And let him nurse his fond deceit, And what if he must die in sorrow! "Glide gently thus, for ever glide, O Thames! that other bards may see As lovely visions by thy side As now, fair river! come to me. O glide, fair stream! for ever so, Thy quiet soul on all bestowing, Till all our minds for ever flow, As thy deep waters now are flowing. "Vain thought!-Yet be as now thou art, How bright, how solemn, how serene!" The following delicious sonnet, inspired by the same scene, is one of the latest effusions of its author. We do not here quote it on account of its allusion to one of the most delightful of poets-nor of the fine unbroken ligament by which the harmony listened to by the later bard is connected with that which the earlier drank in, by the lineage of the songsters who keep up the old ravishment-but of that imaginative power, by which a sacredness is imparted to the place and to the birds, as though they performed unresting worship in the most glorious of cathedrals. "Fame tells of groves from England far away"- The following "Thought of a Briton on the subjugation of Switzerland," has an elemental grandeur imbued with the intensest sentiment, which places it among the highest efforts of the imaginative faculty. "Two voices are there; one is one of the sea, human life-individual character-the vicissitudes of individual fortune-society at large -and the prospects of the species-we shall next proceed more particularly to examine. The spirit of contemplation influences and directs all Wordsworth's poetical faculties. He does not create a variety of individual forms to vivify them with the Promethean fire of dramatic genius, and exhibit the living struggle of their passions and their affections in opposition to each other, or to destiny. "The moving accident is not his trade." He looks on humanity as from a more exalted sphere, though he feels his kindred with it while he gazes and yearns over it with deepest sympathy. No poet of ancient or modern times has dared so entirely to repose on the mere strength of his own powers. Others, indeed, have given hints of the divinest truths, even amidst their wildest and most passionate effusions. The tragedies of Sophocles, for example, abound in moralities expressed with a grace and precision which often ally the sentiment to an image and almost define it to the senses. In Shakspeare the wisdom is as much deeper as the passion is intenser; the minds of the characters, under the strongest excitements of love, hope, or agony, grow bright as well as warm, and in their fervid career shed abroad sparkles of fire, which light up, for an instant, the inmost sanctuaries of our nature. But few have ventured to send into the world essentially meditative poems, which none but the thoughtful can truly enjoy. Lucertius is the only writer of antiquity who has left a great work of this description; and he has unhappily lavished the boundless riches of genius on doctrines which are in direct opposition to the spirit of poetry. An apostle of a more genial faith, Wordsworth, stands pre-eminentlyalmost alone-a divine philosopher among the poets. It has been his singular lot, in this late age of the world, to draw little from those sources of interest which incident and situ ation supply-and to rest his claim to the gratitude and admiration of the people on his majestical contemplations of man and the uni verse. The philosophical poetry of Wordsworth is not more distinct from the dramatic, or the epic, than from the merely didactic and moral. He has thrown into it as much of profound affection, as much of ravishing loveliness, as much of delicate fantasy, as adorn the most romantic tales, or the most passionate trage dies. If he sees all things "far as angel's ken," he regards them with human love. His imagination is never obscured amidst his reasonings, but is ever active to imbody the beautiful and the pure, and to present to us the most august moralities in "clear dream lime conclusions by a painful and elaborate and solemn vision." Instead of reaching subprocess, he discloses them by a single touch, So inhe fixes them on our hearts for ever. that he feels the spirit of good however deeply tense are his perceptions of moral beauty, hidden, and opens to our view the secret We have thus feebly attempted to give some glimpse into the essence of Wordsworth's powers of his skill in delineating the forms of creation-of his insight into the spirit of man—and of his imaginative faculty. How he has applied these gifts to philosophical poetry, and what are the results of his contemplation, by their aid, on the external universe springs of love and of joy, where all has ap *Wallachia is the country alluded to. peared barren to the uugifted observer. He can trace, prolong, and renew within us, those mysterious risings of delight in the soul which | never was by sea or land," and which yet is "may make a chrysome child to smile," and which, when half-experienced at long intervals in riper age, are to us the assurances of a better life. He follows with the nice touch of unerring sympathy all the most subtle workings of the spirit of good, as it makes its little sanctuaries in hearts unconscious of its presence, and blends its influences unheeded with ordinary thoughts, hopes, and sorrows. The old prerogatives of humanity, which long usage has made appear common, put on their own air of grandeur while he teaches us to revere them. When we first read his poetry, we look on all the mysteries of our being with a new reverence, and feel like children who, having been brought up in some deserted palace, learn for the first time the regality of their home-understand a venerableness in the faded escutcheons with which they were accustomed to play-and feel the figures on the stained windows, or on the decaying tapestry, which were only grotesque before speaking to their hearts in ancestral voices. The consecration which Wordsworth has shed over the external world is in a great measure peculiar to his genius. In the Hebrew poetry there was no trace of particular description-but general images, such as of tall cedars, of green pastures, or of still waters, were alone permitted to aid the affections of the devout worshipper. The feeling of the vast and indistinct prevailed; for all in religion was symbolical and mysterious, and pointed to "temples not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." In the exquisite masterpieces of Grecian inspiration, free nature's grace was almost excluded by the opposite tendency to admire only the definite and the palpable. Hence, the pictures of nymphs, satyrs, and deities, were perpetually substituted for views of the magnificence of earth and heaven. In the romantic poetry of modern times, the open face of nature has again been permitted to smile on us, and its freshness to glide into our souls. Nor has there been wanting "craft of delicate spirits" to shed lovelier tinges of the imagination on all its scenes-to scatter among them classical images like Ionic temples among the fair glades and deep woods of some rich domain-to call dainty groups of fairies to hold their revellings upon the velvet turf-or afford glimpses of angel wings floating at eventide in the golden perspective. But the imagination of Wordsworth has given to the external universe a charm which has never else, extensively at least, been shed over it. He has not personified the glorious objects of Creation-nor peopled them with beautiful and majestic shapes-but, without depriving them of their own reality, has imparted to them a life which makes them objects of af fection and reverence. He enables us at once to enjoy the contemplation of their colours and forms, and to love them as human friends. He consecrates earth by the mere influences of sentiment and thought, and renders its scenes as enchanted as though he had filled them with Oriental wonders. Touched by him, the hills, the rocks, the hedge-rows, and the humlest flowers shine in a magic lustre, "which strangely familiar to our hearts. These are not hallowed by him with "angel visits," nor by the presence of fair and immortal shapes, but by the remembrances of early joy, by lingering gleams of a brightness which has passed away, and dawnings of a glory to be revealed in the fulness of time. The lowliest of nature's graces have power to move and to delight him. "The clouds are touched, and in their silent faces does he read unutterable love." He listens to the voice of the cuckoo in early spring, till he “ begets again the golden time of his childhood," and till the world, which is "fit home" for that mysterious bird, appears "an airy unsubstantial place." At the root of some old thorn, or beneath the branches of some time-honoured tree, he opens the sources of delicious musing, and suggests the first hints which lead through a range of human thoughts to the glories of our final destiny. When we traverse with him the "bare earth and mountains bare," we feel that "the place whereon we are standing is holy ground;" the melancholy brook can touch our souls as truly as a tragic catastrophe; the splendours of the western sky give intimation of “a joy past joy;" and the meanest flowers, and scanty blades of grass, awaken within us hopes too rapturous for smiles, and "thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears." To give all the instances of this sublime operation of the imaginative faculty in Wordsworth, would be to quote the far larger portion of his works. A few lines, however, from the poem composed on the Banks of the Wye, will give our readers a deep glimpse into the inmost heart of his poetry, and of his poetical system, on the communion of the soul of man with the spirit of the universe. In this raptur ous effusion-in which, with a wise prodigality, he hints and intimates the profoundest of those feelings which vivify all he has created-he gives the following view of the progress of his sympathy with the external world : "Nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days Not harsh, nor grating, though of ample power And the blue sky, and in the mind of mind: All thinking things, all objects of all thought, There are none of the workings of our poet's imaginative faculty more wonderful in themselves, or more productive of high thoughts and intense sympathies, than those which have for their objects the grand abstractions of humanity-Life and Death, Childhood and Old Age. Every period of our being is to him not only filled with its own peculiar endearments and joys, but dignified by its own sanctities. The common forms of life assume a new venerableness when he touches themfor he makes us feel them in their connection with our immortality-even as the uncouth vessels of the Jewish law appeared sublime to those who felt that they were dedicated to the immediate service of Heaven. He ever leaves us conscious that the existence on whose beginning he expatiates, will endure for ever. He traces out those of its fibres which are eternal in their essence. He discovers in every part of our earthly course manifold intimations that these our human hearts will never die. Childhood is, to him, not only the season of novelty, of innocence, of joyous spirits, and of mounting hope-but of a dreamlike glory which assures to us that this world is not our final home. Age to him, is not a descent into a dark valley, but a "final eminence," where the wise may sit "in awful sovereignty" as on a high peak among the mountains in placid summer, and commune with Heaven, undisturbed by the lesser noises of the tumultuous world. One season of life is bound to another by "the natural piety" which the unchanging forms of nature preserve, and death comes at last over the deep and tranquil stream as it is about to emerge into a lovelier sunshine, as "a shadow thrown softly and lightly from a passing cloud." The Ode in which Wordsworth particularly developes the intimations of immortality to be found in the recollections of early childhood, is, to our feelings, the noblest piece of lyric poetry in the world. It was the first poem of its author which we read, and never shall we forget the sensations which it excited within us. We had heard the cold sneers attached. to his name we had glanced over criticisms, "lighter than vanity," which represented him as an object for scorn "to point its slow unmoving finger at"-and here-in the works of this derided poet-we found a new vein of imaginative sentiment opened to us-sacred recollections brought back on our hearts with all the freshness of novelty, and all the venerableness of far-off time-the most mysterious of old sensations traced to a celestial originand the shadows cast over the opening of life from the realities of eternity renewed before us with a sense of their supernal causes! What a gift did we then inherit! To have the best and most imperishable of intellectual treasures-the mighty world of reminiscences of the days of infancy-set before us in a new and holier light; to find objects of deepest veneration where we had only been accustomed to love; to feel in all the touching mysteries of our past being the symbols and assurances of our immortal destiny! The poet has here spanned our mortal life as with a glorious rainbow, terminating on one side in infancy, and on the other in the realms of blessedness beyond the grave, and shedding even upon the middle of that course tints of unearthly colouring. The following is the view he has given of the fading glory of childhood-drawn in part from Oriental fiction, but imbodying the profoundest of elemental truths : "Our birth is but a sleep, and a forgetting: Not in entire forgetfulness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, The Youth that daily farther from the east And by the vision splendid At length the man perceives it die away, But the following is the noblest passage of the whole; and such an outpouring of thought and feeling-such a piece of inspired philoso phy-we do not believe exists elsewhere in human language: "O joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, The thought of our past years in me doth breed For that which is most worthy to be blest; Of Childhood, whether fluttering or at rest, The song of thanks and praise; Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Hence, in a season of calm weather, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea and soothes us with a strain of such mingled solemnity and tenderness, as "might make angels weep:" "What though the radiance which was once so bright, Though nothing can bring back the hour Which having been, must ever be, In the faith that looks through death, And oh ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, To live beneath your more habitual sway. I love the Brooks which down their channels fret, The Clouds that gather round the setting sun The genius of the poet, which thus dignifies and consecrates the abstractions of our nature, is scarcely less felicitous in its pictures of society at large, and in its philosophical delineations of the characters and fortunes of individual man. Seen through the holy medium of his imagination, all things appear "bright and solemn and serene"-the asperities of our earthly condition are softened away -and the most gentle and evanescent of its hues gleam and tremble over it. He delights to trace out those ties of sympathy by which the meanest of beings are connected with the general heart. He touches the delicate strings by which the great family of man are bound together, and thence draws forth sounds of choicest music. He makes us partake of those joys which are "spread through the earth to be caught in stray gifts by whoever will find" them-discloses the hidden wealth of the soul-finds beauty everywhere, and "good in every thing." He draws character with the softest pencil, and shades it with the pensive tints of gentlest thought. The pastoral of The Brothers-the story of Michaeland the histories in the Excursion which the priest gives while standing among the rustic graves of the church-yard, among the mountains, are full of exquisite portraits, touched and softened by a divine imagination which human love inspires. He rejoices also to exhibit that holy process by which the influences of creation are shed abroad in the heart, to excite, to mould, or to soften. We select the following stanzas from many passages of this kind of equal beauty, because in the fantasy of nature's making "a lady of her own," the object of the poet is necessarily developed with more singleness than where reference is incidentally made to the effect of scenery on the mind: "Three years she grew in sun and shower, Myself will to the darling be Both law and impulse and with me In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, To kindle or restrain. She shall be sportive as the fawn, The floating clouds their state shall lend Even in the motions of the storm Grace that shall mould the maiden's form By silent sympathy. The stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean on air In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, a bolder and most passionate strain, which "The wind, the tempest roaring high, Might well be dangerous food, Whatever in those climes he found Did to his mind impart Nor less to feed voluptuous thought, Yet in his worst pursuits, I ween We can do little more than enumerate those pieces of narrative and character, which we esteem the best in their kind of our author's works. The old Cumberland Beggar is one of those which linger most tenderly on our | sagest antiquarian might muse over in vain, memories. The poet here takes almost the and his name engraven in a wreath or posy lowliest of his species-an aged mendicant, around three bells with which he had endowed one of the last of that class who made regular the spire. "So," exclaims the poet, in strains circuits amidst the cottages of the north-and as touching and majestic as ever were breathed after a vivid picture of his frame bent with over the transitory grandeur of earthyears, of his slow motion and decayed senses, he asserts them not divorced from good"So fails, so languishes, grows dim and dies, traces out the links which bind him to his All that this world is proud of. From their spheres The stars of human glory are cast down; fellows-and shows the benefit which even Perish the roses, and the flowers of kings, he can diffuse in his rounds, while he serves Princes and emperors, and the crowns and palms as a record to bind together past deeds and Of all the mighty, withered, and consumed." offices of charity-compels to acts of love by "the mild necessity of use" those whose of poor Ellen-a seduced and forsaken girlIn the Excursion, too, is the exquisite tale hearts would otherwise harden-gives to the from which we will give one affecting inci young "the first mild touch of sympathy and thought, in which they find their kindred with dent, scarcely to be matched, for truth and a world where want and sorrow are"-and and tales which have been founded on a simi beauty, through the many sentimental poems enables even the poor to taste the joy of bestowing. This last blessing is thus set forth and illustrated by a precious example of selfdenying goodness and cheerful hope, which is at once more tear-moving and more sublime than the finest things in Cowper: ——————“ Man is dear to man; the poorest poor When they can know and feel that they have been, Sits by her fire, and builds her hope in Heaven." Then, in the Excursion, there is the story of the Ruined Cottage, with its admirable gradations, more painful than the pathetic narratives of its author usually are, yet not without redeeming traits of sweetness, and a reconciling spirit which takes away its sting. There, too, is the intense history of the Solitary's sorrows there the story of the Hanoverian and the Jacobite, who learned to snatch a sympathy from their bitter disputings, grew old in controversy and in friendship, and were buried side by side-there the picture of Oswald, the gifted and generous and graceful hero of the mountain solitude, who was cut off in the blossom of his youth-there the record of that pleasurable sage, whose house Death, after forty years of forbearance, visited with thronging summonses, and took off his family one after the other, "with intervals of peace," till he too, with cheerful thoughts about him, was overcome by unexpected sleep in one blest moment," and as he lay on the "warm lap of his mother earth," "gathered to his fathers." There are those fine vestiges, and yet finer traditions and conjectures, of the good knight Sir Alfred Irthing, the "mild-hearted champion" who had retired in Elizabeth's days to a retreat among the hills, and had drawn around him a kindred and a family. Of him nothing remained but a gentle fame in the hearts of the villagers, an uncouth monumental stone grafted on the church-walls, which the 66 lar wo: "-Beside the cottage in which Ellen dwelt Stands a tall ash tree; to whose topmost twig Of his fond partner, silent in the nest. Ay why,' said Ellen, sighing to herself, Their spring-time with one love, and that have need To grant, or be received, while that poor bird, "Such was the tender passage, not by me fated love, we may contrast the following rich "Arabian fiction never filled the world With half the wonders that were wrought for him. |
