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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

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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.

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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. I. 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,

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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

itself to the moralizing influence of all external circumstances "working together for good," till

'whate'er we see,

Whate'er we feel, by agency direct
Or indirect shall tend to feed and nurse
Our faculties, shall fix in calmer seats

Of moral strength, and raise to loftier heights
Of love divine, our intellectual Soul !'

Excursion, Book IV. pp. 197, 198.

Moreover, the soul possesses the power of self-regeneration, and at her own will, by her own activity, in the process of this mystic intercourse with nature, can raise herself from profligacy and wretchedness to virtue and repose. This the Author has endeavoured to exemplify at great length, and with_prodigious effect, in the history of one of his characters, the Wanderer, as well as to establish it by argumentation in the eloquent advice of that character to another, the Solitary, in the fourth book of this poem.

Two questions immédiately arise out of the contemplation of this dazzling theory :-Is it true? Is it all?-True it undoubtedly is to a certain extent; but as undoubtedly it is not all,-all that is necessary to bring in, and constitute, and secure, happiness to man, at once a mortal and an immortal being. The love of Nature is the purest, the most sublime, and the sweetest emotion of the mind, of which the senses are the ministers; yet the love of Nature alone cannot ascend from earth to heaven, conducting us, as by the steps of Jacob's ladder, to the love of God; nor can it descend from heaven to earth, leading us by similar gradations to the universal love of Man ;-otherwise it had not been necessary for Him, "who thought it not robbery to be equal with God," to take upon Himself" the form of a servant,' and die "the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God by HIMSELF." Every system of ethics which insists not on the extinction of sin in the human soul, by the only means through which sin can be extinguished, and everlasting righteousness substituted, is radically defective; and by whatever subtlety of reasoning, or force of language it may be sustained or recommended, it is a snare to him who receives it as sufficient, because excellent and unexceptionable as it may be, so far as it goes, it falls short of the extremity of a sinner's case, and "all have sinned.” We do not mean to infer, that Mr. Wordsworth excludes from his system the salvation of man, as revealed in the Scriptures, but it is evident that he has not made "Jesus Christ the chief corner-stone" of it: otherwise, throughout this admirable poem, he would not so seldom, or, rather, so slightly have alluded to

"redemption in His blood." The pastor of the church among the mountains' indeed, touches delightfully on the Christian's hopes on each side of the grave; but this is only in character, and his sentiments are not vitally connected with the system of natural religion, if we may call it so, which is developed in this poem. The sentiments of the Author, when he speaks in his own person, and of the Wanderer, who is his oracle, are connected with it; yet in the fourth book, where a misanthrope and sceptic is to be reclaimed, when there was not only an opportunity, but a necessity for believers in the Gospel to glorify its truths, by sending them home with conviction to the conscience of a sinner, they are rather tacitly admitted, than either avowed or urged; while the soul's own energy to restore itself to moral sanity, by meliorating intercourse with the visible creation, is set forth in strains of the most fervid eloquence, and the theme adorned with the most enchanting illustrations. Now the Wanderer

had early learned

To reverence the Volume which displays
The mystery, the life which cannot die:'

and the Author, in the exordium of the sixth book, sufficiently proclaims his orthodoxy by a votive panegyric on the Church of England. If then salvation can be obtained only through faith in the sacrifice of Christ, according to that Volume' which the Wanderer reverenced, and according to the doctrines of that Church' which the Author acknowledges, how came the terrors of the Lord, and the consolations of His Spirit to make no part even of that discourse which these two zealous preachers of righteousness held with the unbeliever, at the time when his heart might be supposed most accessible to their influence,-when the arrow of Death had just passed him by, and slain at his feet one of the four beings, who were the whole human race to him in his little world of solitude? This is not a captious inquiry: we are sure that Mr. Wordsworth must have thought much on the subject; we would hope he thinks rightly. If he does not, we are sorry for his own sake, and not for his only, but for the sake of the thousands, in future generations, who may be his readers; for had the Gospel occasion to be recommended by "the words which man's wisdom teacheth," no one living is more eminently gifted for the purpose than Mr. Wordsworth. It is true, that the Gospel has not occasion to be thus recommended, yet on what theme can the greatest talents be better employed? It is the cant of ignorance to say, that the truths of religion are unsuitable themes for poetry of the highest order, for then were they unsuitable themes for the harp of David, and

for the songs of Angels. It is the cant of scepticism, to say that genius is debased by evangelical notions, and that all sacred poetry must needs be akin to the strains of Sternhold and Hopkins:-Milton and Cowper have rescued these subjects from so ill-founded, so inane a charge. The discussion of this topic would however carry us too far. Mr. Wordsworth could so sing of Christ's kingdom, if it has indeed come into his heart, as would for ever set the question at rest; and we hope that in the promised prelude or sequel to this volume, he will. "A Philosophical Poem, containing Views of Man, Nature, and Society," would be miserably imperfect if it involved no contemplations on the eternal destiny of man. Nature may indeed teach her worshipper, by reason and analogy, that in a future state the good must be happy; but neither reason nor analogy will justify the presumption that the wicked can be so. What becomes then of man, when, to use the poet's own phrase, borrowed from Scripture, he who came from God

'doth yet again to God return?'

Mr. Wordsworth must have been haunted in his retirement by this inquiry, and it is not conceivable that he can have contented himself with a doubtful answer to it. A poet, who seems all eye when he sees, all ear when he listens, all intellect when he reasons, all sensibility when he is touched, cannot have been indifferently affected by the awful burthen of that revelation from God, the authenticity of which he allows, and in the meaning of which he must feel himself as deeply interested, as if all the threatenings of the law, and all the promises of the Gospel, were addressed personally to him, and to him alone. We long, therefore, to learn his 'sensations and opinions' on this subject, for we are not satisfied with the scanty intimations of them scattered through this volume. On other subjects we are willing to pay to Mr. Wordsworth, the homage due to his exalted genius, and on this we are anxious to have an opportunity of listening to him with equal deference. But once for all, we must avow our conviction, that the moral system' of any man professing Christianity, which does not include, as its immortal principle, "redemption through the blood of Christ," is inconsistent with the Author's own creed; and however glorious or beautiful in appearance, it will prove a pageant as unsubstantial as Prospero's vision, which, even while it is contemplated, will vanish, and

Leave not a rack behind.'

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After these long preliminaries, which we have introduced to avoid much obscurity and digression hereafter, we shall briefly-we lament that we can only briefly-advert to the contents of this volume.

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