tude for the humble ones forgotten in the world's account — his care for the least element of suffering humanity—his imaginative following of an Apostle's lessons in the primal duties of faith, and hope, and love, we feel that, not profanely, we may apply to his poetry the vision of one of his own sublime sonnets:

"In my mind's eye a Temple, like a cloud
Slowly surmounting some invidious hill,

Rose out of darkness: the bright Work stood still;
And might of its own beauty have been proud,
But it was fashioned and to God was vowed

By Virtues that diffused, in every part,

Spirit divine through forms of human art:

Faith had her arch - her arch, when winds blow loud,
Into the consciousness of safety thrilled;

And Love her towers of dread foundation laid
Under the grave of things; Hope had her spire
Star-high, and pointing still to something higher;
Trembling I gazed, but heard a voice-it said,
'Hell-gates are powerless phantoms when we build.'”

His reverential affection for childhood is an element of Wordsworth's poetry. Memory and imagination are sent to seek for the idea of infancy- the faded vision of the innocence and natural blessedness of the morn of life. It is a delight of the poet's to watch the early portion of existence in all its forms. Not content with the rude divisions into infancy and childhood and boyhood, he marks it into more minute epochs: -the babe in "new-born helplessness;"the "frail and feeble monthling," on whose face

"Smiles are beginning, like the beams of dawn

To shoot and circulate; smiles have there been seen;
Tranquil assurances that Heaven supports

The feeble motions of its life, and cheers

Its loneliness:"

or the "happy creature" of three years old: or in the exquisite group of the "Jewish Family,"

"The grace of parting Infancy

By blushes yet untamed;

Age faithful to the mother's knee,
Nor of her arms ashamed :"

or in the story of "Michael," the growth of his only childthe child of his old age, the gift that "brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts"-first rocked by the shepherd "as

with a woman's gentle hand" and "uttering, without words, a natural tune;"-then, "the boy's attire not yet put on," a playmate at his busy father's side, who bestowed "looks of fond correction and reproof"

"Upon the child, if he disturbed the sheep

By catching at their legs, or with his shouts

Scared them, while they lay still beneath the shears:"

then at five years old, equipped with a little shepherd's staff, and placed

"At gape or gap, to stem or turn the flock;
And, to his office prematurely called,
There stood the urchin, as you will divine,
Something between a hinderance and a help;
And for this cause not always, I believe,
Receiving from his father hire of praise;
Though nought was left undone which staff, or voice,
Or looks, or threatening gestures, could perform :"

then with ten years' strength "to stand against the mountain blasts," and at last when the stripling goes from his father's roof, he is described as putting on "a bold face," when he reaches the public way.

But not only with such familiar ways of childhood does Wordsworth delight to dwell. So deep is his apprehension of the holiliness of the soul yet unspotted by the world, that even in his high-wrought musings upon nature, he finds companionship in the heedless little one, that sports beside him:

"Air sleeps

from strife or stir the clouds are free; The holy time is quiet as a Nun

Breathless with adoration; the broad sun

Is sinking down in its tranquillity;

The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea :
But list! the mighty Being is awake,

And doth with his eternal motion make

A sound like thunder

everlastingly.

Dear Child! dear happy Girl! if thou appear
Heedless untouched with awe or serious thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine :

Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year;
And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not."

Again the solemn sense of childhood illuminates some simple recollection, and, in the sonnet entitled "Catechising," is ex

pressed not less in the exquisite description of the little group, than in the pathetic remembrance of a mother's love:

"From Little down to Least, in due degree,
Around the Pastor, each in new-wrought vest,
Each with a vernal posy at his breast,
We stood, a trembling, earnest company!
With low soft murmur, like a distant bee,
Some spake, by thought-perplexing fears betrayed:
And some a bold unerring answer made:
How fluttered then thy anxious heart for me,
Beloved Mother! Thou whose happy hand
Had bound the flowers I wore, with faithful tie;
Sweet flowers! at whose inaudible command
Her countenance, phantom-like, doth re-appear:
O lost too early for the frequent tear,

And ill requited by the heartfelt sigh!"

To what, it may be asked, does this reverence for childhood tend-what is the impulse and the motive of the poet in carrying the heart back into the shadowy region of its early consciousness? The principle to which he appeals is universal in mankind, but it is not to be explained by superficial reasons. A deeper truth is needed to expound the elements of the human soul, and it is given when he moralizes the glowing description of the two Boys, in the latter books of the Excursion:

"we live by hope

And by desire; we see by the glad light
And breathe the sweet air of futurity;
And so we live, or else we have no life.

To-morrow-nay, perchance this very hour,
(For every moment has its own to-morrow!)

Those blooming Boys, whose hearts are almost sick
With present triumph, will be sure to find
A field before them freshened with the dew

Of other expectations ;· in which course
Their happy year spins round. The youth obeys
A like glad impulse; and so moves the man,
'Mid all his apprehensions, cares, and fears,
Or so he ought to move. Ah! why in age
Do we revert so fondly to the walks

Of Childhood but that there the Soul discerns
The dear memorial footsteps unimpaired

Of her own native vigor; thence can hear
Reverberations; and a choral song
Commingling with the incense that ascends

1

Undaunted, toward the imperishable heavens,
From her own lonely altar?"

When imagination thus lights up these sublime visions of childhood and infancy, what wisdom, what moral strength are we to gather-or are they to pass away as profitless as dreams? The answer is this:- the lesson that teaches how holy a thing, even with all its frailty, the heart is, before worldly passions throng to take possession of it, is in itself persuasive to aspirations after a renewed innocence and simple feelings. The consciousness or the recollection of a better nature, call it which you may, and dim and shadowy though it be, is precious, because God in mercy has not divorced the soul of man from hope and the joy inspired by the mere sense of the good and the pure and the beautiful. That sense is strengthened by these imaginative revelations of infancy, reflecting promises of a redeemed nature, which in themselves are often feebly apprehended; and thus, to apply to this subservience of imagination to revelation one of Wordsworth's beautiful images, we may behold the

uncertain heaven received

Into the bosom of the steady lake."

Not only assurances of a better nature are gained; these imaginative "recollections of early childhood" expand into "intimations of immortality" in the lofty ode closing the miscellaneous poems. The imagination fashions the memory of "delight and liberty, the simple creed of childhood," into the idea of a pre-existent state-a mode of symbolizing the eternal and the idealand by a mighty grasp the past and the future are brought together as fragments of eternity, and from the memory of our inmost being in early life, there springs up an intimation of our immortality:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home;

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.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,

The homely Nurse does all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,

And that imperial palace whence he came."

We know of no mightier effort of poetic genius, than the immortal endowment of the poet's spirit thus struggling with its earthly freight "custom, time, and domineering faculties of sense, and we feel that the power is victorious, when he exultingly tells

us,

"The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction :

for those first affections

Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor Man nor Boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence in a season of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,

Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the Children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."

These strains belong to the very highest order of imagination.

They may, to some, appear flighty, wild, and extravagant - to