Sing ye, with blossoms crowned, and fruits, and flowers,
Of Winter's breath surcharged with sleety showers,

And the dire flapping of his hoary wing!

Knit the blithe dance upon the soft green grass;
With feet, hands, eyes, looks, lips, report your gain :
Whisper it to the billows of the main,

And to the aërial zephyrs as they pass,

That old decrepit Winter- He hath slain

That host, which rendered all your beauties vain !"

But as if he had done injustice to the heart of man, and failed to recognise the help of the Most High, by ascribing too much to the unfeeling Elements, the poet turns away to even a higher and steadier flight:

"By Moscow self-devoted to a blaze

Of dreadful sacrifice; by Russian blood
Lavished in fight with desperate hardihood;
The unfeeling Elements no claim shall raise
To rob our Human-nature of just praise
For what she did and suffered. Pledges sure
Of a deliverance absolute and pure

She gave, if Faith might tread the beaten ways
Of Providence. But now did the Most High
Exalt his still small voice; to quell that Host
Gathered his power, a manifest ally;

He, whose heaped waves confounded the proud boast
Of Pharaoh, said to Famine, Snow, and Frost,

'Finish the strife by deadliest victory!'"

Another element of his genius, brought into fine relief in these songs of freedom, is Wordsworth's invincible hopefulness. His confidence in humanity, with its "few strong instincts," and the majesty of right and genuine freedom, never wavered, even when Europe-Britain alone unconquered-was swept by an unrelenting foe. His inspiration is filled with Hope's perpetual breath, and not the ascendancy of power taken in contempt of right can give a doubt of Providence. This justifies his honorable exultation :

"the poet claims at least this praise,
That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope
Of his pure song, which did not shrink from hope
In the worst moments of these evil days;
From hope, the paramount duty that Heaven lays,
For its own honor, on man's suffering heart,
Never may from our souls one truth depart –

That an accursed thing it is to gaze

On prosperous tyrants with a dazzled eye;
Nor,-touched with due abhorrence of their guilt
For whose dire ends tears flow, and blood is spilt,
And justice labors in extremity-

Forget thy weakness, upon which is built,

O wretched man, the throne of tyranny!"

It is this hopefulness that infuses such steady cheerfulness through his poetry, and guards his seriousness from sinking to dejection. For the mere tendency to excess of melancholy in the series of poems which had their beginning at the "sorrowstricken door" of Abbotsford, he makes a touching "Apology." Nor is the poet's composure disturbed by witnessing the progress of Science, with all its "motions and means—at war with old poetic feeling," and marring the loveliness of nature. Nay, he proclaims its triumphs-the intellectual mastery over the blind elements-and mourns only when he beholds it leading to the sacrifice of a people's health-moral and physical. He deplores not the loss of ancient themes of poetry, but mechanical philosophy ministering to the appetite for gain, and laying waste the old domestic morals of the land its simple manners, and the innocent open-air life of childhood. Except so far as the devices of an inventive age tend to distemper a nation's heart, Wordsworth's poetic eye looks complacently on the career of Science, in the confidence that, though the ancient cisterns of poetry may be broken, imagination can draw from the living and inexhaustible fountains of truth and feeling. The genius of true Poetry is not to be daunted by the speed of Science; it is ever in advance-- like the flying figure of Lucifer in Guido's Aurora― the very flame of its torch not borne back by the current of its own flight, but pointing always forward :

"Desire we past illusions to recall?

To reinstate wild Fancy, would we hide

Truths whose thick veil Science has drawn aside ?
No, let this Age, high as she may, instal

In her esteem the thirst that wrought man's fall,

The universe is infinitely wide,

And conquering Reason, if self-glorified,

Can nowhere move uncrossed by some new wall
Or gulf of mystery, which thou alone,

Imaginative Faith! canst overleap,

the throne

In
progress toward the fount of Love,
Of Power whose ministers the records keep

Of periods fixed, and laws established, less

Flesh to exalt than prove its nothingness."

In taking leave of the subject of this article, we cannot repress our mingled astonishment and regret at the number of poems we are obliged to leave untouched. "The Excursion" alone, demands, rather than the cursory allusions we have made to passages of it, the systematic comment due to a great philosophic poem. We pass by, also, among others, the admirable series of Ecclesiastical Sonnets- the poems on old age and death - many of the lyrical pieces, and the various narrative poems. In the latter, especially, is conspicuous the poet's confidence, that genuine imagination need never overstep the modesty of nature, but can earn for the simplicity of truth a deeper sympathy than all the stimulants of exaggeration can give. He is content with the serene light of nature, though our dull vision may feel it less than the flashes of a false imagination: -a conflagration may be quickly and widely reflected from a murky atmosphere, but what earth-kindled fire can fill the vault of a cloudless sky? It is only the highest poetic genius that is native to the calm regions of simple truth. In the story of " Michael," for instance, the tragic events of which the catastrophe of the son's careertold in five lines, may be seen how free Wordsworth is from the pertinacity with which inferior artists worry the heart into a state of sensibility. We must omit, also, the consideration of his powers of versification, and the faultless taste with which every mode of thought and feeling seems to find a peculiarly accordant form of metre from the sweetness of his rhyme to the majestic march of his blank verse the appropriate music of his high philosophy. It is his praise, too, to have fully exemplified the unknown capacities of the sonnet to express almost every variety of poetic impulse. In the delicate but rich melody of Wordsworth's verse may be heard what Lamb describes as "that small soft voice, which the idea of articulated words raises in a silent reader." The pure and transparent English in which his poetry is written, should not be overlooked.

are

If our illustrations have omitted a large portion of the mate rials of Wordsworth's fame, how greatly is our astonishment increased by the knowledge that much is still reserved in the privacy of his manuscripts. There is withheld from the world, not only "The Recluse," with that prefatory poem, which called from the admiring spirit of Coleridge, the tribute of a puem as honorable to him who gave as to him who received—but what appears to have excited most earnest curiosity- an unpublished

Tragedy. This too,-written more than forty years ago, was pronounced "wonderful" by the same enthusiastic, strongspoken friend. Why all these writings are so perseveringly kept back, now that the world is better disposed to do justice, we know not; nor are we disposed to question the propriety, when we reflect how much better Mr. Wordsworth has managed his own reputation than if he had been more guided by the critics. The published extracts from his manuscripts are undoubtedly calculated to raise a high expectation of the treasures yet in store. Whether the drama will equal Coleridge's unqualified eulogy, or the commendation of the few friends to whom it has been imparted—and whether the author's genius is better suited to develop the elements of human character, than to follow them through their exhibition in contest or repose, we will form an opinion, when the work is made public—and not till then. A tragic drama from the pen of Wordsworth naturally creates expectation, with something of curiosity to learn, whether, stripping" gorgeous Tragedy" of her " sceptred pall," he has ventured to carry the muse, as in other of his poems, into the walks of homely life. A passage in the Excursion gives some encouragement to this thought. That it could be done with effect is in some measure indicated by a dramatic stroke in the tragic story of Ellen, in the same book:

"She reached the house, last of the funeral train ;
And some one, as she entered, having chanced

To urge, unthinkingly, their prompt departure,

Nay,' said she, with commanding look, a spirit

Of anger never seen in her before,

Nay, ye must wait my time!' and down she sate,

And by the unclosed coffin kept her seat,

Weeping and looking, looking on and weeping,
Upon the last sweet slumber of her Child,
Until at length her soul was satisfied."

The powers of Wordsworth continue at the present day in matured and unabated vigor, and we hesitate not to believe that a life so employed may be providentially prolonged — a blessing to his kind. A career so illustrious for fidelity to his great endowments can be explained by the moral cultivation, which alone guards genius from decay. Knowing that, when the visionary faculty is divorced from the moral being, the poet's early gladness is at last changed into solitary-hearted sorrow, he has sustained the life of his imagination by endowing it with the imperishable attributes of spirituality. His consciousness

of the danger of poetic genius was expressed in that stanza opening with the finest description yet given of the hapless prodigy of Bristol :

"I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride;
Of Him who walked in glory and in joy
Following his plough, along the mountain side:
By our own spirits are we deified;

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness,

But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.”

We have claimed for Wordsworth, rank among the greatest of English Poets. We appeal to the tribunal in the hearts of the wise the thoughtful and the feeling. We have seen him breathing new life into poetry and philosophy, revealing a new world of poetry, by what has been spoken of as a law of his mind, that "wisdom is oft-times nearer when we stoop than when we soar" and tracing the links by which the highest aspirations of our nature are connected with the ground-nest in which they are fostered. We have seen him, in the spirit of the religion of humility, giving beauty to humble life and shedding glory on the innocence of childhood, and on the meekness of woman: exposing the littleness of pride, and illustrating the kindred ties between lowliness and sublimity - his poetry being, like one of his own fair scenes, "a lowly vale, and yet uplifted high among the mountains." We have shown him so confiding in Truth as to disdain alliance with an artificial phraseology and unnatural stimulants, and to appeal from them to that natural abhorrence of falsehood, which happily has not perished in the heart of man: so confiding, too, in the sovereignty of his art as to look with composure on the progress of Scienceknowing that no acquisitions of the senses or the understanding can disturb the tranquillity and the repose of an imaginative faith that imagination can pitch her tents in advance of even the outposts of knowledge-and by its spiritual agency render the spoils of philosophy subservient to moral victories. It is thus that to Wordsworth's poetry eminently is applicable the fine observation of one of the "Guessers at Truth," that "Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week." The poet's power has been exhibited not only in disclosing what is grand and beautiful in nature to the senses, but in associating it with the spiritual being within, and in proclaiming, in the language of those fearless stanzas on " Presentiments," that