Of blessed consolations in distress;
Of moral strength and intellectual Power;
Of Joy in widest commonalty spread;
Of the individual Mind that keeps her own
Inviolate retirement, subject there
To Conscience only, and the law supreme
Of that Intelligence which governs all—
I sing."

Of nothing nobler could he have sought to sing; but with what persons did he think fit to associate that splendid train of moral, philosophical, and poetic subjects? Why, with a retired pedlar "a vagrant merchant under a heavy load," who supplied rustic wants, or pleased rustic fancies with the contents of his pack, until, provision for his own wants having been obtained, he retired upon his savings and his philosophy, to instruct, by his wisdom and experience, those who had the happiness to converse with him. Now there is nothing in the abstract nature of things to forbid a poet from creating a pedlar, and endowing him with thoughts as sublime as his condition is humble. He may give him a hardy intellect, and moral feelings strength. ened and braced by breathing in content the keen and wholesome air of poverty. He may describe him as attending to his trade so as to make money, and at the same time being a lone enthusiast in the woods and fields, keeping in solitude and solitary thought his mind in a just equipoise of love. The poet has no doubt a right to do this if he pleases, and to make his lowly merchant utter as noble truths as ever were uttered by philosopher, in language of the finest poetry; but in doing this he directly wars with the common associations of men's minds, and he must therefore expect a storm of opposition and of ridicule. It certainly was a wilful thing of Wordsworth to choose a pedlar, "among the hills of Athol born," for his philosophic hero; for since common experience associates (not unjustly) thoughts the very reverse of generous, and grand, and philosophical, with such men and with their office, it required a breaking down of such associations, and an entirely new conception of the facts, feelings, and circumstances of a pedlar's life, before it was possible to admit him in the character with which Wordsworth had clothed him.

But though, in this great and notable instance, Wordsworth may have carried his system too far, he has done

incalculable good by teaching thousands who otherwise had not been taught that useful lesson, to associate the noble in thought with the simple in circumstances; to believe that there may be, and that there ought to be, "plain living and high thinking;" and that as the lord of thousands a-year may be, and very often is, a creature of mean and grovelling spirit, with no conceptions to lift him above the lowest of the low, so the poorest may be rich in elevated thoughts, and that

"A virtuous household, though exceeding poor,
Austere and grave, and fearing God,"

possesses a true dignity, which voluptuous princes in their palaces cannot achieve. Wordsworth has taught, with more effect than any one before him had taught, that there is a presence and a power of greatness open to all who behold the stars come out above their heads; and that to the feeling heart the meanest flower that blows can bring thoughts that often lie too deep for tears. For this cause, blessings be with his name. But he has pronounced his own benediction :—

"Blessings be with them and eternal praise, The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays."

The poem, now first published in the goodly tome before us, contains about nine thousand lines of blank verse, diIvided into fourteen books. It was completed some five-and-forty years ago, when the author was thirty-five years old, his genius matured by reflection, and his intellectual character fixed and determined. We may expect, then, to find the full fruitage of the poetic faculty he possessed, and herein no reader capable of appreciating the highest order of poetry will be disappointed. But he will also find more of the eccentricities of this great author than his own later judgment would probably have approved. There are many heavy and prosaic passages, and some matters of familiar, and not very important, narrative are given with a solemnity which cannot but provoke a smile. But these are but casual clouds floating in the pure Wordsworthian sky. Ever and anon, he springs from level talk or ponderous triviality into the most glorious heights of poetry, and we hear, as it were, a voice of more than mortal music reverberated from the mountains, and

filling the valleys with sounds of melody sweeter than the fall of their own rivers. But why was this poem left for five-and-forty years unpublished? It was, we presume, because the author considered it to be in some sort of a personal character; and though he did not seem at any time to be much afraid of indirect egotism, yet he may have thought that becoming modesty required this poem should be left for posthumous publication. He says of it (Book III.) :

"A traveller I am, Whose tale is only of himself; even so, So be it, if the pure of heart be prompt To follow, and if thou, my honoured friend, Who in these thoughts art ever at my side, Support, as heretofore, my fainting steps."

The friend thus apostrophised was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to whom the whole poem is addressed. It is called, in the title-page, "A Biographical Poem," and also "The Growth of a Poet's Mind." Probably the author considered it to be such a history, because he had noted in it those incidents and reflections which seemed to himself to mark certain epochs of his mental progress. Any one, however, who shall expect to discover, from this poetical autobiography, the way in which a poetic mind may be built up of such structure and dimensions as the mind of Wordsworth, will certainly be somewhat disappointed. There is nothing here to contravene the ancient canonPuetu nascitur, non fit. Wordsworth was a poet, because God gave him the poetic faculty in large measure, and the peculiarities of his genius were fostered by his taste for retirement, and his disposition to hold communion with external nature, and with his own deeply-meditative soul, rather than with the minds of other men, and the thoughts and business of the world. In the second book of the Prelude he tells us :

"My seventeenth year was come, And whether from this habit, rooted now So deeply in my mind, or from excess In the great social principle of life, Coercing all things into sympathy, To unorganic natures were transferred My own enjoyments; or the power of truth, Coming in revelation, did converse With things that really are; I at this time Saw blessings spread around me like a sea. Thus, while the days flew by, and years passed on,

VOL. XXXVI.-NO. Ccxiii.

From nature and her overflowing soul
I had received so much, that all my thoughts
Were steeped in feeling; I was only then
Contented, when, with bliss ineffable,
I felt the sentiment of Being spread
O'er all that moves, and all that seemeth still;
O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart;

O'er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings,

Or beats the gladsome air; o'er all that glides Beneath the wave-yea, in the wave itself And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not If high the transport, great the joy I felt, Communing in this sort through earth and heaven

With every form of creature, as it looked Towards the Uncreated with a countenance Of adoration, with an eye of love.

One song they sang, and it was audible, Most audible, then, when the fleshly ear, O'ercome by humblest prelude of that strain, Forgot her functions, and slept undisturbed."

These lines have, perhaps, a little of the heaviness, and we think we may, with truth, add, a little of the obscurity, which not unfrequently belongs to Wordworth's narrative manner; but as soon as he leaves narrative, and soars into poetic speculation, then what a glorious burst of elevated song pours from his lofty muse! The following is in continuation of the passage above quoted :

"If this be error, and another faith
Find easier access to the pious mind,
Yet were I grossly destitute of all
Those human sentiments that make this earth
So dear, if I should fail with grateful voice
To speak of you, ye mountains, and ye lakes
And sounding cataracts, ye mists and winds
That dwell among the hills where I was born.
If in my youth I have been pure in heart-
If, mingling with the world, I am content
With my own modest pleasures, and have
lived

With God and Nature communing, removed
From little enmities and low desires-
The gift is yours: if, in these times of fear,
This melancholy waste of hopes o'erthrown :
If, 'mid indifference and apathy,

And wicked exultation when good men
On every side fall off, we know not how,
To selfishness, disguised in gentle names
Of peace and quiet and domestic love,
Yet mingled not unwillingly with sneers
On visionary minds; if, in this time
Of dereliction and dismay, I yet
Despair not of our nature, but retain
A more than Roman confidence, a faith
That fails not, in all sorrow my support,
The blessing of my life-the gift is yours,
Ye winds and cataracts I-'tis yours,

Ye mountains!-thine, O Nature! Thou hast fed

My lofty speculations; and in thee,
For this uneasy heart of ours, I find
A never-failing principle of joy
And purest passion."

It is difficult to imagine a grander strain than this, or a more perfectly bard-like exultation in a near communion with the soul of nature. It may be objected, as it has long been to much of Wordsworth's poetry, that its philosophy is Pantheistic. This does seem to have been the sentiment of the poet's mind, but he never sought to teach it as a religion which should take the place of Christian verities. In whatever dreams of imagination he may have indulged, he never, either by precept or by example, gave any encouragement to depart from Christian faith or practice, but, on the contrary, supported both the one and the other with all the weight of his personal example, while his poetical works seemed to acknowledge a continual sense of the presence of spiritual power manifested either in the stupendous magnificence or the exquisite simplicity of nature. And in respect to this poetical appreciation of natural objects, it should be observed, that though many other poets have felt, and have made others feel, the influence of such objects in some degree, yet no other poet seems to have had the extreme delicacy of sensibility in this respect that Wordsworth had, or to have exhibited so deep a passion of love for the awful and the beautiful. In poetical fervour he could not exceed Burns, nor in lyrical sweetness equal him; but in comparing these poets, and the genius which respectively distinguished each, while we are led to marvel at the variety of excellence which poetry affords when different minds dwell upon the same theme, yet we must confess that, both in the massiveness and grandeur of his conceptions, and in the refined delicacy of his perception, Wordsworth is greatly superior. This we must acknowledge, even while proclaiming that Burns seems a more genuine, unsophisticated, spontaneous poet of nature than his philosophical successor, besides that he took nature in phases more familiar to ordinary minds than Wordsworth did, and the associations of his fancy were more level to general apprehension, and more

closely connected with ordinary sympathies.

passage

The allusions in the above-quoted to the melancholy waste of hopes overthrown, the defections of good men, and the exultation of bad, have reference to the course of events after the great French Revolution, towards the close of last century. Of that outburst of the spirit of liberty, which, being under no moral guidance, soon became the most frantic explosion of wickedness and cruelty that ever disgraced a civilised age, Wordsworth was at the beginning an ardent admirer; and he appears not to have quite lost hope of it, even when many who had been friendly to it began to fall off in weariness or in dread. many parts of the poem we find that deep disgust at abuses, and that ardent, enthusiastic belief in the possi bility of replacing them by a kind of poetical perfection, which, no doubt, were the cause of the poet's sympathy with the "patriots" in France, so long as circumstances left it possible for him to believe that the French were really seeking for liberty and justice.

In

more

But when he found them ready to become, and actually becoming, the instruments of a military tyrant, and ruthlessly robbing other nations of the freedom which they had pretended to desire for themselves, then his sympathy with the French was at an end. He lived to believe that liberty and justice were likely to be found under a system of authoritative government, based upon sound and settled principles, than under the sway of those specious contrivances to which knots of ambitious adventurers give the name of "liberal measures," or under the dominion of passionate decrees, suggested by demagogues and affirmed by mobs.

Proceeding from school to Cambridge, the poet philosophises with much severity upon what he saw there; but first he gives some narrative, which, as it illustrates the livelier attempts of the poem, we shall transcribe, though we must confess our fear that the smile which the lines may provoke will not be likely to be a smile of admiration ::

"I roamed Delighted through the motley spectacle ; Gowns grave or gaudy, doctors, students, streets,

Courts, cloisters, flocks of churches, gateways, towers;

"Of college labours, of the lecturer's room, All studded round as thick as chairs could stand

With loyal students faithful to their books,
Half-and-half idlers, hardy recusants
And honest dunces-of important days,
Examinations, when the man was weighed
As in a balance! of excessive hopes,
Tremblings withal, and commenable fears,
Small jealousies, and triumphs good or bad,
Let others that know more speak as they
know.

Such glory was but little sought by me,
And little won."

He confesses, however, that he had at the time some qualms about his future worldly maintenance; but it is remarkable how fortunate he appears to have been in this respect. A little sufficed for a man brought up with frugal habits, who, when he travelled abroad or at home, trusted to his feet, and carried his wardrobe in a knapsack. But a friend, Mr. Raisley Calvert, who died young, left Wordsworth £100 a-year, because he saw that, though he had very great ability, he was by no means likely to be able to make £100 a-year for himself. And thus it appears that, from 1790 to 1802, when he married and settled in Westmoreland, Wordsworth did little else than roam about in the most beautiful parts not only of England but of Europe, and store his mind with the images, and his heart with the love, which then and afterwards he poured out in poetry,

Here is the account of his actual education-self-education, even at college-and nobler passages of poetry than those lines afford we are not likely soon to see again :

"Whate'er of terror, or of love, Or beauty, nature's daily face put on From transitory passion, unto this

I was as sensitive as waters are
To the sky's influence in a kindred mood
Of passion was obedient as a lute
That waits upon the touches of the wind.
Unknown, unthought of, yet was I most
rich-

I had a world about me- -'twas my own:
I made it, for it only lived to me,
And to the God who sees into the heart.
Such sympathies, though rarely were betrayed
By outward gestures and by visible looks:
Some called it madness-so indeed it was,
If child-like fruitfulness in passing joy,
If steady words of thoughtfulness, matured
To inspiration, sort with such a name;
If prophecy be madness; if things viewed
By poets in old time, and, higher up,
By the first men, earth's first inhabitants,
May in these tutored days no more be seen
With undisordered sight. But leaving this,
It was no madness, for the bodily eye,
Amid my strongest workings, evermore
Was searching out the lines of difference,
As they lie hid in all external forms,
Near or remote, minute or vast-an eye
Which from a tree, a stone, a withered leaf,
To the broad ocean and the azure heavens,
Spangled with kindred multitudes of stars,
Could find no surface where its power
might sleep;

Which spoke perpetual logic to my soul,
And by an unrelenting agency,

Did bind my feelings even as in a chain."

At that time, however, it was only when alone that the musing spirit fell upon the future poet. His heart, he says, was social, and loved idleness and joy. He recalls, in splendid verse, the names of poets who had been at Cambridge before him, and thence proceeds to tell his vision of what a university should be, with stately groves, and majestic edifices, and not wanting a corresponding dignity within. Alas! how is any such vision to be realised? The grove and the edifice are indeed within the power of the artist, but who shall give dignity to pedantry or frivolity, or who shall so govern the pride of youth, and the audacity of wealth, as to make grave and gentle students of those who have just escaped from the restraints of school, with the determination to obtain as much pleasure as they can from increased liberty of action, and an augmented allowance of money? Beautiful, however, most beautiful, is the poet's description of what a university might be, could the dreams of a poet be realised. Even he, however, is obliged to break off thus:"Alas! alas! In vain for such solemnity I looked;

Mine eyes were crossed by butterflies, ears vexed

By chattering popinjays; the inner heart
Seemed trivial, and the impresses without
Of a too gaudy region."

After the university, we have the summer vacation, its rambles, and its amusements, full of the freshness which he tells us he found at that time in human life. Then a book on the subject of "Books," which is certainly best when it leaves criticism to open the pages of the book of nature. The return to Cambridge, and a journey to the Alps, a residence in London, a residence in France, continued through three books, a poetic dissertation on Imagination and Taste, in two books, a retrospect and a conclusion, make up this autobiographic poem, which is rather a chain of reflections than an autobiography, in any strict sense of the word.

In spite of the heavy passages-in spite of the somewhat cumbrous gravity with which trivial matters are sometimes narrated or discussed-in spite of the absence of that graceful ease, and occasional humour, which Cowper's blank verse so eminently possesses, the poem of the Prelude has the strongest claims to the respectful admiration of the reflecting portion of the public. The finer passages have all the grandeur of the Excursion, with, as it seems to us, more vigour, and buoyancy, and fresh delight of composition. When the poet takes up a strain congenial to him, he seems to go on rejoicing in his strength, and pealing out tone after tone of rising grandeur and increasing melody. One great charm of the book is the ardour of the friendship over and over again expressed for Coleridge. In one place he breaks out thus:

"I have thought Of thee, thy learning, gorgeous eloquence, And all the strength and plumage of thy youth,

Thy subtle speculations, toils abstruse
Among the schoolmen, and Platonic forms
Of wild ideal pageantry, shaped out
From things well matched or ill, and words

for things,

The self-created sustenance of a mind
Debarred from Nature's living images,
Compelled to be a life unto herself,
And unrelentingly possessed by thirst
Of greatness, love, and beauty."

Coleridge had gone to the Mediter.

rancan for the recovery of his health, and thus his friend addresses him :

"A lonely wanderer art thou gone, by pain Compelled, and sickness, at this latter day, This sorrowful reverse for all mankind. I feel for thee, must utter what I feel: The sympathies erewhile in part discharged, Gather afresh, and will have vent again : My own delights do scarcely seem to me My own delights; the lordly Alps themselves,

Those rosy peaks from which the morning looks

Abroad on many nations, are no more
For me that image of pure gladsomeness
Which they were wont to be. Through kin-
dred scenes

For purpose, at a time, how different!
Thou takest thy way, carrying the heart
and soul

That Nature gives to poets, now by thought
Matured, and in the summer of their strength.
Oh! wrap him in your shades, ye giant woods
On Etna's side; and thou, O flowery field
Of Enna! is there not some nook of thine
From the first play-time of the infant world
Kept sacred to restorative delight,
When from afar invoked by anxious love?"

This seems to us to be a passage of great fervour, sweetness, and dignity.

The two books on "Imagination and Taste," though frequently less distinct, and less easily understood than will be found agreeable to readers even of an inquiring spirit, have in them, nevertheless, much mental philosophy of the highest interest. He commences by shewing how nature teaches wisdom to those of an observant eye and a feeling heart. The motions of delight that haunt the sides of the green hills, and the subtle intercourse of breezes and soft airs with "breathing flowers" might, he says, if feelingly watched, teach man's haughty

race

"How, without injury, to take, to give Without offence."

The breezes which bend the complying beads of lordly pines, or shift the stupendous clouds through the whole compass of the sky, shew the wondrous influence of power gently used. But the happiness which this didactic dominion of Nature at first gave him, suffered, it seems, an interruption. The intellectual power which fostered love and dispensed truth, and which diffused over men and things ("where reason yet might hesitate")