. He is 'self-involved, not dark.' He sits in the centre of his own being, and there' enjoys bright day." He does not waste a thought on others. Whatever does not relate exclusively and wholly to himself, is foreign to his views. He contemplates a whole-length figure of himself, he looks along the unbroken line of his personal identity. He thrusts aside all other objects, all other interests, with scorn and impatience, that he may repose