God, but a place which Angels might delight to visit on embassies of love. All nature, through all her forms of existence, calls on man to rejoice with her in the goodness of the universal Parent. The stars in their courses, the sun and moon in their changes, by day and by night, display his glory; the seasons in succession, the land and the waters, reciprocally, distribute his bounty; every plant in its growth is pleasing to the eye, or wholesome for food; every animal in health is happy in the exercise of its ordinary functions; life itself is enjoyment. Yet in the heart of man there is something which incapacitates him from the full fruition of the blessings thus abundantly dealt around him something which has introduced disorder into his mind, and disease into the frame; darkening and bewildering his intellect; corrupting and inflaming his passions; and hurrying him by a fatality of impulse to that excess in every indulgence, which turns aliment into poison, and from the perversion of the social feelings produces strife, misery, and confusion to families, to nations, to the world. What is it? It is sin!This cannot have been in man from the beginning, otherwise his Creator could not be a God of holiness, order, and beneficence; nor would He have formed the universe so excellently fair, and so admirably conducive to the felicity of its inhabitants.

It is true, that we are encompassed with perils from the elements, from accidents, and from the constitution of things; but waiving the inquiry how far these may be the consequences of sin, all the sorrows inflicted by the act of God,' in earthquakes, famine, pestilence and storms, are but a drop in the cup of bitterness which man has mingled for himself." Fallen then, as he is, from his primitive state, and shorn of her beauty, though far less in proportion, as nature may be, on account of his transgression, there are still in the human breast those high capacities of enjoyment, connected with improvement, which were his original inheritance; and still throughout the universe there are those forms of sublimity and grace which are calculated to awaken and gratify those capacities: yet, without a new birth, if we may borrow the figure, the noblest powers of the understanding and the imagination remain latent, or, at most, are only passive to receive impressions, not to solicit them, and still less to reproduce them in solitude by reflection. We know that the grossest of rational beings are unconsciously affected by the gaiety and grandeur that surround them in the scenery of morning or midnight, the elevation of mountains, the immensity of forests, the luxuriance of vegetable, and the variety of animal life; yet how much happier would they be if they knew their happiness, and sought it where they could never fail to find it, in every sight and every sound, melancholy or cheerful, terrible or soothing. Minds opened, refined, and ennobled by education, and

led to communion with nature in quest of knowledge and pleasure, which stray hand in hand through all her walks, are prepared to meet the objects of their desire at all times and every where but hearts, regenerated by the Spirit of God, allied to minds thus expanded, are alone capable of exercising all the energies, and of enjoying all the privileges of the human soul in its intercourse with the visible creation, as the mirror of the power and perfections of Deity; or, rather, as "the hiding of his power," the veil of glory which he has cast round the thick darkness wherein he dwells withdrawn from mortal sight, yet. makes his presence felt wherever there is motion, breath, or being.

It was one of the most captivating dreams of ancient philosophy, one of its infant dreams, for the earliest idolatry sprang from this source, that there was a living Spirit in every orb of the universe; the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth itself, were conscious beings, acting and re-acting one on another by their respective influences. Superstition afterwards multiplied intelligences through the minor forms of nature, and turned them all into divinities. Hence the sympathetic intercourse, which exalted understandings may hold with animate and inanimate things, as the effects of one great cause, was debased into a false religion, in which the devotees, by a direct inversion of what reason would teach on such a subject, worshipped objects inferior to themselves, creatures of God, or creatures of the imagination. Language itself in its origin was composed of pictures in words; things that were representing things that were not; and men spoke, as well as wrote, in hieroglyphics, before abstract terms and letters were invented. Poetry in all ages has retained the figures of primitive speech as its most graceful and venerable ornaments: hence its professors have invariably realized the dream of philosophy, and given souls, not only to the host of heaven, but to all the shapes and substances on earth. Mountains, trees, rivers, elements, &c. are personified, apostrophized, and made both the subjects and the objects of hope, fear, love, anger, revenge, and every human affection. With the multitude of poets these are only technical modes of expression employed to charm or astonish their readers; but with Mr. Wordsworth, the Author of the extraordinary volume before us, they are far otherwise. Common place prosopopoeias he disdains to use; he has a poetical mythology of his own. He loves nature with a passion amounting almost to devotion; and he discovers throughout her works an omnipresent spirit, which so nearly resembles God in power and goodness, that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the reverence which he pays to it, from the homage due to the Supreme alone. In proportion, all subordinate identities and phenomena, whether on the earth or in the sky, excite in him

joy or wonder, corresponding to the character of simplicity or complexity, beauty or sublimity, inherent in them, and holding mysterious affinity with congenial qualities in the Poet's own soul. Hence, in the poems formerly published, he frequently divulged sensations of rapture, surprise, or admiration, unintelligible to vulgar minds; and avowed sympathies too profound for utterance, in the contemplation of every-day objects, which ordinary eyes pass over as mere matters of fact, no more demanding attention than a truism requires demonstration. Consequently, such passages provoked the scorn of superficial readers, and even incurred the heaviest censure of self-constituted critics in the highest place, solely because the poet, when most solemnly touched, either awakened ludicrous associations, or failed to present his peculiar ideas in such colours as to excite answering emotions in bosoms unaccustomed to feel and reflect after his manner. Few people would be sentimentally struck by the unexpected appearance of a host of dancing daffodils' on the margin of a lake, 'whose sparkling waves danced beside them ;' and still fewer would carry away the image and treasure it up in memory for the occasional exhilaration of their private thoughts; yet Mr. Wordsworth, after fancifully describing such a merry dance of flowers and sunbeams on the waters, says,

• Oft when on my couch I lie,

In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.' Poems, Vol.II. p. 50.

Perhaps every one who has been brought up in the country, the first time he hears the cuckoo in spring, is vividly reminded of the sports of his boyhood, by a sound so familiarly old, that he never remembers not to have heard it at that season of the year. None, however, except a poet of the most curious sensibility, who at once lives along the line of past existence, and can dwell on any part of it at pleasure, would be thrown into such a trance, at the call of the cuckoo, as to realize the scenes of infancy with raptures like the following:

I can listen to thee yet;
-Can lie upon the plain,
And listen till I do beget

That golden time again.

O blessed bird! the earth we pace,

Again appears to be

An unsubstantial fairy place,

That is fit home for thee. Poems, Vol. II. p. 59.

All men, at least in imagination, love the light, the air, the freedom and the quiet of the hills, the woods, and the streams of retirement, incomparably more than the crowded streets, the murky atmosphere, and the prison-like walls of a populous city; but he must have an eye purified to behold invisible realities, that surround him like the horses and chariots of fire guarding the prophet and his servant, and an ear opened to receive ineffable, sounds, like the voice of the heavens when they are telling the glory of God,-who, with Mr. Wordsworth, in looking abroad on creation, can listen to the still sad music of humanity,' and perceive

A presence that disturbs him with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.'

Lyrical Ballads, &c. Vol. I. p. 196.

Mr. Wordsworth often speaks in ecstatic strains of the pleasures of infancy. If we rightly understand him, he conjectures that the soul comes immediately from a world of pure felicity, when it is born into this troublous scene of care and vicissitude. He tells us, that our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting' of our antecedent state; that

'Trailing clouds of glory we do come
From God who is our home.'

Heaven lies around us in our infancy:'

but 'the shades of the prison-house' begin to close on the boy; the youth travels further from this east,' yet still accompanied by the vision of diminishing splendour, till at length the man perceives it

'die away

Into the light of common day!' Poems, Vol. II. p. 151.

This brilliant allegory, (for such we must regard it,) is employed to illustrate the mournful truth, that looking back from middle age to the earliest period of remembrance, we find

That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth,'

since the time, when every fresh object created wonder or delight, and every day's experience was an acquisition of knowVOL. III. N. S.

C

ledge, a discovery of power, a new kind of enjoyment: but this golden age is gone for ever, and

nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.'

Such is Life, a gradual receding from beatitude to apathy, which nothing can re-quicken or illumine but the genial influences of nature, cheering, strengthening, and elevating the mind of her votaries. And what is Death? Hear it from a meditation on the demise of Mr. Fox.

A power is passing from the earth

To breathless nature's dread abyss;
But when the Mighty pass away,
What is it more than this,

That man, who is from God sent forth,

Doth yet again to God return?

Such ebb and flow must ever be,

Then wherefore should we mourn?' Poems, Vol. II. p. 140.

The question in the last two lines needs no answer to that in the four preceding ones we must reply distinctly :-" It is appointed to men once to die, but after this the JUDGMENT.' Heb. ix. v. 27.

Intimations of sensibilities and opinions thus refined and recondite, abound in Mr. Wordsworth's former volumes, from which these extracts are taken; but in the work before us, the fruit of long labour, experience, and meditation, directed by Sovereign genius, and executed with consummate skill, the principles and evidence of the Author's system of ethics, are splendidly, if not clearly and fully unfolded. Here we are taught, that communion with those forms of nature which excite no morbid passion, but which possess ineffable affinities to the mind of man, so softens, controls, and exalts his feelings, that, -every asperity of temper being softened down into tranquillity, and every perverseness of reason subdued into willing obedience to truth;-he, whose soul is thus harmonized within itself, cannot choose but seek for objects of kindred love in natures resembling his own. Meanwhile, as the imagination is purified, and the affections are enlarged, the understanding is progressively enlightened, and the subject of this happy change, desiring that which is good, looks for it every where, and discovers it in every thing; till aversion, hatred, contempt, envy, and every malignant or disquieting passion cease to be known, except by name; or if the signs of them are discovered in others, they awaken only compassion, while nothing can abate or destroy the love of God, of Nature, and of Man. By this blissful converse of the human soul with the soul of things,' the former grows wiser and better of necessity, while it spontaneously surrenders