PHEDRUS AND SOCRATES.

55

keenly alive to natural impressions as Burns, but he heard voices rolling through all things which never fell on the Scottish poet's ear. He was carried beyond himself; inspired with divine phrenzy. It was a turbulent joy-it was a palpitation of heart, like that the young Egyptian felt before the veiled figure of Sais-it was not happy-no passion is happy. But we have only to notice that he stands here on the threshold of the temple charmed and entranced with nature as a mighty and beautiful being. It is the joy and poetry of a present passion; he has not yet attained the power

If

"To class the cabinet

Of his sensations."

you would see what he was at this period as compared with what he became, carry your mind back to the beautiful scene on the banks of the Illissus, where beneath the shade of the plane tree, and agnus castus, amidst the gleaming marble images of Grecian Nymphs, and the shrill sounds from the grasshoppers overhead, Socrates and Phædrus sat conversing the whole of that long summer's day. Our poet now realises in history that madness of which the Grecian sage discourses to his young companion. Phædrus and Socrates-Tintern Abbey and the Excursion-Passion and Science; look at them side by side and they illustrate each other, and we know he learned to say afterwards,

"By grace divine,

Or reader of Wordsworth, do you know EBENEZER ELLIOTT; he may well serve us in what he was not, as an illustration of what Wordsworth was. In the Prelude the poet tells us he is

"Not used to make,

A present joy the subject of a song."

But that is precisely what Elliott does; he is not an Asthetic poet, or but so in a slight degree; poetry with him is not an art but an impulse; with him the love of nature always was, and ever remained a passion; once Wordsworth tells us

But

"The sounding cataract

Haunted him like a passion."

"That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures."

But nature never ceased to be all this with Elliott; he has never met with a thousandth part of the popularity he deserves, although he has been honored with the love and the lofty word of some of the most eminent critics of our day, among whom we may mention Thomas Carlyle, and Robert Southey; indeed Elliott had much in common especially with those two eminent men; perhaps he stands especially in the same relation to Wordsworth as a poet, in which Carlyle stands as a prose writer; he hurls and thunders his words along like tempests; or he sobs them forth with tearful and pitying tenderness; he cannot hold back his emotion; he is

EBENEZER ELLIOTT-A POET OF NATURE.

57

alternately the laureate of cursing and swearing, and of sympathetic emotions and tears; frequently we have a line or couplet sweet and full as any Wordsworth uttered, and presenting as bright a picture to the imagination as when he paints to us a scene

"Where the old woods worship God,
Where his pencil paints the sod."

No poet is more at home

"Within the sun-lit forest,

Beneath the bright blue sky,

Where fountains flow and wild flowers blow."

And he so sensitive to beauty felt the power and majesty of nature in an equal degree, as when he says, in imagery which many will think too daring,

"Alone beneath the sky

I stood the storm before;
No! God, the storm and I,
We trod the desert floor."

What an Hogarthian Deserted Village we have in the "Splendid Village," and in the "Ranter," and the "Village Patriarch."

"When daisies blush, and wind-flowers wet with dew;
When shady lanes with Hyacinths are blue;

When the Elm blossoms o'er the brooding bird,

And wild and wide the plover's wail is heard;
Where melts the mist on mountains far away,

No more the shouting youngsters shall convene,
To play at leap-frog on the village green,
While lasses ripening into love admire,

And youth's first raptures cheer the gazing sire.
The Green is gone! and barren splendours gleam
Where hizzed the gander at the passing team,
And the gay traveller from the city praised

The poor man's cow, and weary, stopp'd and gazed."

This was the burden of most of Elliott's Poetry-English Scenery-England's

"Blasted homes and much enduring men."

But this sentiment as we have said intruded too much into his poetical inspiration; for wherever we feel or see a joy or sorrow too powerfully, that broader view in which nature and time become the ministers of providence, and thus the inspiration of the poet,-is lost, and the personal emotions of the mere author become inferior to those wider views which make the artist the minister and prophet of God. This it is too which frequently gives to Elliott so much pungency and force, the memory of which will occur to the reader of his poems. From what we have said, our readers will gather that Elliott was in no sense an Esthetic Poet; he did not subject and school his impulses and his passions; he wrote on no method or principle of composition, but he had a keen ear for the sounds of beauty, as he had a keen eye for all the sights of loveliness. He, like Wordsworth, has also localized his impressions throwing over the scenery of his neighbourhood the

DIFFICULTIES OF LIFE.

59

hallowing lustre of his genius; but the writings of our author glow like glorious and full-orbed planets through the clear, calm, cold light of memory, Elliott's verses have all the splendour of the day-beam about them. We are sure that the eye shone brighter while they were composed, and the heart beat more quickly with the rapture of the inspiration. He mounted upwards in a chariot of fire, but his steed plunged and floated through lightning, and through sunbeams, and sometimes sunk down sprawling in bogs of very unpoetic expletive. He was a poet of nature, but not of a calm, and holy and purified nature-the poet of sensuousness-but the sensuousness of colouring and sound and scenery, the poet of passion, but passion winged not by lusts but by lightnings, and filled and inflamed not by wild and evil desires, but by wrath for wrongs unatoned, and evils unexpiated. He exaggerated sentiments therefore as all such men do-or seem to doand hurled his bolts sometime for the purpose of crushing a demon, and sometimes to annihilate a gnat.

To return, from dissertation to narrative.

The early years of Wordsworth's life are very suggestive of thought. It would seem that his friends were most desirous that he should eventually enter the Church, and for the Church he would seem to have been eminently qualified; it is perhaps doubtful how far in his first years he was the subject of impressions transcending the religion of nature, and the absence probably of profound convictions, and the presence of that affection