sentiment and most genuine tragedies. No poet has done such justice to the depth and the fulness of maternal love. What, for instance, can be more tear-moving than these exclamations of a mother, who for seven years has heard no tidings of an only child, abandoning the false stay of a pride which ever does unholy violence to the sufferer ?—

Neglect me! no, I suffered long

From that ill thought; and, being blind,
Said, 'Pride shall help me in my wrong;
Kind mother have I been, as kind
As ever breathed:' and that is true;
I've wet my path with tears like dew,
Weeping for him when no one knew.
My son, if thou be humbled, poor,
Hopeless of honour, or of gain,
Oh! do not dread thy mother's door;
Think not of me with grief or pain:
I now can see with better eyes;
And worldly grandeur I despise,
And fortune with her gifts and lies."

How grand and fearful are the following conjectures of her agony!

"Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan,

Maim'd, mangled by inhuman men;

Or thou upon a desert thrown

Inheritest the lion's den;

Or hast been summon'd to the deep.
Thou, thou and all thy mates, to keep,
An incommunicable sleep."

And how triumphant does the great instinct appear in its vanquishing even the dread of mortal chilliness-asking and looking for spectres-and concluding that their appearance is not possible, because they come not to its intense cravings:

"I look for ghosts; but none will force
Their way to me: 'tis falsely said
That ever there was intercourse
Between the living and the dead;
For surely then I should have sight
Of him I wait for day and night,
With love and longings infinite."

Of the same class is the poem on the death of a noble youth, who fell in attempting to bound over a chasm of the Wharf, and left his mother childless.-What a volume of thought is there in the little stanzas which follows:

"If for a lover the lady wept,

A solace she might borrow

From death, and from the passion of death,—
Old Wharf might heal her sorrow.

She weeps not for the wedding-day,
Which was to be to-morrow :

Her hope was a farther-looking hope,
And her's is a mother's sorrow!"

Here we are made to feel not only the vastness of maternal affection, but its difference from that of lovers. The last, being a passion, has a tendency to grasp and cling to objects which may sustain it, and thus fixes even on those things which have swallowed its hopes, and draws them into its likeness. Death itself thus becomes a passion to one whom it has bereaved; or the waters which flowed over the object of once happy love, become a solace to the mourner, who nurses holy visions by their side. But an instinct which has none of that tendency to go beyond itself, when its only object is lost, has no earthly relief, but is left utterly desolate. The hope of a lover looks chiefly to a single point of time as its goal;-that of a mother is spread equally over existence, and when cut down, at once the blossoming expectations of a whole life are withered for ever.

Can any thing be more true or intense than the following description of remorse, rejecting the phantoms of superstitious horror as powerless, and representing lovely and uncomplaining forms of those whose memories the sufferer had dishonoured by his errors, casting their silent looks perpetually upon him:

"Feebly must they have felt

Who, in old time, attired with snakes and whips
The vengeful Furies. Beautiful regards

Were turned on me-the face of her I loved;

The wife and mother pitifully fixing

Tender reproaches, insupportable!"

We will give but one short passage more to show the depth of Wordsworth's insight into our nature-but it is a passage which we think unequalled in its kind in the compass of poetry. Never surely was such a glimpse of beatific vision opened amidst mortal affliction; such an elevation given to seeming weakness; such consolation ascribed to bereaved love by the very heightening of its own intensities. The poet contends, that those whom we regard as dying broken-hearted for the loss of friends, do not really perish through despair; but have such vivid prospects of heaven, and such a present sense that those who have been taken from them are waiting for them there, that they wear themselves away in longings after the reality, and so hasten to enjoy it :

"Full oft the innocent sufferer sees
Too clearly; feels too vividly; and longs
To realize the vision with intense
And over-constant yearning-there-there lies
The excess by which the balance is destroy'd.
Too, too contracted are these walls of flesh,
This vital warmth too cold, these visual orbs,
Though inconceivably endow'd, too dim
For any passion of the soul that leads
To ecstasy; and, all the crooked paths

Of time and change disdaining, takes its course
Along the line of limitless desires."

But the imaginative faculty is that with which Wordsworth is most eminently gifted. As the term IMAGINATION is often very loosely employed, it will be necessary for us here to state as clearly as possible our idea of its meaning. In our sense, it is that power by which the spiritualities of our nature and the sensible images derived from the material universe are commingled at the will of the possessor. It has thus a two-fold operation-the bodying forth of feelings, sentiments, and ideas, in beautiful and majestic forms, and giving to them local habitations; and the informing the colours and the shapes of matter with the properties of the soul. The first of these workings of the faculty supplies the highest excellencies of the orator, and the philosophic bard. When Sophocles represents the the eternal laws of morality as "produced in the pure regions of celestial air-having the

Olympian alone for their parent-as not subject to be touched by the decays of man's mortal nature, or to be shaded by oblivion-for the divinity is mighty within them, and waxes not old:"* it is this which half gives to them a majestic personality, and dimly figures out their attributes. By the same process, the imaginative faculty, aiming at results less sublime but more definite and complete, gave individual shape to loves, graces, and affections, and endowed them with the breath of life. By this process, it shades over the sorrows which it describes by the beauties and the graces of nature, and tinges with gentle colouring the very language of affliction. In the second mode of its operation, on the other hand, it moves over the universe like the spirit of God on the face of the waters, and peoples it with glorious shapes, as in the Greek mythology, or sheds on it a consecrating radiance, and imparts to it an intense sympathy, as in the poems of these more reflective days. Although a harmonizing faculty, it can by the law of its essence only act on things which have an inherent likeness. It brings out the secret affinities of its objects; but it cannot combine things which nature has not prepared for union, because it does not add, but transfuses. Hence there can be no wild incongruity, no splendid confusion in its works. Those which are commonly regarded as its productions in the metaphorical speeches of "Irish eloquence," are their very reverse, and may serve by contrast to explain its realities. The highest and purest of its efforts are when the intensest elements of the human soul are mingled inseparably with the vastest majesties of the universe; as where Lear identifies his age with that of the heavens, and calls on them to avenge his wrongs by their community

*This passage-one of the noblest instances of the moral sublime -is from the Theban Edipus, where it is uttered by the Chorus on some of the profane scoffs of the fated Iocasta:

of lot; and where Timon "fixes his everlasting mansion upon the beached shore of the salt flood," that "once a day with its embossed froth the turbulent surge may cover him," scorning human tears, but desiring the vast ocean for his eternal mourner!

Of this transfusing and reconciling faculty-whether its office be to "cloath upon," or to spiritualize Mr. Wordsworth is, in the highest degree, master. Of this, abundant proofs will be found in the latter portion of this article; at present we will only give a few examples. The first of these is one of the grandest instances of noble daring, completely successful, which poetry exhibits. After a magnificent picture of a single yew-tree, and a fine allusion to its readiness to furnish spears for old battles, the poet proceeds:

"But worthier still of note

Are those fraternal four of Borrowdale,
Join'd in one solemn and capacious grove;

Huge trunks!-and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine,

Upcoiling, and inveterately convolved,

Not uninformed by fantasy and looks

That threaten the profane;-a pillar'd shade
Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue,
By sheddings from the pining umbrage tinged
Perennially-beneath whose sable roof
Of boughs, as if for festal purpose deck'd
By unrejoicing berries, ghostly shapes

May meet at noon-tide-Fear and trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight-Death the Skeleton
And Time the Shadow-there to celebrate,

As in a natural temple scatter'd o'er
With altars undisturb'd of mossy stone,
United worship; or in mute repose
To lie, and listen to the mountain flood
Murmuring from Glamarara's inmost caves."

Let the reader, when that first glow of intuitive admiration which this passage cannot fail to inspire is past, look back on the exquisite gradations by which it naturally proceeds from mere description to the sublime personification of the most awful abstractions, and the union of their fearful shapes in strange worship, or in listening to the deepest of nature's voices. The first lines-interspersed indeed with