remains untouched by them. We feel that this is not poetry; we see that every word is chosen with scientific precision, that each has its natural and downright signification, that nothing more is suggested than what is actually expressed; we know that the writer very calmly elaborated both the idea and the language in his own warm study, and at his own comfortable desk --and we feel that this is not poetry. Yet who can doubt but that the same thought, under Shakspeare's touch, would have started into Promethean life and energy? Thus it appears that Poetry has a language of her own. To identify her with Prose, is a degradation of her lofty lineage. Hers is a vagabond exile," &c. Here even the very use of the common word further is poetical, as closing up the sense to the mind more perfectly than the word more, and substituting an adverb for an accusative noun, in the vehemence with which passion wrests language to her own purposes. "Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian death," is an instance of the mode in which passion, acting upon imagination, condenses many ideas, and conveys them all to the hearer's mind at once. To give every word in this line its proper meaning in prose, we must say, "Let them condemn me to die, by being cast down the steep Tarpeian rock;" but in the rapidity of passion, not only judgment is pronounced, but death-higher mode of speech, and for higher that death is not slowly produced by the fall from the steep Tarpeian rock, but is itself steep; and although a steep death is an unintelligible expression, yet by the divine clearness with which imagination, in her lofty moods, sees every thing at a glance, she succeeds in stamping her whole meaning upon the mind of another, by the general structure of the sentence.-We will now proceed to the passage from Gibbon's Decline of the Roman Empire: "The apparent magnitude of an ob ject is enlarged by an unequal comparison, as the ruins of Palmyra derive a casual splendour from the nakedness of the surrounding desert." Here the thought is poetical, and the words in which it is dressed are far longer, and more sounding, than the words of the passage just quoted from Shakspeare, (which indeed almost consists of monosyllables,) yet, from not being used in an imaginative manner, they produce but a cold effect upon the mind: the reason is gratified, but the heart purposes. Poetry can speak what Prose hath no voice to utter. She is (as Wordsworth himself elsewhere most beautifully says) "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge-the impassioned expression, which is in the countenance of all science." Is it not a contradiction thus to describe her, yet deny that she speaks a language accordant with her more subtle essence, and more impassioned energy? By stripping her of all essential characteristics, Wordsworth would leave her nothing but the jingling of her bells, whereby she might be distinguished from Prose. And this, so far from being the least distinction, is no distinction at all. If neither the cast of the thoughts nor the structure of the language be poetical, in a composition, it is not metrical arrangement which will constitute poetry. Are the following lines, written by Wordsworth, (for instance) to be called poetry because they are printed in ten syllables? ""Tis nothing more Than the rude embryo of a little dome, Or pleasure-house, once destined to be built Among the birch-trees of this rocky isle. But, as it chanced, Sir William having learn'd That from the shore a full-grown man might wade, And make himself a freeman of this spot At any hour he chose; the knight forthwith Desisted, and the quarry and the mound Are monuments of his unfinish'd task." Of this we may indeed say, with rather more truth than of Gray's sonnet, that "it will easily be perceived" "the language of these lines does in no respect differ from that of prose," whether of good prose I leave it to the reader's judgment to decide. The only poetical mode of expression to be found in them is, "made himself a freeman of the spot," which again exemplifies what I said above respecting the imaginative use of language. I would conclude this part of my subject, by asking Mr Wordsworth how it is (if the language of prose and poetry be the same) that the language of his own prose and of his own poetry are so very different? how it happens that, professing to speak the real language of men in the latter, he speaks the language (it may be) of Gods in the former? For example, "Religionwhose 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!" To sum up all; it appears to me that Wordsworth has confounded poetic diction as it is called, with poetic diction as it really is. He has attacked a poetic diction founded on a mechanical abuse of language. I wish to uphold a poetic diction founded on the imaginative use of language-a poetic diction that depends not on the shifting taste of different eras, or on trifling varieties of costume, but which is immovably fixed on the one grand and unalterable basis- -a poetic diction, which is the country's language of all true poets, (including Wordsworth himself, when he forgets his theory,) however their different provinces may produce varieties of dialect. Thus, in spite of Wordsworth's declaration to the contrary, I assert (and are not my asser tions as good as those of any other man?) that Poetry is a good and sound antithesis to Prose. 461 phatically, the finer spirit of all passion; for, while knowledge is only the light of poetry, passion is her life and vital air. A true poet can, by his verses, convey to the mind the general effect lity than an actual agent in the comof a battle with greater force and fidebat by a prose narration. The latter the former can hurry us into the midst can only place certain facts before us: of the smoke and carnage-make us dust of trampling thousands-and see the bayonets gleaming through the make us hear the dying groan-the shout of victory! The one convinces us that he himself was present at the scene; the other persuades us into a conviction that we ourselves are present there. The poet's description is actually more true than that of the soldier, because it is more graphical, and produces on the mind a greater witness mixes up too much of his own sense of reality; besides that the eyepersonal feeling-too much of the confusion of a mind in action-to convey another. But poetry is the very abtruth in the abstract to the mind of described, as eye-witnesses, the burnstract of truth. Many travellers have ing of Hindoo widows; yet, in some book of Eastern travels, I have seen Southey's poetical account of that reCurse of Kehama, as conveying the volting ceremony extracted from the best idea of its horrors. In the same poet gives to any human passion, is manner, the language which a true actually a more faithful transcript of that passion than the language of him who is under its actual pressure. In the first place, the great passions 66 -are liken'd best to floods and dumb-" By maintaining that poetry should speak the same language with prose, Wordsworth is driven to assert another paradox, very lowering to the divine powers of the former. He says: "Whatever portion of the faculty The shallow murmur, but the deep are (namely, of embodying the passions of man, and of expressing what he thinks and feels) we may suppose even the greatest poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt but that the language which it will suggest to him, must, in liveliness and truth, fall far short of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those passions, certain shadows of which the poet thus produces, or feels to be produced, in himself." To this I answer, that, if poetry be "the finer spirit of all knowledge," it is, more emVOL. XXVI. NO. CLVII. They have no language but looks and / tears. Therefore the poet's language is when they are strongly moved, but an not a transcription of what men say interpretation of what they feel./And herself; namely, that he can at once the poet has this advantage over nature depict her internal promptings, and her external indications of passion. He can bring looks and tears before the eye. In his verses, men both weep and speak. In the next place, if great passions 2 G speak at all, they usually belie themselves by an inadequacy of utterance. The language of the poet is actually more genuine nature than that of the sufferer himself, because the former is the language of the heart, which the latter is not. How frequently, when a man has lost his wife or daughter, his condoling friends hear him repeat, "She was a good creature! No one knows what a loss I have had! No one can tell what I suffer!" And this is all he can say, for the anarchy of his thoughts is like a guard upon his lips. But the poet does know, and can tell what he suffers, and not only produces certain shadows" of his feelings, but the reality itself. And why? Because the poet is himself a man, and because, like other men, the poet has relations and friends who are subject to death, and he also has his causes of joy and sorrow; and if (as Wordsworth grants) a poet "is a man endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, than others; if he also possess a greater knowledge of human nature," why (even painting from himself) may he not give a more tender and enthusiastic language to joy or sorrow, a deeper insight into the core of the human heart, than other men who are mere sufferers? The poet is a man in real life, and a poet beside; and therefore he can feel not only as a man, but can, as a poet, give a more faithful utterance to what he feels. Who knows but that Shakspeare, in painting the jealousy of Othello, or the paternal anguish of Lear, was but giving a keener and more imaginative colouring to some passages of his own life? Who can tell but that Eve was only a sublimated Mrs Milton? For herein, also, the poet's more lively sensibility aids his delineation of strong passion, in that he feels small things more acutely than men of dull and sluggish imagination feel great ones, and that the very shadows of his mind are stronger than the realities of others. It is granted, that men, as they grow older, are less and less moved by any event or accident, and even the loss of a favourite grandson may less move the blunted sensibilities of a nonagenarian, than the loss of a pointer would have excited them when he was fifteen. Shall we say, then, that the language of such a man, under the pressure of any passion, is equal in energy to that which is uttered by a man in the prime of life, and under a similar pressure? But there is not a greater distance between the passions of the nonagenarian and those of the youth of fifteen, than there is between the poet's capacity of feeling and expression, and that of men, on whose hearts a natural want of suscep tibility has anticipated the slow work of time. I would recommend to my readers the perusal of a poem but little known, written by John Scott on the death of his son, as an illustration of what I have advanced. He will see in it an instance of the poetical temperament acted upon by suffering, and speaking with more force and truth than the language of suffering alone could exhibit. Again, if the language of the poet fall short of that which is uttered by men in real life under the pressure of passion, the short-hand writer, who takes down trials, and gives us verbatim the prison dialogues and last dying speeches of convicts, must bid fair to be a greater dramatist than Shakspeare or Ford. Away, then, with such timid restrictions of the poet's power! What boundary shall we place to it? It may be answered-Nature: But nature is boundless; and though, indeed, the poet feels that "there is no necessity to trick out or elevate her infinite wonders; yet, with a soul as boundless as herself, he does not despair to depict them faithfully-aye, or even to transcend what he beholds by the divine faculty with which he pierces things invisible. His muse, indeed, sheds "natural and human tears;" but what forbids that she should not also drop tears "such as angels weep?" Holding such opinions as these, which I have endeavoured to controvert, Wordsworth seems to surmise, that persons may think it a little strange that he should take the trouble to write in verse; and he proceeds to give a most extraordinary reason t for so doing. His meaning when extracted from a heap of words is, that metre, being "something to which the mind has been accustomed in various moods," has " great efficacy” in mitigating any excitement of too strong a kind, which an affecting subject might produce. One should have thought, that with all the precautions which Wordsworth has taken to keep his writings clear of all "gross and violent stimulus," with his choice of "low and rustic" subjects, and adherence to "the real language of men," there could be no "danger that the excitement should be carried beyond its proper bounds." However, he is determined to make all sure, and to lull his reader's mind by sweet metrical sounds as well as by the gentle flow of his ideas. If Wordsworth bounded himself to the assertion, that a tinkling ballad rhyme deducts from the horror of a tragical tale, and that a murder sung about the streetsas how a young woman poisoned her father and mother all for love of a young man-is a very different thing to a real substantial newspaper detail of the same, he might be pronounced in the right; but when he asserts that "Shakspeare's writings never act up on us, as pathetic, beyond the bounds of pleasure," and attributes this mainly to "impulses of pleasurable surprise from the metrical arrangement," he appears to go rather beyond the mark. Is it true, that Shakspeare's writings never act upon us, as pathetic, beyond the bounds of pleasure? The hysterical shrieks of women, and the wry faces of men trying to swallow their tears at a theatrical representation of one of Shakspeare's tragedies, will prove the contrary. Does the circumstance of the performance being spoken in blank verse at all mitigate its exciting effect upon the mind? Is any auditor conscious that it is in blank verse at all? But perhaps Wordsworth will say that he is only speaking of a perusal of Shakspeare. If so, I allow that Shakspeare's writings when read seldom act upon us, as pathetic, beyond the bounds of pleasure; but this overbalance of pleasure, I conceive, is common to all good works of fiction, whether in prose or verse-simply because they are works of fiction, and because the mind delights in seeing nature skilfully imi tated or ennobled, whether by the poetic art of Shakspeare, or the imaginative pencil of Raphael. To see a kettle (except on the hob ready for tea) imparts no pleasure; to see a ghost would give us any thing but delight; yet when we behold a kettle so well painted as to mock reality, or when we look at one of Fuseli's spectres, we are pleased, in the one case, to see the perfection of imitative art, in the other, the triumph of imagination. Wordsworth appeals to his reader's own experience" as to whether" the distressful parts of Clarissa Harlowe❞ do not give more pain than the most pathetic scenes of Shakspeare. The reader's experience may not always tally with Mr Words worth's. I for one confess, that the self-murder of Othello, uncheered by one ray of comfort here, or hope hereafter, (notwithstanding the metre,) is more painful to my feelings than the deathbed of the injured Clarissa, sinned against but not sinning, and half in Heaven before she has quitted earth; and to the "re-perusal" of this, I can safely say, that I never came "with reluctance." But so far from metre having a general tendency to "temper and restrain" our feelings-so far from the mind having been accustomed to it" in a less excited state," I conceive that the very sound of verse is connected in most minds with the idea of something moving or elevating. I remember once, when I had taken shelter in a poor woman's cottage from a pelting and persevering storm, I began to read aloud to a companion who was with me, from a pocket volume of Hudibras. To my surprise, I was shortly interrupted by the sobs of the old lady, who had buried her face in her apron. I asked her what was the matter? "Oh, sir," she replied, "them verses do sound so affecting!" Moreover, are not poets allowed to possess a greater necromancy in raising human passions than authors in any other kind; and do not poets usually write in metre of some sort ? THE STATE AND PROSPECTS OF THE COUNTRY. IN no period within our recollection, has the political state of the country been fraught with more absorbing interest, and worthy of more deep at tention, than at the present moment. It is true, that when threatened with invasion from abroad, or alarmed by the menacing attitude of hungry and discontented crowds in the manufacturing districts at home, the present and imminent danger has more visibly affected the senses, and the kingdom has been struck with a more live ly emotion of immediate peril; but even then, considerate men knew that the evil was but temporary, that the phrase of the "existence of the nation" being in danger, was no more than a figure of speech, and that, how ever the tempest might rage for a time, albeit with some immediate loss and harm, yet calm weather would at no distant period come again, when we might repair that which was shattered, and rebuild that which was thrown down. pect of our condition, which, if not altered by a timely exertion of the intellectual energy, and good English spirit, which yet linger among us, will grow worse, until at length, in the weakness and discontent of our old age, some younger and more vigorous power will bear down upon us, and the greatness of England be no more. In the present time, let us go where we will, in any place from Caithness to Cornwall, wherever men speak seriously respecting their own condition, and that of those around them, there seems to be an unanimous consent to this proposition," that there is a necessity for some great change." Amongst the varieties of men, there are, of course, various opinions as to the means by which the change is to be effected: One would have the greater circulation of the Bible, another that of foreign corn; this man would prohibit the importation of foreign goods, that the exportation of British maBut now, reflecting men feel that, chinery-but one and all say, that with less outward sign, there is much" something must be done," not, as more inward danger. The vessel of in former times, that things may go the state floats, indeed, upon a calmer on better, but that things may go sea, but seems, as it were, to rot by on" at all. At former periods, disreason of the very stillness; and the tress was either local, or it affected strength, the energy, the stout heart, only some particular class of the peoand the lively activity of Great Bri- ple; but now, almost all the common tain, are dying away. There is no people, those who used to live, and great interest of the country flourish- eat and drink" till they were satising, except that of the people whose fied," through the labour of their own revenues are provided out of what is hands, are not only straitened in their wrung from the unwilling hands of means, but actually pinched for the all the rest; the fundholders alone en- commonest support, and existing in joy a present prosperity, and that only the gloomy and dangerous tranquilbecause they must have their bond" lity of despair. At other times, if the as long as there is any thing to pay manufacturers were distressed, the them with. more flourishing condition of the agricultural districts afforded them a refuge; or, if unfruitful seasons and high rents pressed hard upon the cultivators of the soil, there was some temptation to join the busy crowds who lived by manufactures and commerce; but now, both agricultural and manufacturing districts are depressed, not yet to utter starvation, but to gloomy and universal penury. The cheerful, comfortable cottage of the labourer is now become a thing of memory, or of imagination; the crowded dwelling places of the ma 66 Let us not, however, be misunderstood: We do not mean to say any thing so extravagant, as that the power and glory of this great country is about to perish suddenly, and for ever; for we know, that to destroy so mighty a structure as the British empire presents, is no work of a day or year, however violent the decay that eats into its walls and pillars; but, after seriously and attentively considering the state of things around us, we own that we are" oppressed with no dis honourable melancholy" at the pros |