er muse.

Let him who doubts the justice of this remark, verify

it by making the experiment for himself.

Those who would understand and fully appreciate the peculiar merits of Wordsworth, as a poet, should apprize themselves most distinctly of the fact, that he is a reflective and meditative poet. He is a thoughtful man, with all the features of such a man; as one cannot but see, who merely glances at his productions; and he never throws off this character, whether his compositions are grave or gay. Are they lively in their general strain? they are still tinged with the quiet and the sobriety of a thinking mind. Are they graver in their character? they embody some truth of serious import. "The Excursion," his most important work, is a great moral poem, and is a portion of a more extended work, which is to be "a philosophical poem, containing views of man, nature and society; and to be entitled The Recluse; as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement." This fact, that Wordsworth is in the most appropriate sense a reflective poet, his readers and critics. have not, as we think, sufficiently kept in mind. They have pronounced him a tedious writer, but have forgotten the meanwhile, that to the unthinking, and even to the thoughtful, when not in the mood, all moralizing is of course tedious and dull. They have complained of a want of boldness in his conceptions, of a remoteness in his allusions, and of a shadowy indistinctness in his thoughts, without stopping to think, that every reflecting man is liable to the saine charges, both in his conversation and in his written style. These peculiarities of thought and language, and others which originate from the same cause, are found in him, in common with all meditative writers. All such writers are alike quiet in their method of presenting their thoughts, and alike unpretending and unobtrusive in their style. The man who will not read Wordsworth with interest, for such a reason as this, will find no delight in the quaint simplicity of Isaac Walton, nor any meaning in the refined and exquisite humor of Charles Lamb.

We do not at all wonder, that those who love not to reflect on themselves, their duties and their destiny, their joys and their sorrows, do not admire a poet who will lead them, if they follow him, to a course of self-inspection. Not at all wonderful is it, that the Edinburgh Review, which, at the period when Wordsworth was the object of its scorn, was a review without moral principle, without a belief in the law of conscience, we had almost said without a belief in immortality or in God, (in its official capacity we mean, and as far as one could gather from its pages); not at all wonderful is it, that this journal should not relish the subject matter which the poet brought to view in his writings. The sea

fowl that hovered over the divine Plato, on the summit of Sunium, as he stood rapt in high meditation, and neither knew nor could know any thing of the philosopher except that he disturbed them by his presence, were a fit emblem by which to represent the early critics of Wordsworth. Behold the sage, as he stands on the height of the lofty promontory, and looks up into heaven and down upon the depths of the azure sea! shall he be moved by the screaming of those obscene birds? Not he.

Let it not be supposed, however, because Wordsworth is a reflective poet, that therefore his works are all of them serious homilies, or formal meditations. He is sometimes sportive, and always cheerful; and many of his poems, to one not familiar with the spirit of the author, would seem to be but simple and faithful portraits of man or of nature. Sometimes, and with great effect, he rises to the abrupt impassioned strength and the vigorous music of the lyre. When in intercourse with our fellow-men, we meet an individual who deserves the name of a thoughtful man, we do not expect him at once to fall to reading us a dull lecture, nor to wind off every sentence with some grave and weighty conclusion. Such men are often distinguished for humor; and the plain ordinary course of their conversation, causes "blank astonishment" in those who had expected to see a very sage and serious personage, clothed with impressive solemnity. Every thing about such a man, is, however, characteristic of himself, and makes itself obvious to one who possesses any insight into character. So it is with Wordsworth as a poet. His cheerful humor, his plain and faithful narrations, are all tinged by the current of thought that runs deep and strong through the breast of their author. He that would detect this tinge in its faintest shading, and who would reproduce in his own mind all that was in the mind of the poet, must have become familiar with his spirit, and have contracted with him a sort of personal acquaintance.

Usually, however, Wordsworth appears in his distinctive character, as a reflective poet. He is, therefore, not dramatic. The chorus that stood apart during the performance of the classic tragedy, were not in their language and demeanor more distinguished from the busy and interested actors in the play, than Wordsworth is distinguished from Shakspeare. The points of difference are obvious. The dramatist is not himself visible in the characters which he creates; not that they are not formed by his mind, and so far partake of the general features of the mind which gave them being; but it is the living men that are strikingly depicted, and stand boldly forth to our view. The poet, also, who is merely a narrator of events, or a painter of the scenes of nature, as, for example, Homer, presents before us the event or the scene; and he does thus with the greatest success, who realizes in the highest

perfection, the simple truth, the actual life and the early gracefulness in which Homer stands unrivaled. The novels of Scott are examples of this kind of composition, perfect in their kind. The reflective poet, on the other hand, instead of the event or the scene, gives us his own reflections, and presents to us the mind that contemplates the object in the case. The object itself is brought forward, it is true, yet not for its own sake; but only as it was the occasion of the poet's meditations, if these are given at full length, or as it may be the occasion of our own, if we follow on the track which he opens upon us. The poet does not obtrude upon us his fancies as an individual, nor his accidental caprices. Not in the least; he simply calls up within us those feelings, those thoughts, those unchanging realities, which the given object is fitted to awaken in the bosom of every one who calls himself a man. But we propose to illustrate more fully the features of a poet of the reflective class, as we proceed to a more particular analysis of the peculiarities of Wordsworth. We trust our readers do not need to be reminded, that it does not follow from the fact, one is properly a reflective poet, that therefore he has no other merits; that be is in no sense dramatic; that he never describes with accuracy, or narrates with life and interest. A poet simply dramatic, or exclusively meditative, is only to be found in the world where are to be seen actual triangles and substantial polygons. We have spoken of poetry as concerned with man, with nature, and with religion. In these three points of view we propose to examine the merits of Wordsworth.

Wordsworth is pre-eminently the poet of humanity. Man, in his hopes and aspirations, in those kindly sympathies which unite him to his fellow-man, and most of all for those solemn and sacred truths that are enshrined in his inmost soul,-is to him ever an object of the most lively interest. Does he see him in the dawn of his existence, in the fresh and dewy hours of childhood? he does not clothe himself in a grave indifference nor in solemn contempt, as though a child were an object too insignificant to be worthy of his notice. No. The poet remembers, that he was once a child, and at once his own childhood comes back to bim in all its freshness as a real existence. As he gazes on the child before him, all that he once was is revived within him; that credulous and confiding faith; those eager hopes; those desires which magnified and distorted every object; the coming day which was to be so full of pleasure; the festival just past or fast approaching, and which cast its radiant light backward and forward through the circling year. Nor does he despise himself for all this, as though he had become so exalted a personage, that to admit the fact he ever was a child, with a child's feelings, would be a sort of self-degradation. In his view, humanity, in this its early VOL. VIII.

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growth, appears in its fairest form and its most perfect and symmetrical development. Sad indeed it is, that from this early period sin and perverseness seem to draw us backward, and more and more to mar the fair image which nature so sweetly unfolds. It is with our poet a favorite belief, that the powers of man are never seen in such freshness, are never so harmoniously attuned, and are never so vivid and strong in their apprehension of duty and truth, as in the heart of the child.

'Heaven lies about us in our infancy:
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows;
He sees it in his joy.

The youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is nature's priest;

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended ;

At length the man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.' vol, iii. p. 225.

Such is a history of man. What might he not become, were infancy followed by a youth and manhood correspondent to the fair promises which it gives?

We quote here an entire poem :

'My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky;

So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old;

Or let me die!

The child is father of the man ;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.' vol. i. p. 3.

To one who has ever experienced the feelings here expressed,and if a man has truly thought he cannot fail to have experienced such, this effusion cannot but be interesting. Whose heart in his childhood did not leap up, as he looked upon the rainbow? Who has not eagerly hastened to the window or to the open door at the close of an evening shower, when a rainbow was announced by a joyful messenger, and there gazed on the bright arch which spanned the east, "glorious as the gates of heaven?" Whose heart now does not spring forth, as it did then, as God calls him to look again and again on this glorious bow which he hath set in the heavens? There may be many such men; but for such, a poet does not write.

The last lines of the effusion just quoted contain a wish. Without asking whether in the wish there expressed, the allusion is not too remote to be graceful and pleasant, and withal easy to be comprehended, is not the wish itself such as every thoughtful man has a thousand times half uttered, when thinking of the pleasant

days of his childhood? To carry through life the same feelings which lived freshly in our young bosoms; to bind each succeeding day to the one which has gone before it with bonds of love; to see no frightful gap in the even tenor of life caused by wrong feelings or sinful actions,-is not all this worthy of a man and of a poet's prayer?

We might cite many extracts to show the interest which Wordsworth feels in man as he appears during his early years. They would all illustrate the gentleness of the poet's sympathies; his kind and ever sensitive regard to all that is sweet in childhood. But childhood, interesting as it is to him a poet, is viewed by him a reflecting man, as it should be, with sober and serious wishes, under a grave and shaded aspect; with hopes chastened and subdued; with apprehensions which are tremblingly alive to all that may happen in a world of evil.

Of man too, as he passes from childhood to youth, and from youth to maturer years, he is equally regardful. Every human being that meets his eye, is to him a sacred and serious object. Created as he is in the image of his Maker; the subject of his government; blessed by his smiles, or corrected by his chastising stroke, he can hardly cast him out from his sympathies, though he has hardened and degraded himself by crime. Nor can he laugh at his mistakes, however ridiculous he has rendered himself by his folly. Indeed he is one of those who, with the gentle Portia, count it almost a "sin to be a mocker." Or, if he deems it lawful to scorn any of the human species, it is not the heartless sneer and the haughty contempt toward one inferior to himself in the accidents of birth or station, manifested by the man who, whether he belongs to the vulgar or the learned multitude, has in his view renounced the birth-right of his humanity. Let there appear before our poet a living man; his inspired eye looks through his outward garb,-passes at once into his bosom, and both recognizes and responds to those feelings which spring up within its depths, and watches with delight their outward manifestations. His sympathies are at once awakened, and the relationship between himself and his fellow-man is at once acknowledged.

A lively sympathy in the feelings, the interests and opinions of his fellow-men, is felt in a greater or less degree by every poet, and seeins to form a constituent feature of the poetical temperament. With Wordsworth it is more than an impulse or a capricious excitement; for it has become consecrated by principle, and has passed into a habit, a nature. The high-born Byron was now and then won to a strange tenderness, as he witnessed the enjoyment or the suffering of his fellow-men; and for his kind he ever felt with sympathy, provided only, that they did not awaken his brutal desires or strike against his maddened pride. The man in