All, but that this All constituted God. Yet not even these would confound the part, as a part, with the whole, as the whole. Nay, in no system is the distinction between the individual and God, between the Modification, and the one only Substance, more sharply drawn, than in that of Spinoza. Jacobi27 indeed relates of Lessing, that, after a conversation with him at the house of the Poet, Gleim (the Tyrtæus and Anacreon of the German Parnassus), in which conversation Lessing had avowed privately to Jacobi, his reluctance to admit any personal existence of the Supreme Being, or the possibility of personality except in a finite Intellect, and while they were sitting at table, a shower of rain came on unexpectedly. Gleim expressed his regret at the circumstance, because they had meant to drink their wine in the garden: upon which Lessing in one of his half-earnest, halfjoking moods, nodded to Jacobi, and said, "It is I, perhaps, that am doing that," i. e., raining!—and Jacobi answered, or perhaps I ; "Gleim contented himself with staring at them both, without asking for any explanation. 66 So with regard to this passage. In what sense can the magnificent attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or a field of corn; or even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? The omnipresent Spirit works equally in them, as in the child; and the child is equally unconscious of it as they. 27 [Fr. H. Jacobi was born at Düsseldorf in 1743, was President of the Academy of Sciences at Munich, from 1804, died March 16, 1819. He wrote upon Spinoza and against Mendelsohn, on Realism and Idealism, on the Undertaking of Criticism to convert Reason into the Understanding, and other works of metaphysical controversy. His complete works in 5 vols., 8vo., Leipzig, 1812-1822, include his celebrated philosophical romances. Cousin's Manuel, vol. ii, pp. 330-331, Note. Gleim died in 1803, at the age of eighty-four. Taylor says of him: "Gleim had a loving heart, a house always open to literary guests, and a passion for corresponding with all his acquaintance, especially with young men of letters, in whom he anticipated rising genius. His scrutoire has been edited; and it abounds with complaints that his friends are less fond of writing useless epistles than himself, and were one by one letting drop an intercourse, which amused his leisure, but interrupted their industry. Klopstock and Kleist were among his favorite correspondents." S. C.] It cannot surely be, that the four lines, immediately following, are to contain the explanation ? "To whom the grave Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight A place of thought where we in waiting lie;"—28 Surely, it cannot be that this wonder-rousing apostrophe is but a comment on the little poem, "We are Seven ?" 29-that the whole meaning of the passage is reducible to the assertion, that a child, who by the by at six years old would have been better instructed in most Christian families, has no other notion of death than that of lying in a dark, cold place? And still, I hope, not as in a place of thought! not the frightful notion of lying awake in his grave! The analogy between death and sleep is too simple, toc› natural, to render so horrid a belief possible for children; ever. had they not been in the habit, as all Christian children are, of hearing the latter term used to express the former. But if the› child's belief be only, that "he is not dead, but sleepeth: wherein does it differ from that of his father and mother, or any other adult and instructed person? To form an idea of a thing's becoming nothing; or of nothing becoming a thing; is impossi.. ble to all finite beings alike, of whatever age, or however edu cated or uneducated. Thus it is with splendid paradoxes in general. If the words are taken in the common sense, they convey an absurdity; and if, in contempt of dictionaries and custom, they are so interpreted as to avoid the absurdity, the meaning dwindles into some bald truism. Thus you must at once understand the words contrary to their common import, in order to arrive at any sense; and according to their common import, if you are to receive from them any feeling of sublimity or admiration. 28 [These lines are now omitted; after the line we now read, "In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave." S. C.] 29 [P. W., i., p. 19. S. C.] Though the instances of this defect in Mr. Wordsworth's poems are so few, that for themselves it would have been scarcely just to attract the reader's attention towards them; yet I have dwelt on it, and, perhaps, the more, for this very reason. For, being so very few, they cannot sensibly detract from the reputation of an author, who is even characterized by the number of profound truths in his writings, which will stand the severest analysis; and yet, few as they are, they are exactly those passages which his blind admirers would be most likely, and best able, to imitate. But Wordsworth, where he is indeed Wordsworth, may be mimicked by copyists, he may be plundered by plagiarists, but he cannot be imitated, except by those who are not born to be imitators. For, without his depth of feeling and his imaginative power, his sense would want its vital warmth and peculiarity; and, without his strong sense, his mysticism would become sickly-mere fog, and dimness! To these defects, which, as appears by the extracts, are only occasional, I may oppose, with far less fear of encountering the dissent of any candid and intelligent reader, the following (for the most part correspondent) excellences. First, an austere purity of language, both grammatically and logically; in short, a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. Of how high value I deem this, and how particularly estimable I hold the example at the present day, has been already stated; and in part, too, the reasons on which I ground both the moral and intellectual importance of habituating ourselves to a strict accuracy of expression. It is noticeable how limited an acquaintance with the master-pieces of art will suffice to form a correct and even a sensitive taste, where none but master-pieces have been seen and admired; while, on the other hand, the most correct notions, and the widest acquaintance with the works of excellence of all ages and countries, will not perfectly secure us against the contagious familiarity with the far more numerous offspring of tastelessness, or of a perverted taste. If this be the case, as it notoriously is, with the arts of music and painting, much more difficult will it be to avoid the infection of multiplied and daily examples in the practice of an art which uses words, and words only, as its instruments. In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, : may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning. Be it observed, however, that I include in the meaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but likewise all the associations which it recalls. For language is framed to convey not the object alone, but likewise the character, mood, and intentions of the person who is representing it. In poetry it is practicable to preserve the diction uncorrupted by the affectations and misappropriations which promiscuous authorship, and reading not promiscuous only because it is disproportionally most conversant with the compositions of the day, have rendered general. Yet even to the poet, composing in his own province, it is an arduous work: and, as the result and pledge of a watchful good sense, of fine and luminous distinction, and of complete self-possession, may justly claim all the honor which belongs to an attainment equally difficult and valuable, and the more valuable for being rare. It is at all times the proper food of the understanding; but, in an age of corrupt eloquence, it is both food and antidote. In prose, I doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our style wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere, from the sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator to the speech from the convivial chair, announcing a toast or sentiment. Our chains rattle, even while we are complaining of them. The poems of Boetius rise high in our estimation when we compare them with those of his contemporaries, as Sidonius Apollinaris," and others. They might even be referred to a purer age, but that the prose, in which they are set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the true age of the writer. Much, however, may be effected by education. I believe, not only from grounds of reason, but from having in great measure assured myself of the fact by actual, though limited, experience, that, to a youth led from his first boyhood to investi 30 [Sidonius Apollinaris was a Christian writer, born A. D. 430, author of Letters and Poems. S. C.] gate the meaning of every word, and the reason of its choice and position, logic presents itself as an old acquaintance under new names. On some future occasion, more especially demanding such disquisition, I shall attempt to prove the close connexion between veracity and habits of mental accuracy; the beneficial aftereffects of verbal precision in the preclusion of fanaticism, which masters the feelings more especially by indistinct watchwords; and to display the advantages which language alone, at least which language with incomparably greater ease and certainty than any other means, presents to the instructor of impressing modes of intellectual energy so constantly, so imperceptibly, and, as it were, by such elements and atoms, as to secure, in due time, the formation of a second nature. When we reflect, that the cultivation of the judgment is a positive command of the moral law, since the reason can give the principle alone, and the conscience bears witness only to the motive, while the application and effects must depend on the judgment: when we consider that the greater part of our success and comfort in life depends on distinguishing the similar from the same, that which is peculiar in each thing from that which it has in common with others, so as still to select the most probable, instead of the merely possible or positively unfit, we shall learn to value earnestly, and with a practical seriousness, a mean, already prepared for us by nature and society, of teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by the same unremembered process, and with the same never-forgotten results, as those by which it is taught to speak and converse. Now, how much warmer the interest is, how much more genial the feelings of reality and practicability, and thence how much stronger the impulses to imitation are, which a contemporary writer, and especially a contemporary poet, excites in youth and commencing manhood, has been treated of in the earlier pages of these sketches. I have only to add, that all the praise which is due to the exertion of such influence for a purpose so important, joined with that which must be claimed for infrequency of the same excellence in the same perfection, belongs in full right to Mr. Wordsworth. I am far, however, from denying that we have poets whose general style possesses |