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image set up in the stateliest region of poesy, had not value to outweigh all the truths of criticism, or to atone for all its errors?

Not only have Wordsworth's merits been improperly rested on his system, but that system itself has been misrepresented with no common baseness. From some of the attacks directed against it, a reader might infer that it recommended the choice of the meanest subjects, and their treatment in the meanest way; and that it not only represented poetry as fitly employed on things in themselves low and trivial, but that it forbade the clustering and delicate fancies about them, or the shedding on them any reconciling and softening lustre. Multitudes, indeed, have wondered as they read, not only that any persons should be deluded by its perverse insipidities, but that critics should waste their ridicule on an author who resigned at once all pretensions to the poetic art. In reality, this calumniated system has only reference to the diction, and to the subjects of poetry. It has merely taught, that the diction of poetry is not different from that of prose, and suggested that themes hitherto little dwelt on, were not unsuited to the bard's divinest uses. Let us briefly examine what ground of offence there is in the assertion or application of these positions.

hinted allusion, or nice shade of feeling, which may adorn it. If by "poetic diction" is intended the vivid expression of poetic thoughts, to annihilate it, is to annihilate poetry; but if it means certain ornamental phrases and forms of language not necessary to such expression, it is, at best, but a splendid error. Felicity of language can never be other than the distinct expression of felicitous thought. The only art of diction in poetry, as in prose, is the nice bodying forth of each delicate vibration of the feelings, and each soft shade of the images, in words which at once make us conscious of their most transient beauty. At all events, there was surely no offence in an individual's rejecting the aid of a style regarded as poetic, and relying for his fame on the naked majesty of his conceptions. The triumph is more signal when the Poet uses language as a mirror, clear, and itself invisible, to reflect his creations in their native hues,-than when he employs it as a stained and fallacious medium to exhibit its own varieties of tint, and to show the objects which it partially reveals in its own prismatic colouring.

But it is said that the subjects of Wordsworth's poetry are not in themselves so lofty as those which his noblest predecessors have chosen. If this be true, and he has yet succeeded in discovering within them poetical affinities, or in shedding on them a new consecration, he does not surely deserve ill of his species. He has left all our old objects of veneration uninjured, and has enabled us to recognise new ones in the peaceful and familiar courses of our being. The question is not whether there are more august themes than those which he has treated, but whether these last have any interest, as seen in the

Some have supposed that by rejecting a diction as peculiar to poetry, Wordsworth denied to it those qualities which are its essence, and those "harmonious numbers" which its thoughts "voluntarily move." Were his language equivocal, which it is not, the slightest glance at his works would show that he could have no design to exclude from it the stateliest imaginings, the most felicitous allusions, or the choicest and most varied music. He objected only to a peculiar phraseology-light which he has cast around them. If they a certain hacknied strain of inversion-which had been set up as distinguishing poetry from prose, and which, he contended, was equally false in either. What is there of pernicious heresy in this, unless we make the crafty politician's doctrine, that speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts, the great principle of poetry? If words are fitly combined only to convey ideas to the mind, each word having a fixed meaning in itself, no different mode of collocation can be requisite when the noblest sentiment is to be imbodied, from that which is proper when the dryest fact is to be asserted. Each term employed by a poet has as determinate an office as clearly means one thing as distinguished from all others as a mathematician's scientific phrases. If a poet wishes lucidly to convey a grand picture to the mind, there can be no reason why he should resort to another mode of speech than that which he would employ in delivering the plainest narrative. He will, of course, use other and probably more beautiful words, because they properly belong to his subject; but he will not use any different order in their arrangement, because in both cases his immediate object is the same-the clear communication of his own idea to the mind of his reader. And this is true not only of the chief object of the passage, but of every

have, the benefits which he has conferred on humanity are more signal, and the triumph of his own powers is more undivided and more pure, than if he had treated on subjects which we have been accustomed to revere. We are more indebted to one who opens to us a new and secluded pathway in the regions of fantasy with its own verdant inequalities and delicate overshadings of foliage, than if he had stepped majestically in the broad and beaten highway to swell the triumphant procession of laurelled bards. Is it matter of accusation that a poet has opened visions of glory about the ordinary walks of life—that he has linked holiest associations to things which hitherto have been regarded without emotion-that he has made beauty "a simple product of the common day?" Shall he be denied the poetic faculty, who, without the attractions of story-without the blandishments of diction-without even the aid of those associations which have encrusted themselves around the oldest themes of the poet, has for many years excited the animosities of the most popular critics, and mingled the love and admiration of his genius with the lifeblood of hearts neither unreflecting nor ungentle?

But most of the subjects of Mr. Wordsworth, though not arrayed in any adventitious pomp,

let has a princeliness above that of his rank and the beauties of Imogen are shed into her soul only by the selectest influences of creation.

have a real and innate grandeur. True it is, | resentments; but when he is cast abroad to that he moves not among the regalities, but seek a lodging with the owl, and to endure the among the humanities of his art. True it is, fury of the elements, and is only a poor and that his poetry does not "make its bed and despised old man, the exterior crust which a procreant cradle" in the "jutting, frieze, cor- life of prosperity had hardened over his sonl nice, or architrave" of the glorious edifices of is broken up by the violence of his sorrows, human power. The universe, in its naked his powers expand within his worn and wasted majesty, and man in the plain dignity of his frame, his spirit awakens in its long-forgotten nature, are his favourite themes. And is there strength, and even in the wanderings of disno might, no glory, no sanctity in these? traction gives hints of the profoundest philosoEarth has her own venerablenesses-her awful phy, and manifests a real kindliness of nature forests, which have darkened her hills for a sweet and most affecting courtesy-of ages with tremendous gloom; her mysterious which there was no vestige in the days of his springs pouring out everlasting waters from pride. The regality of Richard lies not in unsearchable recesses; her wrecks of ele-"compliment extern"-the philosophy of Hammental contests; her jagged rocks, monumental of an earlier world. The lowliest of her beauties has an antiquity beyond that of the pyramids. The evening breeze has the old sweetness which it shed over the fields of Canaan, when Isaac went out to meditate. The Nile swells with its rich waters towards the bulrushes of Egypt, as when the infant Moses nestled among them, watched by the sisterly love of Miriam. Zion's hill has not passed away with its temple, nor lost its sanctity amidst the tumultuous changes around it, nor even by the accomplishment of that awful religion of types and symbols which once was enthroned on its steeps. The sun to which the poet turns his eye is the same which shone over Thermopyla; and the wind to which he listens swept over Salamis, and scattered the armaments of Xerxes. Is a poet utterly deprived of fitting themes, to whom ocean, earth, | and sky, are open-who has an eye for the most evanescent of nature's hues, and the most ethereal of her graces-who can "live in the rainbow and play in the plighted clouds," or send into our hearts the awful loneliness of regions "consecrate to eldest time?" Is there nothing in man, considered abstractedly from the distinctions of this world-nothing in a being who is in the infancy of an immortal life who is lackeyed by "a thousand liveried angels"-who is even "splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave"-to awaken ideas of permanence, solemnity, and grandeur? Are there no themes sufficiently exalted for poetry in the midst of death and of life-in the desires and hopes which have their resting-place near the throne of the Eternal-in affections, strange and wondrous in their working, and unconquerable by time, or anguish, or destiny? How little, comparatively, of allusion is there even in Shakspeare, whose genius will not be regarded as rigid or austere, to other venerablenesses than those of the creation, and to qualities less common than the human heart! The very luxuries which surround his lovers -the pensive sweetnesses which steal away the sting from his saddest catastrophies-are We allude first to the descriptive faculty, drawn from man's universal immunities, and because, though not the least popular, it is the the eldest sympathies of the universe. The lowest which Wordsworth possesses. He divinity which "hedges his kings" is only shares it with many others, though few, we humanity's finer essence. Even his Lear is think, enjoy it in so eminent a degree. It is great only in intellectual might and in the ter- difficult, indeed, to select passages from his rible strangeness of his afflictions. While in- works which are merely descriptive; but those vested with the pomp and circumstance of his which approach nearest to portraiture, and station, he is froward, impatient, thankless-are least imbued with fantasy, are masterless than a child in his liberality and in his pieces in their kind. Take, for example, the

The objects which have been usually regarded as the most poetical, derive from the soul itself the far larger share of their poetical qualities. All their power to elevate, to delight, or to awe us, which does not arise from mere form, colour, and proportion, is manifestly drawn from the instincts common to the species. The affections have first consecrated all that they revere. "Cornice, frieze, jutting, or architrave," are fit nestling-places for poetry, chiefly as they are the symbols of feelings of grandeur and duration in the hearts of the beholders. A poet, then, who seeks at once for beauty and sublimity in their native home of the human soul-who resolves "non sectari rivulos sed petere fontes"-can hardly be accused with justice of rejecting the themes most worthy of a bard. His office is, indeed, more arduous than if he selected those subjects about which hallowing associations have long clustered, and which other poets have already rendered sacred. But if he can discover new depths of affection in the soul-or throw new tinges of loveliness on objects hitherto common, he ought not to be despised in proportion to the severity of the work, and the absence of extrinsic aid! Wordsworth's persons are not invested with antique robes, nor clad in the symbols of worldly pomp, but they are “apparelled in celestial light." By his power "the bare earth and mountains bare" are covered with an imaginative radiance more holy than that which old Greek poets shed over Olympus. The world, as consecrated by his poetic wisdom, is an enchanted sceneredolent with sweet humanity, and vocal with "echoes from beyond the grave."

We shall now attempt to express the reasons for our belief in Wordsworth's genius, by first giving a few illustrations of his chief faculties, and then considering them in their application to the uses of philosophical poetry.

following picture of masses of vapour receding among the steeps and summits of the mountains, after a storm, beneath an azure sky; the earlier part of which seem almost like another glimpse of Milton's heaven; and the conclusion of which impresses us solemnly with the most awful visions of Hebrew prophecy :

A step,

A single step which freed me from the skirts
Of the blind vapour, open'd to my view
Glory beyond all glory ever seen

By waking sense or by the dreaming soul-
The appearance instantaneously disclosed,
Was of a mighty city-boldly say
A wilderness of building, sinking far
And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth
Far sinking into splendour-without end!
Fabric it seemed of diamond and of gold,
With alabaster domes and silver spires;
And blazing terrace upon terrace high
Uplifted here serene pavilions bright
In avenues disposed; there towers begirt
With battlements that on their restless fronts

Bore stars, illumination of all gems!

O'twas an unimaginable sight;

Clouds, mists, streams, watery rocks, and emerald turf,
Clouds of all tincture, rocks and sapphire sky,

Confused, commingled, mutually inflamed,
Molten together, and composing thus,

Each lost in each, that marvellous array

Of temple, palace, citadel, and huge
Fantastic pomp of structure without name,
In fleecy folds voluminous enwrapp'd.
Right in the midst, where interspace appear'd
Of open court, an object like a throne
Beneath a shining canopy of state

Stood fix'd, and fix'd resemblances were seen
To implements of ordinary use,
But vast in size, in substance glorified;
Such as by Hebrew prophets were beheld
In vision-forms uncouth of mightiest power,
For admiration and mysterious awe!"

Excursion, B. II.

Contrast with this the delicate grace of the following picture, which represents the White Doe of Rylstone-that most beautiful of mysteries on her Sabbath visit to the grave of her sainted lady :

"Soft-the dusky trees between

And down the path through the open green
Where is no living thing to be seen;
And through yon gateway where is found,
Beneath the arch with ivy bound,
Free entrance to the church-yard ground;
And right across the verdant sod
Towards the very house of God;
-Comes gliding in with lovely gleam,
Comes gliding in serene and slow,
Soft and silent as a dream,

A solitary Doe!

White is she as lily in June;

And beauteous as the silver moon,
When out of sight the clouds are driven
And she is left alone in heaven;
Or like a ship some gentle day
In sunshine sailing far away,

A glittering ship, that hath the plain
Of ocean for her own domain.

*

What harmonious pensive changes
Wait upon her as she ranges
Round and through this pile of state,
Overthrown and desolate !
Now a step or two her way
Is through space of open day,

Where the enamour'd sunny light
Brightens her that was so bright;
Now doth a delicate shadow fall,
Falls upon her like a breath,
From some lofty arch or wall,
As she passes underneath :
Now some gloomy nook partakes
Of the glory which she makes,-
High-ribb'd vault of stone, or cell
With perfect cunning framed, as well
Of stone and ivy, and the spread
Of the elder's bushy head;
Some jealous and forbidding cell,
That doth the living stars repel,

And where no flower hath leave to dwell.

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Her's are eyes serenely bright,

And on she moves-with pace how light!
Nor spares to stoop her head, and taste
The dewy turf, with flowers bestrown;
And in this way she fares, till at last
Beside the ridge of a grassy grave
In quietness she lays her down;
Gently as a weary wave

Sinks, when the summer breeze hath died,
Against an anchor'd vessel's side;
Even so, without distress, doth she
Lie down in peace, and lovingly."

White Doe of Rylstone, Canto I.

What, as mere description, can be more masterly than the following picture of the mountain solitude, where a dog was found, after three months' watching by his master's body-though the touches which send the feeling of deep loneliness into the soul, and the bold imagination which represents the huge recess as visited by elemental presences, are produced by higher than descriptive powers?—

"It was a cove, a huge recess,

That keeps till June December's snow;
A lofty precipice in front,

A silent tarn below!

Far in the bosom of Helvellyn,
Remote from public road or dwelling,
Pathway, or cultivated land;
From trace of human foot or hand.

There sometimes does a leaping fish
Send through the Tarn a lonely cheer;
The crags repeat the raven's croak
In symphony austere ;

Thither the rainbow comes, the cloud;
And mists that spread the flying shroud,
And sunbeams; and the sounding blast,
That if it could, would hurry past,

But that enormous barrier binds it fast."

We must abstain from farther examples of the descriptive faculty, and allude to that far higher gift which Wordsworth enjoys in his profound acquaintance with the sanctities of the soul. He does not make us feel the strength of the passions, by their violent contests in a transient storm, but the measureless depth of the affections when they are stillest and most holy. We often meet in his works with little passages in which we seem almost to contemplate the well-springs of pure emotion and gentle pathos, and to see the old clefts in the rock of humanity whence they arise. In these we may not rarely perceive the true elements of tales of the purest sentiment and most genuine tragedies. No poet has done such justice to the depth and the fulness of maternal love. What, for instance, can be more tear-moving than these exclamations of

a mother, who for seven years has heard no tidings of an only child, abandoning the false stay of a pride which ever does unholy violence to the sufferer ?

"Neglect me! no, I suffered long

From that ill thought; and, being blind,
Said, 'Pride shall help me in my wrong;
Kind mother have I been, as kind
As ever breathed :' and that is true;
I've wet my path with tears like dew,
Weeping for him when no one knew.
My son, if thou be humbled, poor,
Hopeless of honour, or of gain,

Oh! do not dread thy mother's door;
Think not of me with grief or pain:
I now can see with better eyes;
And worldly grandeur I despise,
And fortune with her gifts and lies."

How grand and fearful are the following conjectures of her agony!

"Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan, Maim'd, mangled by inhuman men ;

Or thou upon a desert thrown

Inheritest the lion's den;

Or hast been summon'd to the deep
Thou, thou and all thy mates, to keep,
An incommunicable sleep."

And how triumphant does the great instinct appear in its vanquishing even the dread of mortal chilliness-asking and looking for spectres-and concluding that their appearance is not possible, because they come not to its intense cravings:

"I look for ghosts; but none will force
Their way to me; 'tis falsely said
That ever there was intercourse
Between the living and the dead;
For surely then I should have sight
Of him I wait for day and night,
With love and longings infinite."

Of the same class is the poem on the death of a noble youth, who fell in attempting to bound over a chasm of the Wharf, and left his mother childless.-What a volume of thought is there in the little stanzas which follows:

"If for a lover the lady wept,

A solace she might borrow

From death, and from the passion of death,—
Old Wharf might heal her sorrow.

She weeps not for the wedding-day,
Which was to be to-morrow;

Her hope was a farther-looking hope,
And her's is a mother's sorrow!"

that of a mother is spread equally over exist ence, and when cut down, at once the blossom ing expectations of a whole life are withered for ever.

Can any thing be more true or intense than the following description of remorse, rejecting the phantoms of superstitious horror as powerless, and representing lovely and uncomplaining forms of those whose memories the sufferer had dishonoured by his errors, casting their silent looks perpetually upon him:

"Feebly must they have felt

Who, in old time, attired with snakes and whips
The vengeful Furies. Beautiful regards
Were turned on me-the face of her I loved ;
The wife and mother pitifully fixing
Tender reproaches, insupportable!"

We will give but one short passage more to show the depth of Wordsworth's insight into our nature-but it is a passage which we think unequalled in its kind in the compass of poetry. Never surely was such a glimpse of beatific vision opened amidst mortal affliction; such an elevation given to seeming weakness; such consolation ascribed to bereaved love by the very heightening of its own intensities. The poet contends, that those whom we regard as dying broken-hearted for the loss of friends, do not really perish through despair; but have such vivid prospects of heaven, and such a present sense that those who have been taken from them are waiting for them there, that they wear themselves away in longings after the reality, and so hasten to enjoy it :

"Full oft the innocent sufferer sees
Too clearly; feels too vividly; and longs
To realize the vision with intense
And over-constant yearning-there-there lies
The excess by which the balance is destroy'd.
Too, too contracted are these walls of flesh,
This vital warmth too cold, these visual orbs,
Though inconceivably endow'd, too dim
For any passion of the soul that leads
To ecstasy; and, all the crooked paths
Of time and change disdaining, takes its course
Along the line of limitless desires."

But the imaginative faculty is that with which Wordsworth is most eminently gifted. As the term IMAGINATION is often very loosely employed, it will be necessary for us here to state as clearly as possible our idea of its meaning. In our sense, it is that power by which the spiritualities of our nature and the senHere we are made to feel not only the vast-sible images derived from the material universe are ness of maternal affection, but its difference from that of lovers. The last being a passion, has a tendency to grasp and cling to objects which may sustain it, and thus fixes even on those things which have swallowed its hopes, and draws them into its likeness. Death itself thus becomes a passion to one whom it has bereaved; or the waters which flowed over the object of once happy love, become a solace to the mourner, who nurses holy visions by their side. But an instinct which has none of that tendency to go beyond itself, when its only object is lost, has no earthly relief, but is left utterly desolate. The hope of a lover looks chiefly to a single point of time as its goal;—

commingled at the will of the possessor. It has thus a twofold operation-the bodying forth of feelings, sentiments, and ideas, in beautiful and majestic forms, and giving to them local habitations; and the informing the colours and the shapes of matter with the properties of the soul. The first of these workings of the faculty supplies the highest excellencies of the orator, and the philosophic bard. When Sophocles represents the eternal laws of morality as "produced in the pure regions of celestial air-having the Olympian alone for their parent-as not subject to be touched by the decays of man's mortal nature, or to be shaded by oblivion-for the divinity is mighty

within them, and waxes not old:" it is this which half gives to them a majestic personality, and dimly figures out their attributes. By the same process, the imaginative faculty, aiming at results less sublime but more definite and complete, gave individual shape to loves, graces, and affections, and endowed them with the bread of life. By this process, it shades over the sorrows which it describes by the beauties and the graces of nature, and tinges with gentle colouring the very language of affliction. In the second mode of its operation, on the other hand, it moves over the universe like the spirit of God on the face of the waters, and peoples it with glorious shapes, as in the Greek mythology, or sheds on it a consecrating radiance, and imparts to it an intense sympathy, as in the poems of these more reflective days. Although a harmonizing faculty, it can by the law of its essence only act on things which have an inherent likeness. It brings out the secret affinities of its objects; but it cannot combine things which nature has not prepared for union, because it does not add, but transfuses. Hence there can be no wild incongruity, no splendid confusion in its works. Those which are commonly regarded as its productions in the metaphorical speeches of "Irish eloquence," are their very reverse, and may serve by contrast to explain its realities. The highest and purest of its efforts are when the intensest elements of the human soul are mingled inseparably with the vastest majesties of the universe; as where Lear identifies his age with that of the heavens, and calls on them to avenge his wrongs by their community of lot; and where Timon "fixes his everlasting mansion upon the beached shore of the salt flood," that "once a day with its embossed froth the turbulent surge may cover him," scorning human tears, but desiring the vast ocean for his eternal mourner!

Not uninformed by fantasy and look
That threaten the profane ;-a pillar'd shade
Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue,
By sheddings from the pining umbrage tinged
Perennially-beneath whose sable roof
Of boughs, as if for festal purpose deck'd
By unrejoicing berries, ghostly shapes

May meet at noon-tide-Fear and trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight-Death the Skeleton
And Time the Shadow-there to celebrate,
As in a natural temple scatter'd o'er
With altars undisturb'd of mossy stone,
United worship; or in mute repose
To lie, and listen to the mountain flood
Murmuring from Glamarara's inmost caves."

Let the reader, when that first glow of intuitive admiration which this passage cannot fail to inspire is past, look back on the exquisite gradations by which it naturally proceeds from mere description to the sublime personification of the most awful abstractions, and the union of their fearful shapes in strange worship, or in listening to the deepest of nature's voices. The first lines-interspersed indeed with epithets drawn from the operations of mind, and therefore giving to them an imaginative tinge -are, for the most part, a mere picture of the august brotherhood of trees, though their very sound is in more august accordance with their theme than most of the examples usually produced of "echoes to the sense." Having completely set before us the image of the scene, the poet begins that enchantment by which it is to be converted into a fitting temple for the noontide spectres of Death and Time, by the general intimation that it is "not uninformed by fantasy and looks that threaten the profane"-then, by the mere epithet pillared, gives us the more particular feeling of a fane-then, by reference to the actual circumstances of the grassless floor of red-brown hue, preserves to us the peculiar features of the scene which thus he is hallowing-and at last gives to the Of this transfusing and reconciling faculty-roof and its berries a strange air of unrejoicwhether its office be to "clothe upon," or to spiritualize Mr. Wordsworth is, in the highest degree, master. Of this, abundant proofs will be found in the latter portion of this article; at present we will only give a few examples. The first of these is one of the grandest instances of noble daring, completely successful, which poetry exhibits. After a magnificent picture of a single yew-tree, and a fine allusion to its readiness to furnish spears for old battles, the poet proceeds:

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ing festivity-until we are prepared for the
introduction of the phantasms, and feel that
the scene could be fitted to no less tremendous
a conclave. The place, without losing one of
its individual features, is decked for the recep-
tion of these noon-tide shades, and we are pre-
pared to muse on them with unshrinking eyes.
How by a less adventurous but not less de-
lightful process, does the poet impart to an
evening scene on the Thames, at Richmond,
the serenity of his own heart, and tinge it with
softest and saddest hues of the fancy and the
affections! The verses have all the richness
of Collins, to whom they allude, and breathe a
more profound and universal sentiment than
is found in his sky-tinctured poetry.

"How richly glows the water's breast
Before us tinged with evening hues,
While, facing thus the crimson west,
The boat her silent course pursues!
And see how dark the backward stream!
A little moment past so smiling!
And still perchance, with faithless gleam,
Some other loiterer beguiling.

"Such views the youthful bard allure;
But, heedless of the following gloom,
He deems their colours shall endure
Till peace go with him to the tomb

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