prosecution of my design, since his removal from the sphere in which he long laboured, has placed him alike beyond the reach of praise and censure. His writings, as are those of every man that survive their author, are to be regarded now as a public legacy: nor is it too much to say that he bequeathed them for the accomplishment of a great and good purpose. He believed them to be "profitable for instruction;" and though made the sport of critics through a long life, he acquired a party which, if not large, had all the advantages that talent, wealth, and station could command. Under such auspices, he gained an elevation, to which his character as a poet by no means entitled him; and the few disciples he had already numbered, conceiving their great prototype to have earned his distinction, strove the more carefully to imitate his indefiniteness of expression, while the school to which they belonged boasted of increasing adherents. No judicious reader can look upon the inane metrical verbiage now palmed upon the fashionable world as poetry, without feeling painfully conscious that the patronage conferred upon Wordsworth was a national misfortune. None knew better than himself how greatly it tended to strengthen the confidence of his followers in the fancied purity of his style: hence, in a letter to a friend, he says "Tennyson is decidedly the first of our living poets."-" You will be pleased to hear that he expressed in the strongest terms his gratitude to my writings." To have attained what would seem to imply preeminence in the republic of letters, notwithstanding the contempt with which his puerilities were treated, was, after all, no mean achievement for a man of his limited genius. He owed it mainly to patient, untiring industry: for having no susceptibility that allowed him either to be provoked to resentment, or to be crushed into torpor, he plodded on in pursuit of his favourite amusement, until his claims to preferment could be no longer resisted. In him was assuredly exemplified the truth of the proverb nil sine magno Vita labore dedit mortalibus. Added to industry was an inviolable regard for truth; and it pleased him to provide lessons for those who respect "the good old age When Fancy was Truth's willing Page; Poetry, however, is "impassioned truth;" and he who invests heroes and peasants alike with meekness; who, when accounting Rob Roy "wise as brave," deems it necessary to crave forgiveness, "if the phrase be strong;" who, on one hand, would appear to be shocked at the discovery of a Robin* in chace of a butterfly, while, on the other, he can address a sexton over the remains of his late acquaintance in language † at which a cultivated mind almost revolts, obviously betrays a want of that faculty of the soul from which *"Art thou the bird whom Man loves best, Our little English Robin; The bird, who by some name or other The darling of children and men? Could Father Adam open his eyes † Mark the spot to which I point! Andrew's whole fire-side is there. all true poetry springs,-feeling—intense, well disciplined feeling. And such was Wordsworth! Shall I yet be told that evidence of tender emotion may be gleaned from his verse? Then it is surely to be found in his lament for the dead; for under no circumstances can it be more truly affirmed that "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." Here is an example: "She dwelt among the untrodden ways A Maid whom there were none to praise, And “A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! -Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. "She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, Oh! The difference to me!" The worth of this outpouring of a "wounded spirit" will be best estimated, when compared with an affecting passage from Othello's soliloquy over the body of Desdemona, where Emilia seeks admission to the Moor. "If she come in, she'll sure speak to my wife: My wife! my wife! what wife?—I have no wife : Some will be ready to denounce the comparison as invidious: it may possibly admit of such con struction: Quid enim contendat hirundo cycnis? That justice then may be done, I will select a stanza from Wordsworth's elegiac verses on the death of a brother, and place it in juxtaposition with another on a like melancholy subject, taken from a contemporary author, whom he declared to be deficient in feeling. "Full soon in sorrow did I weep, Taught that the mutual hope was dust, How miserably deep! All vanished in a single word, A breath, a sound, and scarcely heard, Sea-Ship drowned-Shipwreck so it came, The meek, the brave, the good, was gone; He who had been our living John Was nothing but a name." "Scion of chiefs and monarchs, where art thou? Fond hope of many nations, art thou dead? |