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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. 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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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. 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

WORDSWORTH AND MILTON.

39

Carmel. Both Milton and Wordsworth carried perpetually the sense of their own consciousness,-in the consciousness of Wordsworth we only behold the eclectic sympathy of Plato, but in Milton the savage grandeur of the prophet to whom "the word of the Lord came in a dream" in the caves of Horeb. Wordsworth would never believe in divine commissions, and supernatural communications; we have no hint of the word lying like a burning coal on the heart, waiting for utterance, and impatient and consumed until it be spoken; but in Milton we have frequent intimations of the spirit that in its unrest, believed in the possibility of being raised up to execute the Heaven-sent command. Like the Greeks of old, Wordsworth does not appear to have had any very clear idea that the world contained any absolute evil;-as is the modern faith, so we could conceive his to be, that evil was a necessity of our being, scarcely to be deplored. But Milton on the contrary held the objective character of all evil; with him it was the thing "the Lord hateth," and he fought against it like his own Abdiel, or Ithuriel. Wordsworth did not seek to elevate his ideas above the world around him when he sought to enter spiritual regions. Spiritual! the world was all spiritual-all holy-all beautiful-the floor of the temple lay everywhere-the lamp was in the eye, in the soul to illuminate every spot with the charm of beauty. Milton found in the most lovely or glorious things around him the likenesses of "things not seen;" to him the legend was real that by and by, the trampling footsteps of the thunder would crush the

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