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to that of St. Chrysostom, or St. Bernard in their impetuous hurryings to and fro among men. Even thus different is the life of Wordsworth from the lives of most other Poets. He was the Anchorite of Poets. He sat in his Cell and revolved the truths of Nature, and of Time. His life appears to have been quite divorced from Action. He had no Enthusiasm. He appears to have tutored his spirit to a perpetual calm, and with the mind and manners of a Hermit of the middle Ages, he gathered round himself the urbanities and civilizations of the nineteenth century. Thus he studied beauty, and order, and liberty, in their relation to the Cosmos, the beauty of the Universe. He was a perfectly educated man-not that his education was that of books; in the mere bookman's lore, millions have surpassed him, in languages, in history, in systematic psychology, in natural philosophy, but our readers do not need to be told that a man may have an extensive acquaintance with all these and be very badly educated; he may be accomplished in intellectual routine, which is merely instruction, and know nothing of moral routine, which is education. Many an old Monk or Hermit pacing to and fro through his forest glades and rocky solitudes, would be thought a dunce in a respectable School; but many such a Monk so regarded as a dunce would, from his life of solitude and introspection have accumulated a mass of facts in moral history-the spiritual life of which, would enlighten an University of Sages, and it is the observative of these moral facts

This was the work of Wordsworth's life; for this we are indebted to him; his power was not the result of lessons given in any "School of Design." Such a School can never make an artist; the lessons conveyed there can only impart the mechanic forms; the true power of the artist is the depth of feeling, by which he fathoms the realms below him, and scans and scales the heights which would appear to be above him; he lives in his volitions and creations, and hence he can live alone, because he can summon all beings to his loneliness; like Prospero, he can soon make his solitude "full of music," he can compel a Caliban, and create an Ariel to serve him; he soon covers his desolation with enchantments, and evolves from all, sights, and sounds of nature, and from human hearts, by attentively studying his own, the secret lore and law, and thus finds "his creed within. the principles of things."*

We have already looked at the Poet of Nature in some contrast to the Poet of Art. The first, it has ever appeared to us, can see only the Soul's Freedom; the second is oppressed by a sense of Nature's Necessity; the object of the highest Art should be the reconcilement of these two. The Poet of Nature is fronted by Liberty, the Artist is fronted by Law. The most marked feature of the first is a spontaneous vitality, a boundless and everflowing and overflowing energy; the most marked feature of the last an invariable attention to the ancient injunction of the Delphic Oracle; conquer thy wonder, do not have

Rob Roy's Grave.

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too much of anything. Man needs indeed beauty, the ideal to help him through the stern realities of life. How miserable becomes life when it terminates in today, when it never mounts beyond the things seen, and transitory, and temporal. The Poet aids and schools the mind of his auditor to this view of life; he helps the human heart to climb the Pizgah Top, overlooking the Promised Land. Thus differing powers are presented, one Poet restricts his paintings to the present, another runs his finger over the chords of destiny, and sets the future to music: he becomes a Prophet. Burns, and Shakspeare, and Chaucer, occupy to our mind very different places to those we are compelled to assign to the Dramatists of ancient Greece, to the great modern German Poets, and to Wordsworth.

Wordsworth was an Artist, no Poet in England ever made his Works so much to result from principles, and from principles perceived, as well as received. This is the great distinction between the verse maker and the Poet; the Poet subjects all his passions, and experiences, and words to a rigid rule. The word writer or painter is content to pour them forth because they are words. It is somewhat old to place Poetry in the number of the Fine Arts, and at present we speak more frequently of the Esthetic life, but they are the same. It is demanded of this Esthetic temper, that it shall look upon things as they are, and not through the perverting medium of its own atmosphere. Byron was an Artist; but how much greater an Artist would he have been

energies; hence how much greater an Artist was Shelley. The Poet truly presents to the eye all objects as they are; he is the mirror before which they float; he is the darkened chamber through which they pass, and the pleasure we feel in reading his verses is akin to that with which we enter and gaze upon the concentrated and miniature life of the Camera Obscura. The Humourist and the Idealist must both equally work upon Esthetic principles; the first does so in order to degrade an object, the Idealist in order to magnify and elevate. De Foe, Swift, and Goethe, and Schiller, were all Artists, but how different the result.

Wordsworth was Artistic and Idealistic; he walked, and surveyed, and wrote beneath the light of a most lofty Imagination; the most distinguishing traces of it we shall have to notice presently. His life was one act of Devotion to Art-one constant effort to catch the image of living nature. Every man who studies carefully to present an object, an impression, an impulse to his auditors, deserves their profound attention; we may by and by possibly dissent from the Artist, we may read the lesson, and the life, of the object altogether another way, but, we are compelled to give the same measure of time to the study of it that the writer gave to the narration of it; it is a duty in order to a fair estimate that we put ourselves into his place, and look at the Poem as far as possible through the same medium; very few have done this in reading Wordsworth. Even now the contempt expressed for him once by the Reviewing craft, and the "tribe of volant writers" is echoed

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by thousands who have by the progress of Society reached to their place, and who fancy themselves sufficiently gifted to pronounce immediately their opinions on subjects demanding a gleam, at any rate of light they have never thought it worth the trouble to obtain. This may be laid down as certain, that to read Wordsworth, a higher education, and a deeper experience is demanded than for the comprehension of most Poets. His writings may be called the Iliad or Enead of the soul.

Lofty imaginative utterance, this is a characteristic the reader will speedily notice in these writings; in no poet will he find occasion to notice it more; concentrated expressions, abound here, and we demand these in the poet-expressions, short, sententious, but in which thought and feeling, are fused down, or say rather folded up, like electricity in a dew drop, and these expressions in a poet evidence the presence and depth of his feeling, and the vividness of his eye to catch and to compel to his service those occult resemblances only to be seen by the great poet. Many writers have accused Mr. Wordsworth of a practical inconsistency here; the grandeur of his language occasionally, say they, does not harmonise with the simplicity of his theory, but we shall find that his theory was that Poetry is the utterance of Nature when in a state of excitement or feeling, the charge of inconsistency would only be just if he put language of strong ideal beauty and sublimity into the mouths of simple and uneducated Peasants. No great poet has spread over his works a richer profusion of these

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