with her.' Her information various, her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature, and her taste a perfect Electrometer."

After staying in Racedown about two years they left and took a house at Allfoxden, principally to enjoy the benefit of Coleridge's society.

Allfoxden is a village near Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire, not far from Bristol, among the Quantock hills, and of his dwelling here he has afforded us some very beautiful and interesting descriptions in many of his poems, and in the poems of Coleridge too, who was his constant companion, we find some very lively and more than graphic traces of the beauty of the spot they had chosen. Miss Wordsworth indeed expresses herself with rapture of their residence here, and speaks of it with greater delight than any of their other residences in England.

It was at this time when at Racedown and Allfoxden that Wordsworth made his only effort at dramatic writing, and produced The Borderers, which however was not published until nearly half a century afterwards, in 1842. We confess we do not turn to it with any especial feelings of pleasure; it wants most of the high tones and interests of such writing. Wordsworth had perhaps few of the elements of the Dramatist, and chose a subject which it is marvellous to suppose was interesting to him. He had not the ready sympathy the Dramatist needs-he had not that various style which gives to the Drama the perpetual charm of novelty

there is a great likeness in the whole Dramatis Personæ. The action of the piece too is very harrowing; very repulsive-the character of Oswald is even far more horrible than Iago, in Othello; his criminality is apparently motiveless; he is described as one of those whose nature it is to

"Spin motives out of their own bowels,

There needs no other motive

Than that most strange incontinence in crime
Which haunts this Oswald. Power is life to him
And breath, and being; where he cannot govern
He will destroy."

The production of this piece belongs to that period when the mind of our author was ill at ease with itself, and how prone the mind in such moods is to turn to a process of moral and mental anatomy the reader may perhaps very well know. Such a period in the life of Shakspeare produced the moralizing and soliloquizing Jacques; such a period in the life of Schiller produced the character of Woolf, not altogether unlike Oswald, but having nevertheless the redeeming circumstance of motive for his atrocious and unnatural iniquities. Minds disposed to the pressure of their own character and individuality, are also usually disposed to watch the movements of other minds with a morbid interest; they are the men who would say

"We dissect

The senseless body, and why not the mind?

There are strange sights-the mind of man upturned,

Is in all natures a strange spectacle ;

In some a hideous one."

MORAL ANATOMY.

97

And quietly to note this spectacle of the upturned mind is a sufficient motive with many men for even the perpetration of great guilt. The old painter purchased the slave that he might watch and paint a death agony. The Entomolgist fixes the insect on the pin that he may watch its beauties as they are transfixed before him; and a moral anatomist will sometimes stretch a spirit on the rack, and so make it suffer, in order that he may be gratified with the curious spectacle of its agonies. But we may doubt if it be possible to become a Dramatist by following this course of study. We do not gather that Wordsworth had himself any great regard for this piece, though an author's estimate of his own works is proverbially no criterion of their excellence. As we have said, it is repulsive in the developement of the story and the plot. The characters are stamped by a great sameness, and the leading personage whose strength and criminality attracts our attention most, is incomplete, and strikes us as in finishing strikingly out of harmony with the idea of his power and the height of his sin. What the reader will expect to meet with however he will find many thoughts of singular force, and strength, and beauty. Expressions and images in the highest degree pictorial; and look at the following passages,

"Great actions move our admiration chiefly
Because they carry in themselves an earnest
That we can suffer greatly.

Action is transitory-a step, a blow,

The motion of a muscle-this way or that

'Tis done and in the after vacancy

We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed

K

Again

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity."

"It is

As you must needs have deeply felt it is
In darkness and in tempest that we seek
The majesty of him who rules the world.
Benevolence, that has not heart to use
The wholesome ministry of pain and evil,
Becomes at last weak and contemptible."

The Borderers is another of those works produced in the fever and excitement of mind consequent upon the French Revolution-the spectacle of the wonderful mingling together of colossal crimes and magnanimous virtues. It exhibits a curious interest in human nature -and suffering intense and terrible too-but it is the most deficient in leading moral motive of almost any work of the Poet's-it awakens thought but it does not sooth or lull feeling-it finds the mind unhappy and leaves it so. Every scene flows on through the terrible and the awful majesties of nature; there is nothing to calm the mind with sunshine or with peace-there are no visions the eye delights to recal-everything taxes the feelings and the affections-if the evil man and the evil deed do not in themselves triumph, yet they launch a bolt with fatal effect on the forms of love and virtue. The good that seeks to operate through the piece finds itself disappointed, and it appears only as a momentary hallucination, speedily put out in the dark night of crime. In this piece man stands shelterless against the

craft of subtlety and villainy-his soul rings and peals indeed with the intimations of a nobler being, but it stands out in a black and dreary waste, and its picture may be sketched from a few lines of the poem

"On a ridge of rocks

A lonesome chapel stands, deserted now:
The bell is left which no one dares remove;

And when the stormy wind blows o'er the peak,

It rings as if a human hand were there

To pull the cord."

It was while fixed at Allfoxden that our Poet and his party became the subjects of most ludicrous suspicion and interest, which would have afforded fine fun to the Jeffrey tribe. Coleridge and Wordsworth, and sometimes Southey, from their roving propensities were regarded as a band of very doubtful characters, and the Wordsworths in consequence were eventually quietly expelled from their village, which derives a transient honor from the men, it could not find a single villager able to comprehend. Coleridge, writing to Cottle, a friend of the group, and their Bookseller and Publisher, says: "Wordsworth has been caballed against so long and so loudly, that he has found it impossible to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden estate to let him the house after their first agreement is expired, so he must quit it at Midsummer. Whether we shall be able to procure him a house and furniture near Stowey, we know not, and yet we must, for the hills and the woods, and the streams, and the sea, and the shore, would break forth into reproaches against us if we did not