and surely the prime lineaments of the Poet's aim bear the stamp of nobility, and approve themselves

"Majestic in their own simplicity."

66

I do not, of course, intend the term simplicity" to apply to those indeterminable hypotheses of a previous state of existence, of which Wordsworth is so eloquently credulous. That

"The soul which rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar,"

is a theory which may dominate in the imagination, and glow on the Poet's page, as it does in the Ode* from which I have quoted; but it is conjectural, and must remain so as long as the immortal part of the mysterious compound, man, is girdled by mortality.

If I mistake not, it was Seneca who said, that the most miserable object which could be conceived, was an old man who would be young again. I had been young and was old, when first I imbibed with an appetite the spirit of Wordsworth; but I remember well there ran along with my blood as it were, a rivulet of rapture, at the visible embodiment in language, of innumerable phantoms wherewith I had * Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood.

been haunted; and then, reflecting how comparatively torpid were my sensations to what they would have been in an earlier day, then, for the first and last time in my life, I felt that I would renew my youth, were its renewal in my power. For the doctrines of this Poet require to be woven with the primary principles of our moral and intellectual being, and to grow with our growth; they are but grafted on the man; and the elements of age, although in casual instances ardent and predisposed, cannot retain the plasticity of youth: and indeed, the susceptibility to impression which lends a charm to the spring-time of life, would imply instability and be considered as indiscretion in the man of maturer years. But even now, when the "wild ecstasies" of former days are stilled into sober pleasure, there are no gradus ad Parnassum that I tread with a happier or more improved spirit than those shapen by the Poet Wordsworth.

E. paused an instant to respire, and resumed with a livelier air and less soliloquisingly

Wordsworth is eminently the Oracle of Nature. He has tuned his lyre at various founts, and many of his less legitimate notes are cherished among the "sweet sounds and harmonies" which have their home

in memory; but when he stands by the side of a murmuring stream, in fair field, or flowery dell, intent on the portraiture of unheeded loveliness,—on redeeming the scene in which he stands, like isolated minstrel, from the reputation of a voiceless solitude,— and on quickening in all things a spiritual intelligence; then the Poet appears overwhelmed with " a sense sublime," and his harp-strings seem wrought of the fibres of our very being. He guides the admiring eye over the many-featured face of Nature, with a rod of enchantment, whose property it is to invest with grace and gladness every object to which it points; and there is not a single exiled feature but he rescues it from demerit, and does so endow it with charms, that you are led captive to the confession of a

"glory in the grass and splendor in the flower."

And, turning from Nature herself, how touchingly does he depict the child, and youth, and man, as swayed unconsciously by the Influence above us and around, to the intelligent observance of which, mankind in thousands are deadened, by custom "heavy as frost." Here is a cast, not from the lineaments but from the characteristics of the child:-refer me, in the

entire range of poetic delineation, to a happier illustration of boyhood and girlhood-the natural impetuosity of the one, the sweet timidity and tenderness of the other:

"Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days,
The time when, in our childish plays,
My sister Emmeline and I
Together chased the Butterfly,
A very hunter would I rush

Upon the prey-with leaps and springs

I followed on o'er brake and bush,

While she-GOD love her!-feared to brush
The dust from off its wings!"

Call nothing henceforth common;-Wordsworth has power to make a child's involuntary gesture poetical, and to extract something tangible and to look at from an urchin's sigh.

Then, too, he has a singular art in sinister strokes. We are familiar with the apothegm, that " Vice, to be hated, needs but to be seen;" but you would not for a moment think of imputing flagrancy to a bagman, because he passed a buttercup without halting to do it homage; yet recite, with ordinarily-becoming emphasis, the following triplet, and Peter Bell the Potter becomes positively an atrocious character, for

regarding a field-flower in no other light than that

of a field-flower!

"A primrose by a river's brim

A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more!"

From the beginning, in every age, the heaveninstructed Poet has recognised in the made a shadowing forth of the attributes of the Maker, and, if devout, has caused this discernment of the Deity to redound to His praise. It is the Poet's function -and how august a function!-to rend from the aspect of Nature the dense veil of indifference thrown over it by habitual unconcerned intercourse, and, in the winning accents of" sweetly-uttered knowledge,' to rouse the listless creature to wakefulness,-thence on to interested watchfulness of the Creator's operations; to convince him that the garniture of earth and its star and sun-emblazoned canopy are not unmeaning display-inexpressive adornment-but to the observant eye are all replete with a sublime significance: that the humblest object which can attract his gaze, though seemingly inanimate or inert, is yet an instrument of design in the laboratory of the Lord

* Sidney.