unimaginative age. In the same volume the character of the times is described in a passage, which reminds us of the statesmanly philosophy of Burke:

"Men have been pressing forward, for some time, in a path which has betrayed by its fruitfulness; furnishing them constant employment for picking up things about their feet, when thoughts were perishing in their minds. While mechanic arts, manufactures, agriculture, commerce, and all those products of knowledge which are confined to gross, definite, and tangible objects, have, with the aid of experimental philosophy, been every day putting on more brilliant colors; the splendor of imagination has been fading. Sensibility, which was formerly a generous nursling of rude nature, has been chased from its ancient range in the wide domain of patriotism and religion, with the weapons of derision by a shadow calling itself good sense: calculations of presumptuous expediency-groping its way among partial and temporary consequences - have been substituted for the dictates of paramount and infallible conscience, the supreme embracer of consequences: lifeless and circumspect decencies have banished the graceful negligence and unsuspicious dignity of virtue."

But it may be asked whether, when poetry assumes to minister to this sorrow of humanity—the degeneracy of our desires to unworthy objects, it is not trespassing on the province of religion. O no! it is in meek attendance in the temple of faith. The highest poetry must be sacred, in the most comprehensive sense. It is in humble alliance for the rescue of exposed humanity. Poetry, for its own glory and the safety of its disciples, preserves at once its affinity and subordination to religion, and it is important, distinctly to appreciate this relation of poetry, to guard on the one hand against its fanatical rejection, and on the other, against its superstitious elevation.

"Faith," says Wordsworth, in the 'Supplement to the Preface,' "was given to man that his affections, detached from the treasures of time, might be inclined to settle upon those of eternity: the elevation of his nature, which this habit produces on earth, being to him a presumptive evidence of a future state of existence; and giving him a title to partake its holiness. The religious man values what he sees chiefly as an 'imperfect shadowing forth' of what he is incapable of seeing. The concerns of religion refer to indefinite objects, and are too weighty for the mind to support them without relieving itself by resting a great part of the burthen upon words and symbols. The commerce between Man and his Maker cannot be carried on but by a process where much is represented in little, and the Infinite Being accommodates himself to a finite ca

pacity. In all this may be perceived the affinity between religion and poetry; between religion-making up the deficiencies of reason by faith; and poetry-passionate for the instruction of reason; between religion whose element is infinitude, and whose ultimate trust is the supreme of things, submitting herself to circumscription, and reconciled to substitutions; and poetry-ethereal and transcendent, yet incapable to sustain her existence without sensuous incarnation."

In illustrating this examination of Wordsworth's poetry by the usual process of disjoined quotation, the difficulty of selecting from so rich a collection of miscellaneous pieces, and from an elaborate poem like the Excursion, would be greatly increased, were it not for the harmony of purpose which pervades them. This is noticed in the preface of the Excursion, which, it will be recollected, is but part of an unpublished "philosophical poem, containing views of man, nature, and society, to be entitled The Recluse ;'" we are also informed of the existence of another unpublished poem of an autobiographical character, on the growth of an individual mind. Of these it is remarked, "the two works have the same kind of relation to each other, if the author may so express himself, as the ante-chapel has to the body of a gothic church, and that the minor pieces have such connexion with the main work as may give them claim to be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in those edifices." The arrangement of the poems "apparently miscellaneous," is described in the general preface, as designed to "serve as a commentary directing the attention of a reflective reader to the poet's purposes, both particular and general." Thus divided into several classes, according to the powers of mind predominant in them to the forms given to them or to their subjects and according to an order of time, commencing with childhood and closing with old age, death, and immortality, the smaller poems are to be "regarded under a twofold view; as composing an entire work in themselves, and as adjuncts to the philosophical poem, 'The Recluse." These considerations may aid us in our present illustrations.

The extract from "The Recluse" introduced in the preface to "The Excursion," is, perhaps, the fullest exposition of the general argument of Wordsworth's poetry. Commending it entire to a thoughtful perusal, we must content ourselves with but a fragment:

- Beauty - a Living Presence of the earth, Surpassing the most fair ideal Forms

Which craft of delicate Spirits hath composed
From earth's materials - - waits upon my steps;
Pitches her tents before me as I move,

An hourly neighbor. Paradise, and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields-like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic Main-why should they be
A history only of departed things,

Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.
-I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
Of this great consummation: and, by words
Which speak of nothing more than what we are,
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
To noble raptures; while my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted: and how exquisitely, too -
Theme this, but little heard of, among men
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation, (by no lower name

-

Can it be called,) which they with blended might
Accomplish this is our high argument.
-Such grateful haunts foregoing, if I oft
Must turn elsewhere — to travel near the tribes
And fellowships of men, and see ill sights
Of madding passions mutually inflamed;
Must hear Humanity in fields and groves
Pipe solitary anguish; or must hang
Brooding above the fierce confederate storm
Of sorrow, barricaded evermore
Within the walls of cities -

may

these sounds

Have their authentic comment; that even these

Hearing, I be not downcast or forlorn!
Descend, prophetic Spirit! that inspir'st
The human Soul of universal earth,
Dreaming on things to come; and dost
A metropolitan Temple in the hearts
Of mighty Poets; upon me bestow
A gift of genuine insight; that my Song

possess

With star-like virtue in its place may shine,
Shedding benignant influence, and secure
Itself, from all malevolent effect

Of those mutations that extend their sway,
Throughout the nether sphere!"

There need be no surprise, that by poetry, of which the argument is at once so exalted and so delicate, popular favor should be slowly won. Greater far would the marvel be if it had earned a quick sympathy; for, when a poet is charged with the duty of enlarging the sphere of sensibility, it is necessarily part of his labor to create the very taste by which he is to be enjoyed. How could it be otherwise, when old poetic feeling had been blunted by an artificial school of poetry, and when the best impulses of the soul were checked by a cold philosophy, whose glory-whether in religion, or government, or letterswas a heartless skepticism. Besides, a taste for poetry of a high order is not that passive thing it is often taken for. The reader's spirit must be not sympathetic only, but co-active :- it must possess an imagination of its own and kindred to the master's mightier faculty. "How," exclaims Coleridge, "shall he fully enjoy Wordsworth, who has never meditated on the truths which Wordsworth has wedded to immortal verse ?" It is such causes rather than temporary and local agencies, which, after all, explain the world's slow reception of his poetry. Wordsworth's genius first opened on the sight with the meekness of an unexpected moon - at one moment, the crescent light hid by some interposing evening cloud; at another, itself still concealed, giving to the cloud "a silver lining" that was not so before; again, piercing it with a ray no greater than a star; at length, suffusing it with a radiance with which the veil passes away into air, and now

"In full-orb'd glory yonder moon divine
Rolls through the dark blue depths.

Beneath her steady ray

The desert circle spreads,

Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky."- Thalaba.

It is every way characteristic of Wordsworth, that, with a fearless fidelity to his own impulses, he devotes his first pages to a class of poems calculated to bring him in conflict with intellectual pride, and with the fastidiousness of an artificial taste. The "Poems referring to the period of Childhood" form the humble and narrow entrance, as if inviting the approach of only simpli

city and lowliness of spirit. The poet's illustration of the Gothic church, quoted above, admits of another application than to the mere relation between his respective poems. We know of no fitter type of the complete structure of Wordsworth's poetry than some illustrious model of Gothic architecture. The analogy is brought strongly to our thoughts, when we trace in the humble introductory pieces a similitude to the low gateway common to the proudest Abbey or Cathedral; the lofty pile, not rising like a Greek temple on its aspiring flight of steps, but resting on the simple level of the soft earth. Proud thoughts must bow down at the very threshold. Passing into the inner region the student may feel, that, in the poet's solemn musings on the mind of man - his lofty contemplations of nature, with a fidelity to her smallest forms-the stories of saints and good men, glowing with the tints of his imagination-the tributes of private grief- the memorials of deeds famed in his country's annals and, in the range of his sublime aspirations, tending to thoughts of eternity and meditations of prayer and faith, there is no capricious likeness to the high embowed roof- the dim aisles all that is vast with a prodigality of delicate forms-the monumental effigies -the colored rays from the "storied windows" and the aw ful perspective of the nave, leading up to the light that breaks in at the East above the altar. There is in Wordsworth's poetry the Gothic harmony of all that is grand with all that is minute but not mean; for, both the architect and the poet work not servilely but congenially with nature, as her hand moulds not less the mountain's bulk, than the fine tracery of each leaf that waves above it. Not only at the entrance and in the interior is this similitude ; — when the visitant comes forth in the open air, still feeling that his spirit, at first humbled, had been expanded into a sense of infinitude, he may look back from the thronged street and amid the intrusion of trivial cares, and behold the edifice in its outward glory-pinnacle and spire high reaching to the sky. Thus, the heart familiarized with the spirit of Wordsworth's poetry, feels its deep communion not only in the meditations it awakens, but bears forth into the outer world its humanizing influences a light upon our daily path. It is a question of an accomplished and philosophic writer-Julius Hare: "Do you not, since you have read Wordsworth, feel a fresh and more thoughtful delight whenever you hear a cuckoo, whenever you see a daisy, whenever you play with a child ?"—(Guesses at Truth.') When we consider Wordsworth's strenuous and constant efforts for the spiritual elevation of mankind his solici