passed away without producing in Europe a single really important political event, or one great predominating mind. But these things were all destined to be changed in the changes of the great moral cycle, acting apparently through the proximate causes of various political convulsions. The obstinate tyranny of England forced the colonies in North America into a most just and holy rebellion. A contest of principles arose; it was imitated in Ireland, in the conflict which triumphed in the year 1782; and reproduced under a more formidable and astounding shape in the French Revolution. Wars became struggles of the intellects and passions of nations,-not merely of musquets and bills of exchange. Politics were changed into the opposition of great moral principles, instead of the frivolous frenzies of pamphleteers and secretaries of state, for the possession of a village or the inviolability of a sinecure. Men learned, in short, to think and to feel for themselves, instead of being talking or acting mechanism. The breath of universal existence seemed to become a subtle and mighty power, an impulse, and an inspiration. The hearts of men were enlarged by the reception of a vast hope; and their faculties impregnated by the glorious influences of the time. The great visible changes were, the awakening of nations, the overthrow of the mighty, the destruction of armies and empires, the reform of France into a republic, and of Italy into a people. But there were also the stranger, more fruitful, and more permanent changes, the regeneration of the German mind, and the second miraculous descent upon English literature of the purifying and kindling fire from heaven.

Of this imbreathed spirit, Wordsworth has in our country received more largely than any one now living; or rather bringing with him into manhood rarer faculties than the rest of his generation, he has also laboured more unceasingly and earnestly to make them instruments of

ideal art and moral truth, creators of the beautiful, and ministers to the good. For these objects he has ceased to draw from the shallow and muddy fountains of so much preceding and contemporary literature. Ile has sequestered himself from the customary interests and busy competitions of the society around him; and has endeavoured to see, in his own breast, and in the less artificial classes of mankind, the being of his species as it is, and as it might be, and in the outward world a treasury of symbols, in which we may find reflections of ourselves, and intimations of the purport of all existence. He has attempted to build up in this way his own nature; and to impress it upon his kind, by embodying his serene benevolence and universal sympa thies in the forms supplied by a pe culiarly faithful and fertile imagination. He has not aimed at all at momentary applause, nor even made renown, either present, or to be, the object of his exertions; but he has written from the love for man, the reverence for truth, and the devotion to art, which, though totally unconnected with the business of book-making, are the only foundations of literary excellence. Therefore it is, that, amid all the ridicule with which he who belongs not to the age has been attacked by its minions, his influence has been gradually but uniformly extending; and those who judge every thing by the commercial standard of the day, will be surprised to find that the booksellers have lately thought it for their advantage to publish a complete and beautiful edition of the works of this "drivelling ballad-monger."

The main strength of the clamour against Wordsworth has been directed upon his fondness for the use of plain and ordinary phraseology. Now for this there are various reasons. In the first place, the constant employment by metrical writers of certain set forms of phrase, many of them never used by any one to express real feelings, and the rest by the very fact of becoming the cant language

of poetry, disused among living men, -this custom had by repetition so deadened their effect, that they had ceased to be symbols recalling any thing whatsoever, but the precedents for their use in some other writer. Wordsworth attempted to remedy this by seeking for fresh reservoirs of expression in the real language of mankind, as springing from their genuine feelings and he found his best materials among those classes whom the habits of society have not compelled to dilute into weakness the mode of communicating their sensations; though in drawing his language in a great degree from the less instructed ranks, he of course omitted every thing that by its rarity would have been unintelligible, or which was not in conformity either with human nature in general, or with the necessary principles of human discourse. But it is a mistake to suppose that he never employs a dialect which might not have been collected from the lips of ploughmen; on the contrary, using simple phrases for simple things, and giving unpedantic expressions to uninstructed men; he also wields, and far more powerfully than any one, between Milton and himself, a language sufficient to the heights and depths of all philosophy, and more subtle and powerful in expressing the most delicate and complex shades of feeling, than any English writer whatsoever, Shakspeare alone excepted. At the same time the habitual use of an uninflated phraseology gives extraordinary vigour to all that homely illustration, and fresh, natural imagery, which are so conspicuous in Wordsworth's poems. But in general his sonnets, the larger number of his minor poems, the "White Doe of Rylstone," and the "Excursion," are by no means marked with the lowliness of diction which it is so common to dwell upon and to ridicule. We find still vigor ous in these poems, and in none but them, and the works of Coleridge and of Shelley, the full harmony and profusion, the swell and force, of our English tongue, the green old age of

that majestic speech, in which Spen ser wrote the Fairie Queen," and Milton discoursed the "Areopagiti ca" to angels, to men, and to eternity.

Connected with this charge is that of Mr. Wordsworth's propensity to represent as his heroes, obscure, and therefore uninteresting, personages. But is there, or is there not, in the hearts of men, that true catholic faith in our nature, from which we learn that what interests and engages all our better, and therefore all our stronger feelings, is not the accident. al peculiarity of circumstance, but the immoveable foundations of human being, and its incorporeal, indivisible essence? Place these where

you will, so that they show themselves through the accidental accompaniments, and are not stifled by them, there is in them that which draws us to itself, and makes us feel the stirrings of kindred pulses. But how generally, among the instructed classes, is every free emotion checked or masked! Sympathy is called affectation; earnestness, enthusiasm ; religion, fanaticism; and the whole of society beaten down and shrunk into flat barrenness. But among the ranks of men which are less subjected to fashion, there are still to be seen yearnings and ebullitions of natural feeling, and among them mankind may be studied with more accuracy, and examples of deeper and truer interest discovered, than in the portion to which we belong. Acting upon this belief, Wordsworth has done more than any one who has written in our language for two centuries, to realize and bring home to our minds the character of the larger portion of our species. At a time when the favourite personages of even our best poets were Celadons and Musidoras, when poetry confined itself either to Gentlemen and Ladies, or to the shadowy indiscriminate mockeries of humanity, the swains of pastoral absurdity-it was doing a mighty service to society to represent the artisan and the peasant even with the external minuteness of

scarcely any propensity to increase his knowledge or sharpen his apprehension of the every-day doings of worldly men. He loves to repose upon meditation, or only to send forth the mind for the purpose of contemplating the beauty of the material world, or of studying man in the individual; instead of mingling actively with the busy life of society. He pours into his personages the strong life and moving breath of genius, but they have little of the air of the mart or the farm-yard. They have, indeed, all that which is so completely wanting in the heroes of Lord Byron, the absolute truth of being, the nature which is so uniform under so many varieties; they are made up of the elements of universal, but want the accidents of social, humanity. Wordsworth appears to take no pleasure in watching the entangled threads of passion which bind together crowds with such manycoloured, yet scarcely distinguishable feelings. He retires from the conflict of mingled and heterogeneous interests. He loves to muse by winding rivers; but the tumultuous current of men's ordinary motives has little for his contemplation. He delights to gaze upon cities; but it is when "all that mighty heart is lying still." He cares not to trace through all the eagerness of men's selfish pursuits, a subtle vein of better feeling; or to look with keen and searching eye upon the follies and fluctuations of society. He has, therefore, no dramatic power whatsoever, and would probably fail completely in the simplest form of tragedy; while comedy is entirely out of the question. In all this he is directly the opposite of his greatest contemporary poet, Goëthe, who seems to take almost equal pleasure in the study of every class of human character, and to delight in tracing the involutions of cunning or the rush of crime; at least, as much as in observing and sympathizing with pure and lofty excellence. Goethe, moreover, is peculiarly shrewd and philosophical in detecting the action and

re-action of social circumstances on individual character, the intertwining of good and evil motive, and the most delicate and apparently cause. less shades of capricious selfishness. The difference of the two minds is, perhaps, wisely ordained. For the practical and working Englishman will be benefited and improved by those aspirations to invisible good, and inward perfection, towards which the Germans are already far more generally inclined. Whether the German is or is not too abstracted a being, may admit of dispute; but there can be little doubt that the Englishman is vastly too much engrossed with the casual business of the hour. His thinking is far too completely guided by the multiplication-table and the foot-rule.

This fondness for the actual and the outward, this tendency to wrap ourselves up in the petty interest of the moment, is opposed by the whole strain of Wordsworth's poetry. He diffuses his affections over every thing around him; and lets them be restricted by no arbitrary limits, and confined within no sectarian enclosures. He looks round upon the world and upon man with eyes of serene rejoicing; and traces all the workings of that spirit of good, of whose influence he is conscious in his own heart. But from his want of that mastery over forms which was never possessed so perfectly by any one as by Shakspeare, he cannot make so intelligible to all men, as he otherwise might, the depth and value of his own feelings. This has prevented his works from becoming more powerful instruments than they can for ages be, in diffusing the free philosophy and catholic religion so conspicuous throughout his writings. For those, however, who realiy wish to understand the mind, and sympathise with the affections, of this glorious poet, there is nothing in his works of rugged or ungrateful. The language is the most translucent of atmospheres for the thought. The illustrations are furnished by a sensibility of perception