can fallings from us' mean, I wonder?" he dolefully sighed out, as if he despaired of ever getting beyond his noviciate. The previous annotator was again forced to unravel the mystic knot. "The poet (he said) is still speaking of the dim recollections, which he supposes us to retain in childhood, of our former state, and calls them obstinate questionings,' that ever recur to the mind with the enquiry, Whence came we? -transitory gleams of our glorious pre-existence, that fall away' and vanish' from before us almost as soon as they appear— misgivings' that we are not as we have been-a feeling that we have scarcely as yet realised our present state of being to ourselves." The Neophyte thanked the expositor, but still sighed; "for," said he, "when I think of my childhood, I have only visions of traps, and balls, and whippings. I never remember being haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind.' To be sure, I did ask a great many questions, and was tolerably obstinate, but I fear these are not the 'obstinate questionings,' of which Mr Wordsworth speaks." The reader proceeded:

"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."

"Well!" exclaimed a sort of neutral personage, a very good, but somewhat heavy man-" these lines are, I must say, very grand, and-(he paused)-very sublime! I like them better than all the rest."-" Are you quite certain that you understand them?" asked the laughing sceptic. "To be sure!" answered the previous speaker. "Have I not often put a conch shell to my ear, and heard the roaring of the sea as plainly as if I were at Brighton, though I really was in London?" A burst of laughter from the querist followed the reply, and became infectious to many of the party. When order was restored, the other sceptic, who had maintained his gravity throughout, remarked that he thought the neutral's explanation of the idea raised in his mind by the poet's words was

interesting, inasmuch as it proved that, very frequently, the pleasure we derive from poetry consists in the colouring which our own minds impart to an author's meaning; and that words, taken in the aggregate, often stamp on the fancy an image, which, when they are analysed, is found to be scarcely analogous to their real signification. Thus, also, one line in a poem may excite a series of delightful thoughts, which the next line may destroy by giving too definite a form to the unfinished sketch whereon Imagination had delighted to exercise her scope and power. "To give an instance of this," he continued, "I remember opening, for the first time, Lord Byron's third canto of Childe Harold, at the notes, and reading this line placed at the end of one of them, 'The sky is changed; and such a change! -oh Night!'

This simple ejaculation Oh night!" delightful associations, and involuntouched upon a thousand vague and tarily I anticipated to myself, in a dim kind of way, the grandeur that was to follow. But, when I turned to the page whence the line was taken, and read,

'Oh night,

And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,

Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light Of a dark eye in woman,'

the whole tone of my feelings seemed lowered, and the same sort of jarring sensation was produced in my spiritual man, as that which our bodily organs experience, when,walking in the dark, we put out one foot with the notion that a deep step is below it, and find ourselves still on plain ground. This power of association -this imperfection of language as a vehicle of thought-this omnipotence of mind over matter, should make us less surprised that ideas, which appear original and splendid to one person, should to another seem trite and poor. That which Shakspeare affirms of a jest, is equally true with regard to serious matters.

"Their propriety lies in the ear of him that hears them. Wordsworth, if I mistake not, himself acknowledges, that, in some instances, 'feelings even of the ludicrous may be given to his readers by expressions

which appeared to him tender and pathetic; but he does not, as in fairness he should have done, observe, on the other hand, that ideas and expressions which he scarcely meant to be other than laughable, or at least subordinate, may excite in his admirers very tender or noble feelings. He tells us, (for I have accurately read his own defence of his system,) the reader ought never to forget that he is himself exposed to the same errors as the poet, and perhaps in a much greater degree;' but, I confess, I am of opinion, that in proportion as the author's feeling of his subject is more intense and more tinged with his own peculiar consciousness, in that proportion is he more liable to be mistaken in appreciating the originality and excelfence of his compositions. That which we feel vividly, we are apt to think we feel newly; and all that appears new to ourselves, we deem must be new to all the world. Every poet is, no doubt, original to himself, just as every retailer of Joe Miller is a wit in his own eyes, for no one knowingly relates a twice-told tale. Let a really original thought strike a reader ever so much, it can never have upon his mind the same full and fresh effect that it had on the writer's, when it first struck him ;and for this reason-a true poet can never express his whole meaning: there still remains behind that which passes utterance. Wordsworth, fond as he is of paradox, never vented a stranger than when he affirmed that the author is a more competent judge of his own works than the reader, because the latter is so much less interested in the subject.' The voice of ages,―the embodied spirit of human wisdom-to which Wordsworth declares his devout respect, his reverence, is due,'-has decreed that no man is a competent witness in his own cause; and for this manifest reason, that, as long as we are fallible human creatures, our self-partiality must, to a certain degree, throw dust in the eyes of the best of us. It is the looker-on who sees most of the game it is the cool, uninterested reader who can best detect an author's errors. Even though the former, as Wordsworth fears, may decide lightly and carelessly,' yet his very lightness and carelessness may

hit off a truer judgment than any to which the passionate earnestness of the poet can, in its over-zeal, attain. The fresh eye of a casual spectator can better decide upon a portrait's resemblance than the eye of the painter, who has so long pored over the canvass, as to have his very errors wrought into his visual perceptions with all the force of truth, and who has bestowed so much attention upon each separate part, that the result escapes him. It is this which renders it dangerous for an author to paint too exclusively, as Wordsworth has, from his own mind. Although it is not to be expected that a poet's ideas are to be recognised by all the world, (since he places himself in colloquy with the better part of his species,) yet it is a poet's wisdom, as well as his duty, to bring forward such thoughts and feelings as shall be held in common by a large body of mankind, otherwise he runs a risk of substituting the idiosyncrasies of an individual, for the grand features of human nature in general. The greater part of the Platonic ode, to which we have been listening, lies under this objection, namely, that it gives a private interpretation to a feeling almost universal-I mean the lingering regret with which we look back upon the period of childhood. Wordsworth calls the Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.' It should rather be entitled, • Intimations of Pre-Existence;' unless our author means to say that, having existed from all eternity, we are of an eternal and indestructible essence; or, in other words, that being incarnate portions of the Deity (as Plato supposes), we are as immortal as himself. But if the poet intends to affirm this, do you not perceive that he frustrates his own aim? For if we are of God's indivisible essence, and receive our separate consciousness from the wall of flesh which, at our birth, was raised between us and the Fount of Being, we must, on the dissolution of the body, on the casting down of the partition, be again merged in the simple and uncompounded Godhead, lose our individual consciousness, and, although in one sense immortal, yet, in another sense, become as though we had never been. If I were to speak as a critic, of the whole

poem, I should say that Wordsworth does not display in it any great clear ness of thought, or felicity of language. I grant that ideas, however well expressed, may possibly be so abstruse as to present difficulties to the ordinary reader; but the ode in question is not so much abstruse in idea as crabbed in expression. There appears to be a laborious toiling after originality, ending in a dismal want of harmony. With a dithyrambic irregularity of construction, which ought to have afforded the poet full scope for varied music, there exists a break-tooth ruggedness of versification-the general characteristic of Wordsworth's attempts at mysterious loftiness. Melodious as he is in his simpler movements, the jerks and jumbles of his more ambitious style are truly astonishing. His sublimity seems, like the burden of Sisyphus, pushed hard up hill, only to rumble back to the plain. In one instance we find a line of four syllables succeeded by a super-Alexandrine of fourteen.

'Thou Child of Joy, Shout round me-let me hear thy shouts,

thou happy Shepherd Boy!'

The rhymes are inartificial, and indeed incorrect, to a degree which would appear to indicate either a want of ear, or a deficiency of skill, in the poet; and which would for ever forbid the ode from ranking with the great lyrical models in our language. Witness

'Oh evil day, if I were sullen
While the earth herself is adorning
This sweet May-morning,
And the children are pulling,' &c.
And again,

Not in entire forgetfulness,'
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home.'

In a composition of high pretensions, such careless and brief numbers as these,

A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;'

'As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation ;' together with the perpetual introduction of the expletives did,' and 'do,' produce the same unhappy effect as a dancer in a minuet tumbling head over heels. But I have

too long suspended the conclusion of the Öde, which is beautiful, and which sufficiently attests the superiority of Wordsworth's natural, over his artificial style. What can be more noble than the following lines? They must find an echo in every human breast.

'What though the radiance, which was once so bright,

Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind,
In the primal sympathy,

Which having been must ever be,
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering,

In the faith, that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind.'

worthian," who would have thought "Well," exclaimed the Wordsknew Wordsworth by heart?"—“ Í that you, of all persons in the world, have derived as great pleasure," repart of his works, as I have received plied the sceptic, "from the best pain from the worst." The Ode was then finished without farther interruption, and the party dispersed; but not before the good dull neutral had petitioned for the loan of the book, that he might study at his leisure that sublime passage about "the mighty waters rolling evermore."

It may be expected that I should not pass by in silence the poem which some persons consider Wordsworth's best-the Excursion. It is certainly the most ambitious of his productions, and by its length seems to claim an importance, not possessed by his shorter pieces. But while I acknowledge that there are exquisitely beautiful passages in the Excursion (and perhaps none more so than that which the Edinburgh Review extracted for reprobation, beginning

effect, the pleasure of the ear is lost. The most fatal fault of the Excursion is, that it is too long. I do not mean long in respect to quantity, (for I have heard a longer sermon of fifteen minutes than one of fifty,) but long in respect to the quantity of idea spread over a surface of words. Every thing is long in it, the similes, the stories, the speeches, the words, the sentences (which are indeed of a breathless length),-and yet, awful to relate, it is only the third part" of a long and laborious work!"

But it may still be urged, by those who consider Wordsworth a poet of first-rate merit and originality, that the force of his genius has been demonstrated by its effects upon the taste and literature of the age. They may boast that he brought back the public mind from a love of false glare and glitter, to the simplicity, and truth of nature.

He himself says, after a retrospective view of different eras of literature, "It may be asked, where lies the particular relation of what has been said to these volumes? The question will be easily answered by the discerning reader, who is old enough to remember the taste that prevailed when some of these poems were first published, seventeen years ago, who has also observed to what degree the poetry of this island has since that period been coloured by them."

That the taste of the age, about the period when Wordsworth published his first poems, was far gone from nature, I allow. I grant that (to use Wordsworth's own words) "the invaluable works of our elder writers were driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse," and I honour the attempt to restore a healthier tone of feeling. Still, I cannot attribute the inevitable reaction, which took place at one period, to aught but the natural tendency of all extremes to produce reaction, and unfortunately again to verge in to extremes. Wordsworth himself I consider less a moulding spirit of the age, than a perverted production of it. He began to write at the era when men were wearied with perpetual stimulants, and disgusted with copies of copies ad infinitum. Thom

VOL. XXVI. NO. CLIX.

son, in his Seasons, had already dared to use nothing but a pencil and a pallet, and his own eyes, in delineating nature; Burns had presented her to the world in her sweetest, her freshest, her simplest attire: and Wordsworth went a step farther,he stripped her naked. Yet his followers have been few. The masterspirits of an age have always had their imitators, and have given somewhat of an abiding character to the literature of a whole century. But who has imitated Wordsworth? Where is the stamp and impress of his mind to be found in this generation? Simplicity has again lost her charms for the public taste. Nature, indeed, is still worshipped, but it is nature in frenzy and distortion. Alas! that evil should be so much more enduring and energetic than good! If Wordsworth cannot justly be ranked (as his worshippers rank him) the first Genius of the age, still, his lower station on the fair hill of Virtue is more enviable than that of others on the lightning-shattered pinnacle of Vice. And, if Wordsworth would be contented to occupy that more lovely station gracefully and meekly, there would be no dissentient voice to dispute his honours. But he has yet to learn the important lesson of remaining silent under evil report and good report. Why, if Wordsworth so implicitly believes in the justice of "Time the corrector, where our judgments err;" why, if he is so steadfastly assured that the " great spirit of human knowledge," ntoving on the wings of the past and the future, will assign him his proper station in the ranks of literature; why, if he is persuaded that his volumes, " both in words and things, will operate in their degree to extend the domain of sensibility, for the delight, the honour, and the benefit of human nature," why does he write so many pages to prove the truth of his convictions? Can he talk himself into immortality? Self-praise is, of all modes of self-aggrandisement, the least graceful, and the most impolitic. Why should we give a man that which he has already bestowed on himself? And, if we think that the self-eulogist claims too great a share of merit, human nature is up in arms to dispute with him every inch of 3 E