and the art of galvano-metallurgy, have each their separate journal or journals. Each art, each pursuit, each whim or amusement is represented by some periodical, generally of merit and possessing a considerable circulation. But we have, also, a large and increasing mass of information given to us in a variety of other periodical works, many of which are sold at a price inconceivably small, if we consider the ordinary costliness of books in England: such, for example, as the publications by Constable and Chambers in Scotland, and the prolific brood of Family Libraries,' Cabinet Cyclopædias,' and penny journals. These works, by which a great extent of useful, if not very profound, knowledge is placed at the disposal of the labouring classes, have in most cases been exceedingly successful, and are calculated to give a foreigner a high idea of the intellectual activity and enterprise of the English people;-an impression which will become still stronger when he finds the contents of these collections to be, in almost every case, well selected, well arranged, decorous and moral, written always with respectable, and often with extraordinary ability. CHAPTER XXI. WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, AND THE NEW POETRY. Wordsworth and the Lake School-Philosophical and Poetical Theories-The THE throne of English poetry, left vacant by the early death of Byron, is now unquestionably filled by Wordsworth. It was a species of revolution which seated the author of 'Childe Harold' upon that throne: it is a counter-revolution which has deposed "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme." The English Bards' was Byron's 18th Fructidor; the publication of 'The Excursion' was his Waterloo. But in the fluctuation of popular taste, in the setting of that current, which, flowing from the old classicism, has carried us insensibly, but irresistibly, first through Romanticism, and has now brought us to a species of metaphysical quietism, there have been many temporary changes of direction; nay, some apparent stoppages. Despite the effort and impulsion of the Byronian poetry -the poetry of passion-there were writers who not only retained many characteristics of the forms that had to appearance been exploded, but even something of the old tone of sentiment; modified, of course, by the aesthetic principles which were afterwards to be completely embodied in such a cycle of great works as constitutes a school of literature. Thus Crabbe, with his singular versification (a kind of mezzo-termine between the smart antithetic manner of Pope and the somewhat languid melody of Goldsmith), combined a gloomy analysis of crime and weakness with pictures of common life delineated with a Flemish minuteness of detail; and the traditions of the purely classic school survived in the diction of Rogers and the exquisite finish of Campbell. These poets are the connecting links between the two systems so opposite and apparently so incompatible: and it is not surprising that these writers, both of whom have deservedly become classics in our language, should exhibit, in the difference of feeling and treatment perceptible when we compare their first works with their last, a perfect image of the gradual transition of public taste from the one style of writing to the other. They both began, the former in 'The Pleasures of Memory,' and the latter in 'The Pleasures of Hope,' as imitators of Akenside (himself an imitator of Milton) and of Goldsmith; while in their later works we trace a gradually increasing tendency towards the more passionate and lyric tone of modern poetry. In Rogers's exquisite poem of Human Life,' in his 'Italy,' in his charming songs and fugitive pieces, we find him gradually receding farther and farther from his first models: and in examining the works of Thomas Campbell we perceive a still stronger proof of the same transition. The Pleasures of Hope,' published at the very early age of twenty-four, was absolutely a reproduction of the tone and feeling of 'The Traveller' but if we follow Campbell through his tender and pathetic narrative poem of 'Gertrude of Wyoming' and his admirable lyrics - national and patriotic, and among the finest in any language. we shall see that in him, as in the general state of literary feeling reflected in his works, a complete and vast change had taken place. In literature nothing can ever be perfectly destroyed or obliterated, nothing can exist without producing an influence on remote times; and poetry therefore will ever bear something of an eclectic character. It is the philosophy of Wordsworth-his theory, religious, social, and moral-that has most deeply coloured the poetry of the present day in England. He has exercised upon the literature of his country an influence far more permanent and powerful than that which was communicated to the mind of Europe by the splendid innovations of Byron, although it was not so intense and rapid in its first development. The Lake School (so called because its founders resided chiefly among the picturesque scenery of the lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and have described with enthusiastic fondness not only that beautiful mountain region, but also the simple virtues and pastoral innocence of its inhabitants) was founded by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; of whom the former must be considered as the most industrious apostle and expounder of its doctrines. These doctrines are not of a mere æsthetic character: so far from it, indeed, that their æsthetic deductions are simply an application to art, of principles of faith and reasoning of the most clevated and all-embracing character. Their poetry is, in short, nothing but an embodiment, in a particular form, of a theory which, whether true or false, involves the highest concernments of man in his relation to God, to nature, to his fellow-creatures, and to himself. These writers are in some sense the Quietists, the Mystics, the Quakers of the poetic fraternity. As critics, the chief object of their attacks was the conventional language, so long considered as inseparable from poetry. They considered that the ordinary speech of the common people, being founded on the most general and universal feelings of the mind, and expressive of the most extensive class of wants and ideas, was a more faithful, philosophical, and durable vehicle for thought than the ornamented and ambitious phraseology heretofore deemed essential to poetry, although subject, as it was, to every caprice of fashion and taste. Nor were their ethical doctrines less bold. Strong passions, splendid and striking actions, revenge, ambition, unbridled love, all that had hitherto been considered as the very stuff and material of poetical impressions, they held to be wanting in the higher attribute of dignity and fitness for the artist's purposes. All in our nature, that either indicates, generates, or proceeds from a selfish motive, they held to be demonstrably less sublime than the tranquil virtues, the development of the affections, and the incessant effort of the soul to unite itself by meditation and reverent aspiration with God himself. Thus, casting down, at the feet of the Divinity, the passions of our nature, they of course were the iconoclasts also of the idols of human reason. For the acute speculator, the pryer into the material creation, the philosophaster, the quack and empiric of science, they express the most intense contempt; being too apt to confound the legitimate exercise of our intellect and curiosity with the petty, unfeeling, irreverent spirit of the Philosopher, a fingering slave, One that would peep, and pry, and botanise In proportion as the world becomes more civilized, the splendida tilia will, so to say, sink in value in our moral exchange; and the day may come when courage and military energy, for example, will be considered as the necessary barbarism of a savage state, and the exploits of a Charles XII. and a Napoleon will be looked back upon with a half-pitying, half-incredulous wonder. That the human race is yet arrived at this point of philosophy and civilization does not very evidently appear; but the doctrines of Wordsworth's school are an attempt to anticipate this millennium of innocence and virtue. In the same way as the ordinary sentiments of poetry are rejected by the Lake School, the ordinary subjects of it have no less been changed. The materials of many of their works, particularly of the earlier ones, are the adventures and sentiments of the very humblest class of human life, and such as, in themselves, would appear to defy any power of rendering them interesting and attractive. Thus the heroes of 'Peter Bell' are a cruel carrier and his ass; an idiot boy forms the whole subject of another poem; and an old pedlar is the chief personage in the noble fragment of The Excursion.' The diction is, of course, characterized by similar singularities. Peculiarly awake to the defects of that brilliant and ingenious poetry which was introduced into England from France at the Restoration, and whose chief representatives are Prior, Waller, and Pope, the Lakists appear to have shut their eyes to its incontestable merits; or, if they allow the existence of those merits, they consider them as of so low an order, and purchased so dearly, that they prefer the simple pathos, the rude picturesqueness, of the old English ballads to all the sparkle and ingenuity of the Poets of the Intellect. Wordsworth's earlier diction was marked by a humility and even meanness of phrase; and the ballads, published in 1798, excited an universal uproar of ridicule. Both the system, and the ridicule it gave birth to, were naturally somewhat exaggerated: it is not, therefore, surprising that those very journals, such as 'The Quarterly,' 'The Edinburgh,' and 'Blackwood's Magazine,' which overwhelmed the Lyrical Ballads' on their first appearance with ridicule, should have gradually become admirers, if not warm supporters, of Wordsworth's poetical and moral opinions. There can, however, be no question that, in his first publications, he carried his system much too far; and the Lake School, in their eagerness to escape the Idols of the Theatre, have sometimes manifestly fallen under the influence of the Idols of the Den. One thing, however, is incontestable; the new school of poetry draws its inspiration from a truly elevated source. With these writers, poetry is but an embodiment and expression of faith. Their works are not the productions of mere intellectual dexterity; but are monuments of the profoundest conviction, of the sublimest aspirations after what is good and beautiful and true. Poetry, with them, is a religion; and they, like the bards of the heroic age, are not artists only, but priests and hierophants. In Wordsworth, poetry, which is but another name for the reverent study of nature, embraces all knowledge, all sanctity, all truth. With him it is 6 "The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The prominent feature in Wordsworth's system, cf mingled æsthe tics and ethics, is the belief that external nature is not the mer lifeless echo of the voice of God, but the voice itself: and that the stream, the cloud, the leaf are not altogether inanimate and feeling less; but that they have a consciousness and a language of their own, audible and intelligible to all who will reverently listen; but most audible, most intelligible to the poet; whose only difference from other men consists in his greater fineness of ear for that universal hymn of nature. This leading idea will be found, also, in the morc lofty meditations of the Platonic dialogues. These ideas Plato ob. tained, we know, from his master Socrates; and they came originally, in all probability, from the East; for Oriental poetry bears much of this peculiar stamp of mysticism. A great deal of this platonism is to be found embodied in the poetry of the Elizabethan era; not only in the great work of Spenser, where it is indeed peculiarly perceptible; but even in the productions of men whose reputation, then very great, has not been able to resist the destroying power of time in the poems, for instance, of Sir John Davies, of Phineas Fletcher, and of Silvester. In the Indian poetry this diffusion, through all nature, of consciousness and of feeling, tends directly to a species of sublime pantheism: in Wordsworth, the same dogmas. made subservient to the doctrines of the Christian revelation, acquire a still more pure and ethereal character. If we examine the whole collection of Wordsworth's poems, we shall find that, while he has remained faithful to the ethical part of his theory, he has involuntarily been obliged to renounce a great deal of what was peculiar in his art; that is, its peculiar language. That extreme simplicity of diction and imagery, which he formerly seemed to consider the only true vehicle of poetical impressions, was obviously too little in accordance with his elevated and abstract doctrines to be retained, for any length of time, as his poetical language. Thus, while an unlearned peasant would have found nothing in Wordsworth's early narratives and songs which he would not have perfectly understood, as far as the words were concerned, the deductions, the drift, the moral results would have remained, and ever will remain, as unintelligible to such a reader as if they were couched in the most artificial and ornamented rhetoric. Many of Wordsworth's finest productions-as, for example, the admirable 'Laodamia,' his Sonnets, and nearly all 'The Excursion'-are, as far as the diction and versification are concerned, written in strong discordance with the poet's own theory of poetical expression: and are so far from exemplifying an extreme simplicity, and the use of the most popular or even rustic phraseology, that they are absolutely among the most highly finished and elaborate specimens of artificial diction which the Eng lish language can show. Milton, Spenser, Akenside, Thomson, are undoubtedly among the most scholastic of our poets; and yet we do |