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kindred with the solitude of the blasted heath, and the grim portals of highland rocks-when the shattered tower and the ruined church seem the impersonations of some like desolation in the soul-in the bleat of lambs, and the bark of dogs, and sounds even of creatures supposed to be meaner than these-in all those waiting moods and postures of the soul, when clouds of every shape and hue, portentous or cheerful, are messengers received gratefully by the spirit, the mind at once, a mirror and an echo gives back tones and sounds from all objects. In all these, Wordsworth's verses abound, they sink to the most pathetic softness, they rise to the most daring sublimity, they swell to the most majestic utterance; if we find him for some years worshipping as in a Pantheistic temple, it must be admitted that he bowed with a heart more universal than Byron, and with a spirit more reverent than Shelley.

And that Dream of Nature, that intoxicating poetry of the hills and the woods; how it besets the young spirit still; it is the opium and the opium dream of life, and it brings the rapture and the delight, and by and by the agony and the delirium of opium. It is true it is not easy to comprehend the idea of a personal God; but until that idea is comprehended, through what a tangled maze of dangerous enchantment the spirit treads.

Wordsworth presents to us now the picture of a spirit stricken with awe and adoration beneath the startling wonders around him and within him; 'tis mystery all! And that first dream of nature so surrounds the spirit by mystery, in every age the same, when the mind

PANTHEISM THE SOUL OF GREECE.

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emerges out of the child's dream of God into the youth's dream. As was the dream of the youthful world, so is it still of the youthful nation, the youthful mind. It was the myth of Egypt and of Greece; Nature beheld as a terrible and inexorable beauty. In England in this age how difficult it is to conceive the mind of the ancient Hellene-the Pelasgic spirit-for we have been circumfused, and interfused with a new genius and soul. But so far as our mind could resemble the mind of that early time, the mind of Wordsworth resembled the genius of the soil that produced Plato-calm, statuesque, imaginative, stern and mournful, impassive and heroic. His Verses, his Sonnets, his Prelude and Excursion, seem to us more like the utterances of an ancient Grecian, and Greece was, through all her rites and ceremonies, her literature, sculpture, and architecture, the mirror of nature. That transparent language, that polished mind, how they reflected the lights of heaven and of earth. Yet nature on all the soul of Greece sits like a dead weight, there is a mournful beauty over all her works—a mournful beauty-the soul cannot fly beyond nature. Is not this felt to be as a whole the great generalization of her mind; the spirit was not free, for it was the slave and bondmaid of an iron and inexorable Necessity. This everywhere met it, and now this everywhere meets us in her Drama, her Literature, and her Life-Pantheism! that word expresses the soul of Greece, and for the period of which we speak it expresses the soul of Wordsworth too.

that delightful dream-it is the summer garden of the soul; we sail through the glittering Archipelago; we touch the fair Hesperides-gorgeous heavens-radiant earth-glorious seas; what can man or angel want more? It is the moment of life's beauty-the Gods! We are the Gods-Creation behold it! Dissolution! Ah! we will not touch that dream-and the spirit-why it can shed and receive divinity from all things around it! from the silver linings of the clouds-from the golden groves and blossoms of the trees-from the perpetual choral chaunt of the hours and the birds, as they sing and chime responsive to each other-Phantasmal!-ah! if it be so-see the leaves are rent from the trees-and the blossoms fair haired, and the beautiful flowers, they die! die? what is that? and the ice comes heavily and sails over our fair river, and the gloom blots our Pleiades from the sky, and Love too; our beautiful fair haired boy, and our Jo they have gone from us. Alas thou beautiful nature, thou hast thy terrors-thy portonts-death is beautiful, but what if death be the dissolving essence, and life never find itself again.

And thus the Grecian found his only consolation, his only ministration in nature was in the identifying himself with nature. He never rose above her, In a word is not this the difference between the drama of the Greek and the drama of Shakspeare-Necessity? it runs through the whole plot upon the stage. The Greek never recognised his freedom. How was it possible? The identity between the mind of Wordsworth and the mind of the ancient Pelasgian will realise to you the

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difference between the mind of Wordsworth and Shakspeare. How mournful it is that eminent critics try our Gothic drama by the rules laid down for the poets of Athens-Time! Space! these are the Unities which must not, according to Warton and other critics, be outraged. Although since then the whole mind and genius of the globe has had brought to it, as to us new conditions. The moral of the Grecian drama is Necessity. Necessity is the great lesson we derive from Panthea, the spirit of nature-the spirit of Greece. The genius of Shakspeare's drama, in contradistinction to the mind of the Grecian, is Moral Freedom.

We are now contemplating a period of the history of our poet, when this sentiment of moral freedom but very slightly impressed him, he was held in a pleasing bondage, he was contented to breathe an atmosphere beyond which he could not pass. His faith was of too lofty a kind to sink to the cold nonchalance of Pope; but his mind hurried away into long and glittering abstractions, to speculations tinted with roseate colourings, and Nature was the centre of every beautiful and radiant dream. He turned aside the boughs of trees, and descended into the depths of caverns, and passed over difficult heights, and through subterranean chambers to find the fairy gnome, the intimations of whose presence perpetually met him; and when he penetrated to her court, Nature was the fairy, she was the Titania, the Ariel whom he had followed so ardently and long. Joyous unrest,-the cloud had not dimmed the star, the autumn had not touched the tree, the frost had not laid

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a finger on the river; now and then perhaps the shadowy folds of some darker drapery might rustle behind the foliage of the wood, a shadow of a shroud sometimes clothed the hill; but yet like the partial frown on the face of a beloved beauty, it only intoxicated our Poet the more. The spirit of his homage to nature at this time is not less than enchantment, and Nature, Nature is his everlasting solace and song.

You have often heard Wordsworth mentioned by the side of Milton; but what in a word is the grand distinction between the two? is it not this that Milton, high over all his learning and his scholarship, over all his taste and through all his genius, heard the awful words of the Hebrew ritual sounding and surging "The Lord our God is one Lord," while Wordsworth through all his musings and his haunts, in the midst of all his readings and his delights, was perpetually followed by a beautiful Panthea. a beautiful Panthea. We could imagine him perpetually engaged in his earlier years in the utterance of the sublime prayer with which Socrates closes his discourse to Phædrus: "Oh beloved Pan, and all ye other Gods of this place, grant me to become beautiful in the inner man, and that whatever outward things I have, may be at peace with those within." Milton was essentially Hebrew, and Wordsworth essentially Greek. How sublime were both, we feel and well know. The mind of Wordsworth had no angles, it was smoothed and polished with exquisite grace and finish, the mind of Milton was rugged and unhewn, as the stones with which Elijah reared the altar on Mount

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