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supposition of another and a better world, I do not see. As to my departed brother, who leads our minds at present to these reflections, he walked all his life pure among the impure, except a little hastiness of temper, when any thing was done in a clumsy or bungling manner, or when improperly contradicted upon occasions of not much importance, he had not one vice of his profession. I never heard an oath or even an indelicate expression or allusion, from him in my life; his modesty was equal to that of the purest woman. In prudence, in meekness, in self-denial, in fortitude, in just desires, and elegant and refined enjoyments with an entire simplicity of manners, life, and habit, he was all that could be wished for in man, strong in health, and of a noble person, with every hope about him that could render life dear, thinking and living for others, and we see what has been his end! So good must be better, so high must be destined to be higher."*

Life. vol. i, 293..

CHAPTER VI.

THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH.

66 SOLE KING OF ROCKY CUMBERLAND."

"But most of the subjects of Mr. Wordsworth, though not arrayed in any adventitious pomp, have a real and innate grandeur. True it is, that he moves not among the regalities, but among the humanities of his art. True it is, that his poetry does not make its bed and procreant cradle' in the jutting frieze, cornice, or architrave of the glorious edifices of human power. The universe in its naked majesty, and man in the plain dignity of his nature, are his favorite themes. And is there no might, no glory, no sanctity, in these; Earth has her own venerablenesses, her awful forests, which have darkened her hills for ages with tremendous gloom; her mysterious springs, pouring out everlasting waters from unsearchable recesses, her wrecks of elemental contests; her jagged rocks, monumental of an earlier world. The lowliest of her beauties has an antiquity beyond that of Pyramids. The evening breeze has the old sweetness which it shed over the fields of Canaan, when Isaac went out to meditate. The Nile swells with its rich waters towards the bulrushes of Egypt, as when the infant Moses nestled among them, watched by the sisterly love of Miriam. Zion's hill, has not passed away with its temple, nor lost its sanctity amidst its tumultuous changes around it, not even by the accomplishment of that awful religion of types and symbols, which once was enthroned on its steeps. The sun to which the Poet turns his eye is the same which shone over Thermopyla; and the wind to which he listens swept over Salamis, and scattered the armaments of Xerxes." SIR T. N. TALFOURD.-Lectures on Wordsworth.

FROM what has been said, and from the reader's personal knowledge of these Poems, he will gather that they overflow with allusions to the whole country in which the writer had ever lived. The land of Wordsworth is

even yet more strongly marked and outlined than the land of Burns or Scott; the greatest however of our modern Poet's have had no especial country, they have lost sight of their own in their verse. Wordsworth has planted the laurels of immortality on hundreds of places, to which in future years pilgrimage will be made for the sake of his verses, and his memory; he might perhaps have been a greater Poet had it not been so; it is wonderful to notice how he turned every subject into the occasion of music, his genius resembles the power of those musicians who from pieces of Cornish granite or limestone rock draw forth sweet sounds; there is no object over which he cannot instantly pour a mingled stream of music and thought, but this constant placing of insects upon the microscopic pin must have prevented him from ranging his feelings and his observations beneath some great generalization; he did not emulate however the magnificence of the Cartoon, he was satisfied with the exquisite and highly finished Medallion, he had read many of the Italian Poets apparently, and gave forth his words in a similar manner, in forms of beauty rarely surpassed, but whose character partook rather of the photograph than the painting.

Localised impressions! how many of these we have in Wordsworth's writings, and it is this which makes his Land so interesting. May we not say that he presents to us the aesthetics of travel, over every place he visits he throws the mantle of his peculiar poetic fervour and makes every spot a platform on which to discuss a doctrine, or to inculcate a duty, or to analyse a sensa

LOCALISED IMPRESSIONS.

163

tion. No Poet so constantly and incessantly presents to his reader the objects of thought, every spot is tributary, every place is a shrine, and perhaps we have too much of this-in it Wordsworth is almost alone. Shakspere has no locality, nor Schiller, nor Milton, impressions are absorbed in the wholeness of the individual being. Wordsworth allows for the time his being to be absorbed by the scene; it contains his whole manhood, it reflects his whole life, witness in his early days, Tintern Abbey; in the closing years the musings near Aqua pendente; it is as we have said, individuality is the essence of his poetry, he felt too intensely to know and to feel universally; standing by Rob Roy's grave he conjures up the spirits of despotism and democracy, and round him

"Kingdoms shift about like clouds
Obedient to his breath."

He discusses the principles of government, as he clears the nettles from the tomb of the Highland Chieftain; he wakes up the slumbering forms of the world's dead kings, and utters in their ears the great battle words of humanity. When he visits the pleasure ground of Dunkeld, the representation of Mimic waterfalls, near the grave of Ossian, rouses not merely a burst of passionate indignation for the folly of that artifice, but some of the most glorious words ever uttered on the folly and criminality of similating a love of nature, and mocking the mind with false, fictitious, and meretricious sentiment. This power of localizing impressions is shown especially

in the memorials of the tours in Scotland, and in Italy, in many of his Sonnets, and indeed characterises in an eminent degree more or less the whole of his poetry; every place touched some responsive spring in his nature, and the place, the spot, the object instantly became ideal; all objects he surrounded with the golden fire mist, and the rain-bow hued gleams of his fancy and genius, he presented nothing naked or unclothed, all things were dressed in the imaginative vesture, they became to him something more than themselves, he saw far more in them than met ordinary eyes; they became to him centres of feeling, from them thought took flight to a great round of conception and association; from a flower, or a broken stone his mind shot up in a long range of concentric and spiral rings until it touched the topmost stars, yet never losing sight of the point or the foundation from which he sprung; beneath his genius the meanest objects became suns shooting forth planets of moral truth, to hold their circumvolving course around the central light.

It is a question much mooted whether the Poet should be a hermit, a recluse, and solitary, whether he should retire from the walks and ways of men and live alone, feeding thought from his scallop shell of quiet, through the deep dark winter and the bright summer hours; whether cities, or solitudes, most call forth and develope the resources of man's nature. For ourselves we do not feel disposed either to moot or to discuss the question, but perhaps it may be said that the Poet will avail himself most of the resources in solitude, with

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