Of the whole species) to the external world Can it be called) which they with blended might -Such grateful haunts foregoing, if I oft Within the walls of cities; may these sounds And are we-the defenders of the faith-never to see more of the " Recluse" but the "Excursion"-the great Philosophical Poem, of the design and scope of which these matchless lines have been said by Wordsworth to be " a kind of Prospectus?" What right has the next age to exclude us from such a possession? What right has the poet? We men alive love and reverence him-what more would he desire? To us, his worshippers, that revelation is dueif withheld till we are dead, wrong will have been done us all; and perhaps the next age, blind as the past and far blinder than the present-for the wisdom of nations, though progressive, often pauses and sometimes recedes-may punish the poet by its ingratitude, denying-when he himself like us is dust-that homage to his genius which we have ever paid, in the spirit of knowledge and of truth. Well let us change our toneand dissert to the Neophytes. The spirit of this nation is characterised as "a practical spirit ;" and the temper which Wordsworth has desired to contribute his aid to counteract, is this practical spirit in excess. For it is to be considered that human life is divided to the two powers of speculation and action, and that to both these several destinations of man are appropriated great affections of mind and high faculties of execution;-with such allotment, that, while minds of great power have appeared among us as given up some to one destination, and some to the other, it is difficult for us to pronounce to which of them the chief admiration of men has been given; and we should rather say, that the admiration of their species has been divided to the two classes of minds which have been thus distinguished from one another. Now, it seems reasonable to suppose that, if, in the character of an individual, or in the character of a nation, these two spirits could be united in equal measure, and, at the same time, in great strength, that character would appear to us the very excellence of our nature; but if either should be in great excess, it is to be apprehended that in such a mind, and much more in such a nation, great defects, and of immediate consequence, would manifest themselves. It appears to be the opinion of Wordsworth that in our own country, in this age, at least, the spirit of action is carried to pernicious excess. The nature of the injurious consequences of each several excess may be best understood by considering a little more fully what is the essential nature of the spirit itself. The spirit of thought or speculation turns the mind inward upon itself; its essence is retirement from the external world, from all outward life, into the recess of its own thoughts, into the depth of its own being. The danger of such a spirit is the separation of the mind from those affections by which we are united to men. It is to be expected that the mind, forsaking the life of the world to retire to a life within itself, may become selfloving, and lose alike the use and the estimation of those principles of its nature by which it is drawn and constrained to make sacrifice of itself upon requisition of the welfare of others. It is also to be expected that in thus relinquishing the natural happiness of men, it will deceive itself, and, not finding a happiness commensurate with that to which it was born, will introduce principles of pain into its existence, and with them a disaffection to good. On the other hand, the spirit of action carries the mind to mix itself in the life of men, and to unite its own condition with theirs. And here there is a twofold danger. First, because that active intercourse with men must involve much intercourse of hostility; there is danger that the selfish principles of action will be brought out into predominant form, and acquire an unnatural sway over the mind; and in the second place, it must necessarily happen that this principle tending entirely to outward life and the external world, there will be an estranging of the mind from all the deep and awful feelings which lie, it may be said, in its own solitary depth, and by degrees an actual oblivion of all the knowledge which holds to those feelings. William Shakspeare! John How! Edward Young! William Wordsworth! all with us-in the spirit-in this Highland hut. It must be further on into the night than we had supposed-for the storm is utterly dead. We heard the wind long moaning-then sobbing-then sighing but now there is not a breath and the river has the whole glen entirely to itself-filling it with a loud but a placid voice. Let us go to the door and look at the night. What a starry host! The great golden moon, who plunged through the storm-why art thou absent from a calm like this? Yet the stars seem glad thou art not here to bedim their lustre ; and that planet is almost as splendid as thyself, burning apart, and were the rest obscured, sufficient softly to illume the skies. And 'tis a lovely glen-though without wood-here and there but a few trees "The grace of forest trees decayed And pastoral melancholy." The darkenings from the mountains show the knolls greener between-and which is the more peaceful, our heart knows not, the lights or the shadows. Peaceful, too, the mountains all awake in the beauty of midnight-but the clouds look as if they had taken up their rest in heaven, and, in companies, were asleep. A living calm not unpartaken by our grateful heart. Heaven's blessing be on this hut! Ere we stoop beneath the humble lintel, one other look at the sky. Emmanuel Kant, we recite our extemporaneous version of some of thy noblest words. "Two things fill my soul with everincreasing wonder and reverence, the more steadily and continually reflection is busied with them-the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within my own being. Both of these I must not merely seek and suspect as things veiled in darkness and beyond my sight; for I see them before me, and I knit them intimately with the consciousness of my own existence. The first begins from the space I occupy in the outward world of sense, and enlarges the connexion in which I stand into the Illimitable great, with worlds above worlds, in all the boundless terms of their periodic movements, their beginning, and their duration. The second begins from my invisible self-my individuality-and places me in a world which has real infinitude, but is investigable only to the understanding, and with which I recognise myself, not, as in the other case, in merely accidental, but in universal and necessary connexion. The first, as part of a countless multitude of worlds, annihilates my importance as an animal being, that must again give back the matter, out of which it was made, to the Planet-a mere point in the universe, after it has been a short time, no one knows how, provided with living power. The second, on the other hand, raises infinitely my worth, as an intelligence, through my individuality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animal nature, and even of the whole world of sense. For the mysterious destination of my existence, through this moral law, is not limited to the condition and bonds of this life, but stretches into the Infinite." Perhaps The Night Thoughts" are gloomy over-much-yet can we forget longer than a moment the awful lot of man on earth even in presence of that transcendent sky! A softened strain arises in our memory-but it, too, deepens into sadness-and, but for the Hope that keeps alive, would darken into despair. "Blest be that hand Divine that gently laid I see the circling haunt of noisy men, That impressive passage was awakened in our memory, perhaps, by one line, "Here, like a shepherd gazing from his hut." With the poem in our hand, and that heaven overhead, we have now in our heart a higher a holier strain; and we can recite it without book-as we have done a hundred times, when lonelier than we are now, walking by ourselves, at midnight, along the mountain ranges, and sometimes almost afraid to gaze on the spiritual counte nance of the boundless sky. "Oh, may I breathe no longer than I breathe Cut through the shades of hell, great Love! by thee, Where shall that praise begin which ne'er should end? How is night's sable mantle labour'd o'er ! What wisdom shines! What love! This midnight pomp, And bids fierce whirlwinds wheel his rapid car? "What mean these questions ?-Trembling I retract; My voice (if tuned); the nerve, that writes, sustains; "The nameless He, whose nod is nature's birth; Her dissolution his suspended smile! The great First-Last! pavilion'd high he sits His glory, to created glory, bright, As that to central horrors: he looks down On all that soars; and spans immensity. "Though night unnumber'd worlds unfolds to view, Boundless creation! what art thou? A beam, A mere effluvium of his majesty: And shall an atom of this atom world Mutter, in dust and sin, the theme of heaven? And ask their strain; they want it, more they want, What a spence! Of the threethe best is peat-then wood-then coal. Or what do you say to all three together? Extravagant-they devour one another-and though the light be like that of Greek fire, and the power like that of alpha intensive, they burn but to expire, and fiercely rush to ashes. What hands unseen have heaped our hearth? Brownie's. Banished from the low countries he took to the hills-and, insulted among the hills, sought refuge among the mountains. The race was never numerous, and now must be thin-for they are all male-and they are not immortal. Or have the fairies heard of our arrival? Titania is a tidy creature-and though that is not the name she bears in the Highlands, the same queen reigns over all the silent people, from the tomans of Lorn and Lochaber, to the sparry caves of the Orient. Or what if it were the blind man's Christian Flora-sitting up to serve the stranger that stole for a minute into the chamber-and having set all to rights, put by the auld ballad, lay down and fell asleep? Fortunate old man! in all our wanderings through the Highlands for sixty years (what is our age?), at tofall of the day we have always found ourselves at home. What though there were no human dwellings on that side of the Loch. We cared not for we could find a bedroom among the inclinations of any clachan of rocks, and of all curtains the wild briar forms itself into the most gracefully festoon'd draperies, letting in green light alone from the intersected stars. Many a cave we know of-cool by day and warm by night—where no man but ourselves ever slept, or ever will sleep-and sometimes on startling a doe at evening in a thicket, we have lain down in her lair, and in our slumbers heard the rain pattering on the roofing birk-tree, but felt not one drop on our face till at dawning we struck a shower of diamonds from its fragrant tresses. Strange sights and fair have we seen in such dormitories and heard have we, too, strange sounds and sweet; but the words we invented, to shadow out their looks and melodies, to you would have no significance and 'tis a language we speak but in dreams, and have taught to the creatures of our dreams. Have we been talking in our sleep? Nay writing-and writing legibly too which is more than we can do when awake-except to our good friends, Ballantyne's most cunning of compositors. Where is the Diamond? In our hand to be sure-and our thumb at a passage that proves Young to have been "a metaphysician and something more "--but your only Philosophers, after all, are the Poets. "Where thy true treasure?" Seek it in thyself, In being so descended, formed, endowed; In senses, which inherit earth, and heavens ; But for the magic organ's powerful charm, Man makes the matchless image man admires. Say, then, shall man, his thoughts all sent abroad, His admiration waste on objects round, When Heaven makes him the soul of all he sees? What wealth In fancy, fired to form a fairer scene Preserve its portrait, and report its fate! Of his idea, whose indulgent thought Long, long ere chaos teemed, planned human bliss. What wealth in souls that soar, dive, range around, Disdaining limit, or from place or time; And hear at once, in thought extensive, hear The Almighty Fiat, and the trumpet's sound! Bold, on creation's outside walk, and view Souls that can grasp whate'er the Almighty made, Perhaps the most delightful passage, in the most delightful of all poems, is that in which Cowper closes VOL. XLIV. NO. CCLXXVII. "The Task," with the picture of the Happy Man, 2 P |
