He

sions. He regarded other men chiefly as natural influences acting on himself; but he never was inclined to identify Nature with either Man or God; for freedom, immortality, and a spiritual God were of the very essence of his own meditative world. He is not specifically the poet of Nature, nor the poet of Man, nor the poet of Truth, nor the poet of Religion; he is the poet of all separate living emanations from Nature, or from Man or God. Contemplative as he is, his mind was too concentrated and intense for general Truth. He fixed his imagination and his life too entirely and intensely on single centres of influence. could not pass from the one to the other, and grasp many at once, so as to discern their mutual relations, in the discrimination of which Truth consists. He kept to single influences: solitary contemplative communion with all forms of life which did not disturb the contemplative freedom of his spirit, was his strength. His genius was universal, but was not comprehensive; it did not hold many things, but it held much. You see this especially in his larger poems: he is like one of his own "bees that murmur by the hour in foxglove-bells." He cannot move gradually through a train of thought or a consecutive narrative. He flies from bell to bell, and sucks all the honey deliberately out of each. Hence he was so fond of the sonnet, because it was just suited to embody one thought; yet it seldom exhausted for him one subject, and there is often an injury to his genius in the transition from sonnet to sonnet when he wrote a series on one theme. His "plain imagination and severe," as he himself called it, isolated whatever it dealt with, brought it into immediate contact with his own spirit, and so drew from it slowly and patiently every drop of sweet or sad or stern influence that it had the power to give off. But it is with him consciously influence, and influence only. He never humanises the spirits of natural objects, as Shelley did. He puts no fairy into the flower,-no dryad into the tree,-no nymph into the river;-he is too much of a realist for that, and he has far too intense a consciousness of the simple magnificence of moral freedom. Indeed he has far too inelastic a human centre of contemplation for that to be possible. He regards Nature as a tributary to Man, sending him influences and emanations which pass into the very essence of his life, but never constitute that life. They are not like in kind to humanity. To liken them to higher beings is but to find "loose types of things through all degrees;" and when he addresses the river thus

"O glide, fair stream, for ever glide,
Thy quiet soul on all bestowing,

Till all our minds for ever flow

As thy deep waters now are flowing,"

there is not even a momentary attempt to abstract from the

visible water, and bestow a human "soul" upon the river;-he only gathers up the spiritual influences which emanate from it into a living centre, just as he elsewhere spreads abroad the "soul of happy sound" through earth and air. He has the deepest conviction that different objects and scenes do radiate specific influences of their own, not dependent on the mere mood of the contemplative observer. So much is this the case, that to him even sleep is a calmer and more spiritual thing amongst the mountains than it can be among men,—

"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;

His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,

The sleep that is among the lonely hills."

But these radiated influences are never human till they touch the human soul, and are transmuted by that touch. Rich and almost infinite streams of power and beauty Nature does pour into Man; but first when they reach that free and solitary spirit which draws down other and higher influences to meet them from God, do they fulfil their simple destiny. If any one chooses to deny that there is an absolute reality in the expressions of Nature to human minds,-that they are something as unalterable as the meaning of a smile or a frown, he may and must say with Hazlitt that Wordsworth "never looks abroad into universality," but overwhelms natural objects with the weight of his own arbitrary associations. If the dancing daffodils are no real image of simple joy,-if the "power of hills" be a vague and misleading metaphor,-if the "welcome snowdrop"

"That child of winter, prompting thoughts that climb
From desolation towards the genial prime "-

can tell no true tale of immortality to the simple-hearted when sinking beneath the snows of age; if it be a "mere confusion of ideas" for a poet to believe

"That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved

To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song;
And from his alder shades and rocky falls,
And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flowed along my dreams;"

if there be nothing ghostly in the yew-tree, no "witchery" in the sky, and no eternal voices in the sea; if, in a word, "the invisible things of Him from the creation" are not "clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made,"-then indeed was Wordsworth "vain in his imagination," and "his foolish heart was darkened."

But Wordsworth did not doubt about these things; he knew them; and he knew well too the kind of human character they

served to make or mar. His own nature was of this primitive humanity :

Long have I loved what I behold

The night that calms, the day that cheers;
The common growth of mother earth

Suffices me her tears, her mirth,

Her humblest mirth and tears."

He knew how these simple influences could not be received into the heart without receiving also

he knew that no heart which "watches and receives" what quiet nature gives, can have any of the preoccupying restlessness which evil brings; he knew that he

"Who affronts the eye of solitude, shall learn

That her mild nature can be terrible."

And thus we have a set of characters of simple grain, all of them fed by the life of nature, but all religious, spiritual, and free,such as Michael, the Leech-gatherer, and the Wanderer in “The Excursion ;" while we have Peter Bell, and, in part, the Solitary, on the other hand, whose personal strength had been spent in "affronting the eye of solitude."

The result of almost all Wordsworth's universal experience of the influences of nature acting alone on man is gathered up into his three poems, "Lucy," "Ruth," and "The Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle" (the last, perhaps, the most perfect effort of his genius): the first being his conceptions of the plastic influences of Nature in moulding us into beauty; the second, of her exciting influences in awakening the passions; the last, of her tranquillising influences on a mind of thought. If we take with these the poem on the lonely Leech-gatherer, in which he contrasts the instinctive joy and life of nature with the burden of human free-will; the great "Ode on Immortality," in which he brings natural life into contrast with the supernatural, speaking of "those high instincts before which our mortal nature doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised;" and finally, the lines in which he draws together Nature, free-will, and God into one of the sublimest poems of our language, the " Ode to Duty,"-we have in essence nearly all the truth that Wordsworth anxiously gleaned from a life of severe meditation, though a very slight epitome indeed of the innumerable living influences from which that truth was learned. If any one doubts the real affinity between the expressions written on the face of Nature and those human expressions which so early interpret themselves to even infants that to account for them except as a natural language

seems impossible, the exquisite poem on "Lucy" ought to convert him. The contrast it illustrates between Wordsworth's faith in real emanations from all living or unliving "mute insensate" things, and the humanised "spirits" of life in the Greek mythological poetry, is very striking. Influences come from all these living objects, but personified influences never.

"Three years she grew in sun and shower;
Then Nature said, 'A lovelier flower

On earth was never sown.
This child I to myself will take,

She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.

Myself will to my darling be

Both law and impulse; and with me
The girl, in rock and plain,

In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power

To kindle or restrain.

She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;

And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.

The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willows bend :

Nor shall she fail to see

Even in the motion of the storm

Grace that shall mould the maiden's form

By silent sympathy.

The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place

Where rivulets dance their wayward round;

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face.

And vital feelings of delight

Shall rear her form to stately height

Her virgin bosom swell:

These thoughts to Lucy I will give,

When she and I together live

Here in this happy dell.'

Thus Nature spake the work was done.

How soon my Lucy's race was run!

She died; and left to me

This heath, this calm and quiet scene,
This memory of what hath been

And never more will be."

But we must not linger longer on an endless theme. Of the

poetry of Wordsworth that may, perhaps, never be said which

Wordsworth truly said of Burns, that "deep in the general heart of man his power survives;" for his is the poetry of solitude, and the “general heart of man" cannot bear to be alone. But there are some solitudes that cannot be evaded.

"Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills
The generations are prepared; the pangs,
The internal pangs, are ready-the dread strife
Of poor humanity's afflicted will,”-

-and then we leave the greatest poets of the great world, and look to one who was ever glad to gaze into the deepest depths of his own heart, of Nature, and of God. "The pangs, the internal pangs," were not ready for him. "Bright, solemn, and serene," perhaps he alone, of all the great men of that day, had seen the light of the countenance of God shining clear into the face of Duty:

"Stern Lawgiver! Yet thou dost wear

The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we any thing so fair

As is the smile upon thy face.

Flowers laugh before thee in their beds:
And fragrance in thy footing treads.

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

And the most ancient Heavens through thee are fresh and strong."

And therefore in his poems there will ever be a spring of something even fresher than poetic life-a pure, deep well of solitary joy.

'ART. II. THE RELATIONS OF ART TO RELIGION.

The Poetry of Christian Art. By A. F. Rio (English Translation). London: 1854.

Esthetic Papers. Edited by Elizabeth P. Peabody. Boston:

1849.

History of Latin Christianity. By Henry Hart Milman, D.D. (Volume VI. Chapters viii. ix. x.) London: 1855.

Pictures of Europe, framed in Ideas. By C. A. Bartol. Boston:

1855.

The Seven Lamps of Architecture. By John Ruskin. Second edition. London: 1855.

RELIGION never has existed in a state of entire independence upon Art. Art has been the universal language of the spirit of man seeking after God. It has its origin in the necessity of