LIFE OF CAMBRIDGE.

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life, to the reader almost unknown, to himself probably almost unsuggestive, although his college walks had been made venerable by the feet of Burleigh, and Strafford, Ben Johnson, Matthew Prior, and Otway.

Unsuggestive we have said, but we must revoke that word, or only use it with considerable limitation; he has introduced us in some measure to his musings in the university, though we can conceive from the outline of them that they were very desultory; life took no shape to him; he was impressed he says with

"fears

About future worldly maintenance,

And more than all a strangeness in the mind

A feeling that I was not for that hour,

Nor for that place."

He was still pursuing too his wonted course of dressing the dead world in a spiritual vesture; even to the loose stones that covered the highway he gave a moral life; he saw them feel or linked them to some feeling. More and more the feeling of his independence came to him; he longed to stand unpropped, yet his mind he assures us had within, both the Cavern and the Arbour; the place for thought and the place for pleasure. The great men who had trodden the aisles and fields of Cambridge before him were to him an inspiration-Chaucer-SpenserMilton. He has enwoven too with his history of those hours, the recollection of one solitary departure from the strict temperance of a lifetime. He began life a water drinker, and he confesses himself in several places of his writings a water drinker; only on one occasion does

he appear to have swerved, and the instance is mentioned with so much shame in his Prelude, that we are compelled to believe that the sin must have been trifling.

What surprises us most is that he gives us to understand he was something of a dandy at this time. So did he pass through these years of discipline-he did not devote himself much to books, either of the dead or living languages; he tells us he was a better judge of thoughts than words; he loved a few books, and those he then most loved, he loved till the close of life. Varying the hours of study in Cambridge with long pedestrian excursions, and now for the first time it would seem with his sister. As he prepared to leave the university, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was preparing to enter; how nearly were they related in their hours of study, separated only by a few months from that converse which might have changed the destiny of both. Doubtless, it was for the best; it is difficult to say what influence the one might have exerted on the other when we remember how they met.

In 1791 our poct took his degree of Bachelor of Arts and quitted Cambridge; the whole of the week before he was engaged in reading Clarissa Harlowe. At this time of his life his character was unformed, but it was soon to receive impulses and thoughts tending to form it; its state at present may be described as desultory individuality; a tendency to identify a life and being and meaning with every object, but not the power, the character, which starts up and assumes its own identity

and individuality in the midst of all. The character of his mind developes itself in the course especially of two poems written at this time, which we shall refer to by and by, descriptive, and in the style and measure of Pope.

CHAPTER II.

FIRST LOVE, THE PASSION OF NATURE.

"For nature then

To me was all in all."

TINTERN ABBEY.

"Imagine a character in which the susceptibility of the mind is very trifling, but the sensitiveness of the soul so boundless that the slightest emotion thrills through every nerve of the spiritual being, united besides with a will so powerful that it divides with the soul the entire guidance of the moral feelings."

SCHLEGEL. Limits of the Beautiful.

"He, who without the madness of the muses, approaches the gates of poesy under the persuasion that by means of art he can become an efficient poet, both himself fails of his purpose, and his poetry being that of a sane man is thrown into the shade by the poetry of such as are mad.” PLATO. Phædrus.

THUS we have very distinctly reverted to the period of the Poet's life, when in virtue of that peculiar power he brought to nature, "he felt the sentiment of Being, spread" over all things, and as it would appear the sentiment of Being without the sentiment of Personality. It must be confessed that there is nothing in these earlier verses breathing either the image, or the sentiment of

EXTERNAL BEING.

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the invisible-God. We are greeted by the same buoyant atmosphere which spreads over the works,-especially the Queen Mab,-of Shelley. Like many other Poets he derives his solace and his song from the spirit of nature. Not that we would mislead our readers in reference to his faith, we do not believe that he ever ignored the existence of the Godhead even in his mind; but it is evident that it did not reach him as a conviction imparting pleasure and delight, it was not to him the source of exuberant joy, it did not compel his spirit to pour itself forth in streams of music and emotion. He felt himself brought into contact with all things, all things gleamed out to him through a Spinozistic phantasm, and it was this which compelled him to place on all things some fitting laurel or rose-leaf of verse. Nature as yet did not present herself to him as a system, he did not behold her everywhere inter-penetrated by law.

It scarcely needs to be said that all who regard Nature as he did, bring to the observation, and to the pursuit their own minds-their mind gives the impulse, the sentiment, the pervading idea. External Being is absorbed in the sentiment of the present pleasure. In all those passionate invocations of nature, those outpourings of soul in which it claims alliance with storm, and night, with sunbeam, and moonbeam, and starbeam—with the weird whisper of the rustling wood-with the wail of winds imprisoned in the cavern, or leaping in their strength and their agony from hill to hill-with the ocean, and the riverwith the blossoming tree, and the shrinking flowerin all those daring attitudes of spirit in which it claims