sages" which darkened at the tidings of reflection, contained in lines and sentences man's fall, and to the "organ of eternity" which have become proverbs—of mild enwhich sung pæans over his recovery. thusiasm of minute knowledge of nature We sum up what we have further to-of strong, yet unostentatious, sympathy say of Wordsworth, under the items of with man-and of devout and breathless his works, his life and character, and his communion with the Great Author of all! death. Apart altogether from their intellectual His works, covering a large space, and pretensions, Wordsworth's poems possess abounding in every variety of excellence a moral clearness, beauty, transparency, and style, assume, after all, a fragmentary and harmony, which connect them immeaspect. They are true, simple, scattered, diately with those of Milton; and beside and strong, as blocks torn from the crags the more popular poetry of the past age of Helvellyn, and lying there "low, but-such as Byron's and Moore's-they remighty still." Few even of his ballads mind us of that unplanted garden, where are wholes. They leave too much untold. the shadow of God united all trees of They are far too suggestive to satisfy. fruitfulness and all flowers of beauty inFrom each poem, however rounded, there to one; where the "large river," which streams off a long train of thought, like watered the whole, "ran south," toward the tail of a comet, which, while testify- the sun of heaven, when compared with ing its power, mars its aspect of oneness. the gardens of the Hesperides, where a "The Excursion," avowedly a fragment, dragon was the presiding deity, or with seems the splinter of a larger splinter, like those in the Metropolis, where Comus a piece of Pallas, itself a piece of some and his rabble rout celebrate their undissplit planet. Of all his poems, perhaps, guised orgies of miscalled and miserable his sonnets, his "Laodamia," his "Intima-pleasure.

tions of Immortality," and his verses on To write a great poem, demands years the "Eclipse in Italy," are the most com--to write a great undying example, deplete in execution, as certainly they are mands a lifetime. Such a life, too, bethe most classical in design. Dramatic comes a poem-higher far than pen can power he has none, nor does he regret the inscribe, or metre make musical. Such a want. "I hate," he was wont to say to life it was granted to Wordsworth to live Hazlitt, "those interlocutions between in severe harmony with his verse-as it Caius and Lucius." He sees, as "from a lowly, and as it aspiring, to live, too, tower, the end of all." The waving lights amid opposition, obloquy, and abuse-to and shadows, the varied loopholes of view, live, too, amid the glare of that watchful the shiftings and fluctuations of feeling, observation, which has become to public the growing, broadening interest of the men far more keen and far more capacious drama, have no charm for him. His in its powers and opportunities than in mind, from its gigantic size, contracts a Milton's days. It was not, unquestiongigantic stiffness. It "moveth altogether, ably, a perfect life, even as a man's, far if it move at all." Many of the little poems less as a poet's. He did feel and resent, which he wrote upon a system are exceed-more than beseemed a great man, the puringly tame and feeble. Yet often, even suit and persecution of the hounds, whein his narrow bleak vales, we find one ther "grey" and swift-footed, or whether "meek streamlet-only one," beautify-curs of low degree, who dogged his steps. ing the desolation; and feel how painful His voice from his mountains sounded at it is for him to become poor, and that, times rather like the moan of wounded when he sinks, it is with "compulsion and weakness, than the bellow of masculine laborious flight." But, having subtract- wrath. He should simply, in reply to his ed such faults, how much remains - of opponents, have written on at his poems, truth of tenderness-of sober, eve-like and let his prefaces alone. When will grandeur of purged beauties, white and authors learn that, to answer an unjust clean as the lilies of Eden-of calm, deep attack, is merely to give it a keener edge,

and that all injustice carries the seed of oblivion and exposure in itself?

pathise with the ongoings of society, the fulness of modern life, and the varied pasThe sensitiveness of such writers might sions, unbeliefs, sins, and miseries of moadmit of some curious reflections. One dern human nature. His soul dwelt apart. would sometimes fancy that Apollo, in He came, like the Baptist, "neither eatan angry hour, had done to his sons what ing nor drinking," and men said, "he fable records him to have done to Mar- hath a demon." He saw at morning, syas-flayed them alive. Nothing has from London Bridge, "all its mighty brought more contempt upon authors heart" lying still; but he did not at noon than this-implying, as it does, a lack of plunge artistically into the thick of its common courage and manhood. The true throbbing life, far less sound the depths son of genius ought to rush before the of its wild midnight heavings of revel and public, as the warrior into battle, resolved wretchedness, of hopes and fears, of stifled to hack and hew his way to eminence and fury and eloquent despair. Nor, although power, not to whimper like a schoolboy at he sung the "mighty stream of tendency" every scratch-to acknowledge only home- of this wondrous age, did he ever launch thrusts, large, life-letting-out blows his poetic craft upon it, nor seem to see determined either to conquer or to die, the whitherwards of its swift and awful and feeling that battles should be lost in stress. He has, on the whole, stood aside the same spirit in which they are won. from his time-not on a peak of the past, If Wordsworth did not fully answer this not on an anticipated Alp of the future, ideal, others have sunk far more disgrace-but on his own Cumberland highlandsfully and habitually below it. hearing the tumult and remaining still, In private, Wordsworth, we under-lifting up his life as a far-seen beacon-fire, stand, was pure, mild, simple, and ma- studying the manners of the humble dwelljestic-perhaps somewhat austere in his ers in the vales below-"piping a simple judgments of the erring, and perhaps song to thinking hearts," and striving to somewhat narrow in his own economics. waft to brother spirits the fine infection In accordance, we suppose, with that of his own enthusiasm, faith, hope, and part of his poetic system which magni- devotion. Perhaps, had he been less fied moleheaps to mountains, pennies as- strict and consistent in creed and in chasumed the importance of pounds. It is racter, he might have attained greater ludicrous, yet characteristic, to think of breadth, blood-warmth, and wide-spread the great author of "The Recluse" squab-power, have presented on his page a fuller bling with a porter about the price of a reflection of our present state, and drawn parcel, or bidding down an old book at a stall. He was one of the few poets who were ever guilty of the crime of worldly prudence that ever could have fulfilled the old paradox, 'a poet has built a house." In his young days, according to Hazlitt, he said little in society, sat generally lost in thought, threw out a bold or an indifferent remark occasionally, and relapsed into reverie again. In latter years, he became more talkative and oracular. His health and habits were always regular, his temperament happy, and his heart sound and hale.

We have said that his life, as a poet, was far from perfect. Our meaning is, that he did not sufficiently, owing to temperament, or position, or habits, sym

from his poetry a yet stronger moral, and become the Shakspere, instead of the Milton of the age. For himself, he did undoubtedly choose the "better part;" nor do we mean to insinuate that any man ought to contaminate himself for the sake of his art, but that the poet of a period will necessarily come so near to its peculiar sins, sufferings, follies, and mistakes, as to understand them, and even to feel the force of their temptations, and though he should never yield to, yet must have a "fellow-feeling" of, its prevailing infirmities.

The death of this eminent man took few by surprise. Many anxious eyes have for awhile been turned towards Rydal Mount, where this hermit stream was

nearly sinking into the ocean of the In-equally unable to rescue their votaries from finite. And now, to use his own grand the swift ruin which is in chase of us all: word, used at the death of Scott, a "Golden lads and girls all must, "trouble" hangs upon Helvellyn's brow, and over the waters of Windermere. The last of the Lakers has departed. That glorious country has become a tomb for her more glorious children. No more is Southey's tall form seen at his library window, confronting Skiddaw, with a port as stately as its own. No more does Coleridge's dim eye look down into the dim tarn, heavy laden, too, under the advancing thunder-storm. And no more

is Wordsworth's pale and lofty front shaded into divine twilight, as he plunges at noonday amidst the quiet woods. A stiller, sterner power than poetry has folded into its strict, yet tender and 7earning embrace, those

Serene creators of immortal things."

Like chimney-sweepers, come to dust." But Wordsworth has left for himself an epitaph almost superfluously rich—in the memory of his private virtues of the impulse he gave to our declining poetry his strains with the poor, the neglected, -of the sympathies he discovered in all and the despised-of the version he furnished of nature, true and beautiful as if it were nature describing herself-of his lofty and enacted ideal of his art and the artist-of the "thoughts, too deep for tears," he has given to meditative and lonely hearts-and, above all, of the support he has lent to the cause of the "pri

mal duties" and eldest instincts of man -to his hope of immortality, and his fear of God. And now we bid him farewell in his own words

Alas! for the pride and the glory even of the purest products of this strange world!"Blessings be with him, and eternal praise, The poet, who on earth has made us heirs Of truth and pure delight, by heavenly lays."

Sin and virtue, pleasure and poetry, the lowest vices and the highest aspirations, are

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY was far too | monies to the existence of a Great Spiharshly treated in his speculative boy- rit; where there is not a flower that bloshood; and it has often struck us that, soms in the garden, but preaches that had pity and kind-hearted expostulation been tried, instead of reproach and abrupt expulsion, they might have weaned him, ere long, from the dry bosom of atheism, to the soft breast of the faith and "worship of sorrow;" and the touching spectacle had been renewed, of the demoniac sitting, "clothed, and in his right mind," at the feet of Jesus. As it is, we deplore the atheism of such a spirit, with humility and bitterness of heart, and "wonder at it, with a great admiration." That a being of such richly endowed intellect, and warm quick beating heart-who was no worldling, tinged with no selfish or sinister motives, but a sincere, shy, and lofty enthusiast-standing up in a creation so infinitely full of testi

there is a God, nor a leaf that twinkles in the sunbeam, nor a cloud that passes over the moon, nor an insect which flutters in the breath of the gale, or creates a tiny tempest on the waves of the pool, but repeats and re-echoes the testimony that there is a God; where the lion roars it out amid his native wilds, and the humming-bird says it in every colour of her plumage, and every wafture of her wing; where the eagle screams up the tidings to the sun, and the sun, in reply, writes them round the burning iris of the eagle's eye; where the thunder, like a funeral bell hung aloft in the clouds, tolls out there is a Deity, and the earthquake mutters and stammers the same great truth below; where snow in its silence

and storm in its turmoil; summer in its | He said, "Love is God." Why did he beauty and winter in its wrath; the blos- not change it into "God is Love?" He soms of spring and the golden glories of deified a vague but beautiful principle of autumn, alike testify to a God; where Benevolence. Why did he not turn and the ten thousand orators of Nature-the see it in a purer, loftier form, condensed thunderbolts, the hailstones, the rain- in the countenance, illustrated in the drops, the winds, the ocean waves, the character, and sealed by the blood of flushing and the falling foliage of the Jesus? woods, the lightnings of the sky, and the cataracts of the wilderness-are all crashing out, blazing out, thundering out, whispering out, and murmuring true and solemn tidings about the Being who made them all; who gave the torrents

Their strength, their fury, and their joy,
Unceasing thunder and eternal foam;"

And when, as the climax of his madness, he dared, in the album at Mont Anvert, to subscribe himself Atheos, do you not almost wonder that Nature, in her grandest forms surrounding the misguided man, did not, appalled at the dignant at the conduct of him who was spectacle, no longer able to endure, inwriting down, in God's power, a denial who clothed the woods; who scooped out of his existence, burst silence and speak the bed of the sea; "who bringeth the out-that the avalanches, rolling down, wind out of his treasuries, and maketh a did not say, in every crash, "There is a path for the lightning of the thunder!" God!" that the mountain torrents, -that such a being, placed in the centre dashing by, did not cry, "There is a of so sublime a circle of witnesses, should God!"that the mountain snow, silent say, "I doubt, I deny, I cannot believe as death, did not awake to proclaim, ere that there is a God;" nay, that he should it relapsed into everlasting dumbness, have realised, in his imaginary experi-"There is a God!"-that Mont Blanc ence, the tremendous dream of Jean did not begin a chorus of acclamation, Paul-have lifted himself up through which all his brother giants would take the starry splendours of the universe, up, echoing the tidings from their lofty but found no God-have risen above summits, "There is a great and a glotheir remotest suns, but found no God-rious God!" But all was silence; and have descended to the lowest limits of perhaps that indifference, that "silent space-have looked down into the abyss, magnanimity of Nature and her God," and heard the rain-drops descending, did more powerfully than any words reand the everlasting storm raging, but buke the blasphemy. Shelley, in that found no God; should have come back from an empty heaven to a fatherless world, and said, "We are all orphans: neither I nor you have any God"-is, in truth, a profound, and awful, and inscrutable mystery.

Oh, star-eyed Shelley, didst thou wander there!

wild moment, would have almost_triumphed had his single word disturbed the harmony of creation, or brought down the thunderbolts of heaven. But that silence of the sun above, and the glaciers and mountains below, might have read a lesson to his proud heart, and taught him his own intense insignificance in the sight of Him, who no more regarded the denial to which he had summoned all the perverted heroism of his nature, and all the haughtiness of his then infuriated spirit, than a charioteer the one upward indignant curl of a crushed worm!

To waft us home the message of despair?" What ailed, we may well inquire, this noble but misled spirit against the God who had so bountifully enriched him? What ailed him against his holy child Jesus, with his perfect character and his bleeding love? Why did he not just re- Ultimately, indeed, he admitted more verse his own first principle, which would fully than at first the existence of a have brought him to the first principle-great, pervading, though not creative the life and essence of the Christian faith? | mind, co-eternal with the universe. His

tone, too, in reference to Christ, under- | sin of our age's literature. From a leviawent a change. He continued to read than Coleridge, with half of his huge the Scriptures with delight till the last; shape in clear water, and the other emand there are some grounds for believing bedded in mud, down to the smallest that he was emerging from the shades of "tritons of the nunnows," splashing unbelief, when there came down upon themselves into invisibility; from great him, so suddenly, the deeper darkness of unshorn originals, to the merest "echo's death. We gladly turn from his creed echo" and shadow's shade, there is a to his poetical character. One grand perpetual straining with many to involve objection to Shelley's poetry is its me- themselves in a larger or lesser degree of lancholious and whining tone. Thomas darkness. Some even of the gifted of Carlyle seems to entertain this idea of it. the day plunge, of mere malice prepense, We are surprised at this, and venture to into the dim, mistaking it for the deep. deny it. Shelley was a doubter, a denier, But Shelley is seldom guilty of this dea dogmatiser; but he was no whiner, no liberate "darkening of counsel." The blubbering imitator of Byron, lying across masters in the art of obscurity—for it is the wheelway, or reclining on the shore; reduced to a regular system-produce it but a working man, or maniac, striving generally by an affected, or by an encumagainst real or imaginary ills; now with bered, or by a deficient phraseology: now, the flush of hope, and now with the fury Shelley's style is one of the purest, most of despair. Shelley was a workman, natural, most copious, and most fluent though his undertaking was a despe- ever written. His command of language rate one. He shot an infant finger is not merely great, but absolute: words, amid the thunder-crashing spokes of the the shortest or the longest, the most grim wheel of necessity; it was crushed; simple and the most abstract, Saxon or and if he did utter one wild wailing cry, Latin, wait, winged and obedient, to as he drew it back, mangled, into his body forth his rarest and most ethereal bosom, who shall blame him? Did conceptions, instead of toiling after them Carlyle ever do more than point, with for long leagues behind. Öf versificafirm finger, to the black revolutions of tion, too, he is a perfect master; and we that awful wheel? Shelley was a work- know that, in general, it flowed on him man; but such a workman as, in Shinar like a swift stream. He needed selof old, sought to reach heaven by piling domer than most poets to sacrifice clearbrick on brick, and mortar on mortar; ness of sense to the necessities of rhyme: working, too, alone, under a black sky, what, then, the secret of his obscurity? and with guardian lightning blinding his - for we must, of course, grant that eyes. Had Carlyle been a Christian, he obscure he often was. It sprung partly might have stood behind the bewildered from his extreme subtlety of distinction; boy, half-shaken with laughter, yet half-partly from the dreamy character of his rapt in wonder, at the fearless insanity of subjects; partly from his passion for inthe enterprise, and said, as he patted the terweaving the abstractions of the schools fair head, prematurely grey, "Build on, with the living laurels of Parnassus; but since no better may be. Better build in principally from his incessant practice of Shinar, than rot in Sodom: better build allegory-a figure into which he was at stones thus, than sepulchres with Nim- once seduced by the preternatural livelirod. But, ah, poor child! were it not ness of his imagination, and driven by better still for thee to build with Noah the daring peculiarity of his opinions. an ark, or with Abraham an altar?" If we try parts of his works by the comAnother objection is, that mystic and mon standards of descriptive and didactic shadowy obscurity which is said to ad- poetry, their darkness is rayless, solid, here to his poetry. There are none impenetrable; but if we regard the whole readier than we to condemn wilful and as one mass of allegories, to which his deliberate mystification; it is the crying system forms the master-key, we will not