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MR. WORDSWORTH.

MR. WORDSWORTH's genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age. Had he lived in any other period of the world, he would never have been heard of. As it is, he has some difficulty to contend with the hebetude of his intellect, and the meanness of his subject. With him "lowliness is young ambition's ladder:" but he finds it a toil to climb in this way the steep of Fame. His homely Muse can hardly raise her wing from the ground, nor spread her hidden glories to the sun. He has "no figures nor no fantasies, which busy passion draws in the brains of men :" neither the gorgeous machinery of mythologic lore, nor the splendid colours of poetic diction. His style is vernacular: he delivers household truths. He sees nothing loftier than human hopes; nothing deeper than the human heart. This he probes, this he tampers with, this he poises, with all its incalculable weight of thought and feeling, in his hands; and at the same time calms the throbbing pulses of his own heart, by keeping his eye ever fixed on the face of nature. If he can make the life-blood flow from the wounded breast, this is the living colouring with which he paints his verse: if he can assuage the pain or close up the wound with the balm of solitary musing, or the healing power of plants and herbs and "skyey influences," this is the sole triumph of his art. He takes the simplest elements of nature and of the human mind, the mere abstract conditions inseparable from our being, and tries to compound a new system of poetry from them; and has perhaps succeeded as well as any one could. "Nihil humani a me alienum puto"-is the motto of his works. He thinks nothing low or indifferent of which this can be affirmed: every thing that professes to be more than this, that is not an absolute essence of truth and

and turgid common-places, so that nothing more could be in that direction but by the most ridiculous bombast or thi servility; he has turned back partly from the bias of partly perhaps from a judicious policy-has struck into the e, se tered vale of humble life, sought out the Muse ameng and hamlets and the peasant's mountain-haunts, has 2.s the tinsel pageantry of verse, and endeavoured (not in vz grandise the trivial and add the charm of novelty to the No one has shown the same imagination in raising trifes portance: no one has displayed the same pathos in treat simplest feelings of the heart. Reserved, yet haughty, hav og m unruly or violent passions, (or those passions having been easy suppressed,) Mr. Wordsworth has passed his life in soitary mi or in daily converse with the face of nature. He ex-, an eminent degree the power of association; for his poetry other source or character. He has dwelt among pastoral till each object has become connected with a thousand fee. -link in the chain of thought, a fibre of his own heart. Every com is by habit and familiarity strongly attached to the pace of 20 birth, or to objects that recall the most pleasing and event 2. cumstances of his life. But to the author of the Lyrazi Barbell, nature is a kind of home; and he may be said to take a pers sad interest in the universe. There is no image so instant it has not in some mood or other found the way into his brart sound that does not awaken the memory of other years —

"To him the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often he too deep for tears'

The daisy looks up to him with sparkling eye as an

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ance: the cuckoo haunts him with sounds of early yeh sem be expressed a linnet's nest startles him with boy ish deput old withered thorn is weighed down with a heap-1 rec a gray cloak, seen on some wild moor, torn by th drenched in the rain, afterwards becomes an obert of to him: even the lichens on the rock have a life and be thoughts. He has described all these objects in a wiỷ an intensity of feeling that no one else had done before him,

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has given a new view or aspect of nature. He is in this sense the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere. The vulgar do not read them, the learned, who see all things through books, do not understand them, the great despise, the fashionable may ridicule them; but the author has created himself an interest in the heart of the retired and lonely student of nature, which can never die. Persons of this class will still continue to feel what he has felt he has expressed what they might in vain wish to express, except with glistening eye and faltering tongue! There is a lofty philosophic tone, a thoughtful humanity, infused into his pastoral vein. Remote from the passions and events of the great world, he has communicated interest and dignity to the primal movements of the heart of man, and ingrafted his own conscious reflections on the casual thoughts of hinds and shepherds. Nursed amidst the grandeur of mountain scenery, he has stooped to have a nearer view of the daisy under his feet, or plucked a branch of white-thorn from the spray but in describing it, his mind seems imbued with the majesty and solemnity of the objects around him-the tall rock lifts its head in the erectness of his spirit; the cataract roars in the sound of his verse; and in its din and mysterious meaning, the mists seem to gather in the hollows of Helvellyn, and the forked Skiddaw hovers in the distance. There is little mention of mountainous scenery in Mr. Wordsworth's poetry; but by internal evidence one might be almost sure that it was written in a mountainous country, from its bareness, its simplicity, its loftiness and its depth!

His later philosophic productions have a somewhat different character. They are a departure from, a dereliction of his first principles. They are classical and courtly. They are polished in style, without being gaudy; dignified in subject without affectation. They seem to have been composed not in a cottage at Grasmere, but among the half-inspired groves and stately recollections of Cole-Orton. We might allude in particular, for examples of what we mean, to the lines on a Picture by Claude Lorraine, and to the exquisite poem, entitled Laodamia. The last of these breathes the pure spirit of the finest fragments of antiquity

-the sweetness, the gravity, the strength, the beauty and hea guor of death

"Calm contemplation and majestic pains. *

Its glossy brilliancy arises from the perfection of the fir like that of careful sculpture, not from gaudy colouring-esture of the thoughts has the smoothness and solidity of matta. It is a poem that might be read aloud in Elysium, and the 16of departed heroes and sages would gather round to listen to Mr. Wordsworth's philosophic poetry, with a less glow ng araw and less tumult in the veins than Lord Byron's on similar sions, bends a calmer and keener eye on mortality; the imapreens if less vivid, is more pleasing and permanent; and we cons (perhaps it is a want of taste and proper feeling) that there we lines and poems of our author's that we think of ten times fe ema that we recur to any of Lord Byron's. Or if there are any of de latter's writings, that we can dwell upon in the same way, that lasting and heart-felt sentiments, it is when laying aside he wai pomp and pretension, he descends with Mr. Wordsworth to the common ground of a disinterested humanity. It may be connar as characteristic of our poet's writings, that they either make no impression on the mind at all, seem mere nonsense verses of s they leave a mark behind them that never wears out. Thy.

"Fall blunted from the indurated breast”—

without any perceptible result, or they absorb it like a passun To one class of readers he appears sublime, to another (and fear the largest) ridiculous. He has probably realised Makes wish,-" and fit audience found, though few" but we suspect be is not reconciled to the alternative. There are delightful pamarm in the EXCURSION, both of natural description and of insp.red reflection (passages of the latter kind that in the sound of the that, and of the swelling language resemble heavenly sympber mournful requiems over the grave of human hopes ) bat add, in justice and in sincerity, that we think it impossible this work should ever become popular, even in the saine degree

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