effectually than any other words could have done. In this play, indeed, and in the Midsummer Night's Dream, all Eden is unlocked before us, and the whole treasury of natural and supernatural beauty poured out profusely, to the delight of all our faculties. We dare not trust ourselves with quotations; but we refer to those plays generally, to the forest scenes in As You Like It, to the rustic parts of the Winter's Tale,-several entire scenes in Cymbeline, and in Romeo and Juliet, and many passages in all the other plays,-as illustrating this love of nature and natural beauty of which we have been speaking,the power it had over the poet and the power it imparted to him. Who else would have thought, on the very threshold of treason and midnight murder, of bringing in so sweet and rural an image as this, at the portal of that blood-stained castle of Macbeth ?

"This guest of summer,

The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,

By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,

Buttress, nor coigne of vantage,' but this bird

Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle."

Nor is this brought in for the sake of an elaborate contrast between the peaceful innocence of this exterior and the guilt and horrors that are to be enacted within. There is no hint of any such suggestion, but it is set down from the pure love of nature and reality, because the kindled mind of the poet brought the whole scene before his eyes, and he painted all that he saw in his vision. The same taste predominates in that emphatic exhortation to evil, where Lady Macbeth says,

"Look like the innocent flower,

But be the serpent under it."

And in that proud boast of the bloody Richard,—

"But I was born so high:

Our aery buildeth in the cedar's top,

And dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun!"

The same splendor of natural imagery, brought simply and directly to bear upon stern and repulsive passions, is to be found in the cynic rebukes of Apemantus to Timon,

"Will these moist trees,

That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels,

And skip when thou point'st out? Will the cold brook,
Candied with ice, caudle thy morning taste

To cure thine o'er-night's surfeit?"

1 Coigne of vantage, convenient corner.

No one but Shakspeare would have thought of putting this noble picture into the taunting address of a snappish misanthrope,any more than the following into the mouth of a mercenary murderer,

"Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,

And in their summer beauty kiss'd each other!"

Or this delicious description of concealed love into that of a regretful and moralizing parent,

"But he, his own affection's counsellor,
Is to himself so secret and so close,
As is the bud bit with an envious worm

Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air,
Or dedicate his beauty to the sun."

And yet all these are so far from being unnatural, that they are no sooner put where they are, than we feel at once their beauty and their effect, and acknowledge our obligations to that exuberant genius which alone could thus throw out graces and attractions where there seemed to be neither room nor call for them. In the same spirit of prodigality he puts this rapturous and passionate exaltation of the beauty of Imogen into the mouth of one who is not even a lover,

""Tis her breathing that .

Perfumes the chamber thus! The flame o' the taper
Bows towards her! and would under-peep her lids,

To see the enclosed lights, now canopied

Under these windows, white and azure, laced

With blue of heaven's own tinct!-On her left breast

A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops

I' the bottom of a cowslip!"

But we must break at once away from these manifold enchantments.1

t

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1770-1850.

4. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was born on the 7th of April, 1770, at Cockermouth, in Cumberland. His parents were of the middle class, and designed him for the church; but poetry and new prospects turned him into another path. His pursuit through life was poetry, and his profession that of stamp-distributor for the government, in the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland. He made his first appearance as a poet in 1793, by the publication of a thin quarto volume, entitled An Evening Walk; an Epistle in Verse, addressed to a Young

1 From a critique on "Hazlitt's Characters of Shakspeare," in the Edinburgh Review, August, 1817.

!

Lady, In the same year he published Descriptive Sketches in Verse, taken during a Pedestrian Tour among the Alps, of which Coleridge thus writes in his Biographia Literaria:-" During the last of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication, entitled Descriptive Sketches; and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced." Two years after, the two poets, then personally unknown to each other, were brought together, at Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire. Coleridge was then in his twenty-fourth, and Wordsworth in his twenty-sixth year. A congeniality of pursuit soon ripened into intimacy, and in September, 1798, accompanied by Miss Wordsworth, they made a tour in Germany.

Wordsworth's next publication was the first volume of his Lyrical Ballads, published just after he left for the continent, by Joseph Cottle, of Bristol, who purchased the copyright for thirty guineas.2 But it proved a great failure, and Cottle was a loser by the bargain. The critics were very severe upon it. Jeffrey in the Edinburgh,3 Byron in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and James Smith in his Rejected Addresses, and others of less note in the literary world, all fired their shafts of reason and ridicule at him. Many years, therefore, elapsed before Mr. Wordsworth appeared again as a poet. But he was not idle; for in the same year that witnessed the failure of his Lyrical Ballads, he wrote his Peter Bell, though he kept it by him many years before he published it. Wordsworth married, in the year 1803, Miss Mary Hutchinson, of Penrith, and settled among his beloved lakes,-first at Grasmere, and afterwards at Rydal Mount. Southey's subsequent retirement to the same beautiful country, and Coleridge's visits to his brother poets, originated the name of the "Lake School of Poetry," by which the opponents of their principles and the critics of the Edinburgh Review distinguished the three poets, whose names are so intimately connected. In 1807 he put forth two volumes of his poems, and in the autumn of 1814 appeared, in quarto form, the celebrated Excursion. It consists of sketches of life and manners taken during an excursion among the mountains, intermingled with moral and devotional reflections. It is merely a part of a larger poem, which was to be entitled The Recluse, and to be prefaced by a

It was published by Johnson, in St. Paul's Church Yard, from whose shop, but seven years before, had appeared the Task of Cowper.

Mr. Cottle deserves to be held forever in the most grateful remembrance for the constant, unwearied kindness and liberality he showed to Wordsworth and Coleridge.

3 All the world laughs at Elegiac Stanzas to a Sucking Pig-A Hymn on Washing-DaySonnets to one's Grandmother-or Pindaries on Gooseberry-Pie; and yet we are afraid it will not be quite easy to convince Mr. Wordsworth that the same ridicule must infallibly attach to most of the pathetic pieces in these volumes."-Edinburgh Review, xi. 218.

"We come next to a long story of a Blind Highland Boy, who lived near an arm of the sea, and had taken a most unnatural desire to venture on that perilous element. His mother did all she could to prevent him; but one morning, when the good woman was out of the way, he got into a vessel of his own, and pushed out from the shore:

In such a vessel ne'er before
Did human creature leave the shore.'

And then we are told that if the sea should get rough, a beehive would be ship as safe." But say what was it?' a poetical interlocutor is made to exclaim most naturally; and here followeth the answer, upon which all the pathos and interest of the story depend:

A HOUSEHOLD TUB, like one of those

Which women use to wash their clothes' "'

This, it will be admitted, is carrying the matt as far as it will well go; nor is there any thit.

down to the wiping of shoes, or the eviso. ration of chickens-which may not be introduced in poetry, if this is tolerated.”—Ibid. xi. 225.

See page 288.

5 The author is in company with his friend the Wanderer, and in the course of their walks they meet with the Solitary, a soured and desponding recluse, and with the excellent village pastor, whose parochial experiences furnish materials for unlimited philosophizing. Long conversations, arguments, &c. form the subject of this bulky poem.

minor one delineating the growth of the author's mind, published since his death under the name of The Prelude. The Recluse was to be divided into three parts: the Excursion forms the second of these; the first book of the first part is extant in manuscript, but the rest of the work was never completed.

No sooner did The Excursion appear, than the critics were down upon it with a vengeance. "This will never do,” was the memorable opening of the article in the Edinburgh. A few thought it "would do," and praised it; but while it was still dividing the critics, Peter Bell appeared, to throw among them yet greater differences of opinion. The deriders of the poet laughed still louder than before; while his admirers believed, or affected to believe, that it added to the author's fame. Another publication the next year, The White Doc of Rylstone, was even more severely handled by one party, while with "the school" it found still greater favor than any thing that he had written. In 1820 he published his noble series of Sonnets to the River Duddon, which contains some of his best poetry. Two years after appeared his Ecclesiastical Sonnets, which were composed at the same time that Southey was writing his History of the Church.

In 1831 he visited Scotland, and, on his way to the Lakes, had an affecting interview-the last he ever had-with Sir Walter Scott, who was rapidly failing and was about to set off for an Italian clime. The evening of the 22d of September was a very sad one in his antique library. Lockhart was there, and Allan, the historical painter. Wordsworth was also feeble in health, and sat with a green shade over his eyes, and bent shoulders, between his daughter and Sir Walter. The conversation was melancholy, and Sir Walter remarked that Smollett and Fielding had both been driven abroad by declining health and had never re turned. Next morning he left Abbotsford, and his guests retired with sorrowfu. hearts. Wordsworth has preserved a memento of his own feelings in a beautiful sonnet. In 1833 he visited Staffa and Iona. The year 1834 was a sort of era in his life, by the publication of his complete works in four volumes. His friends, however, now began to fall around him. That year poor Coleridge bade adieu to his weary life, which must have touched many a tender chord of association in Wordsworth's heart. In 1836, his wife's sister, and his constant friend and companion, died, and blow followed blow in rapid succession.

As if to console him for the loss of so many that were dear to his heart, worldly honors began to be heaped upon him. In 1835 Blackwood's Magazine came out strongly in his defence. In 1839, amid the acclamations of the students, he received the degree of Doctor of Civil Law from Oxford University. In 1842 he received a pension of £300 a year, with permission to resign his office of stamp-distributor in favor of his son. Next year he was

1 The Prelude is an autobiographical record of the remembered feelings and incidents of his infancy, boyhood, and adolescence; of his experience at Cambridge, at London, and at Paris; and of his convictions regarding the causes and consequences of the first, and, par excellence, the French Revolution,-whose ultimate failure he mourns with unfeigned and undisguised regret.

2" This will never do! * * It is longer, weaker, and tamer than any of Mr. Wordsworth's other productions; with less boldness of originality, and less even of that extreme simplicity and lowliness of tone which wavered

so prettily, in the Lyrical Ballads, between silliness and pathos.”—Edinburgh Review, xxiv. 1.

3This, we think, has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume; and though it was scarcely to be expected, we confess, that Mr. Words. worth, with all his ambition, should so soon have attained to that distinction, the wonder may, perhaps, be diminished when we state that it seems to us to consist of a happy union of all the faults, without any of the beauties, which belong to his school of poetry.”—Ibid. XXV. 355.

appointed to the laureateship left vacant by the melancholy death of Southey. After this he lived a quiet and dignified life at Rydal, evincing little apparent sympathy with the arduous duties and activities of the every-day world,—a world which he left, calmly and peacefully, at a good old age, on the 23d of April, 1850.

No author in the English language has so divided the critics as William Wordsworth. A few place him in the first class of our poets; while the large majority, certainly, of readers see nothing in his poetry that can fairly give him such a rank. Gladly would I add my humble testimony in unison with that of his ardent admirers, if I honestly could; but, whether right or wrong, I cannot. I cheerfully grant that his style is simple and often vigorous; that his versification is smooth and easy; that his blank verse is manly and idiomatie; that he shows great power of minute and faithful description; and that his poetry is everywhere pervaded with sentiments of pure morality and deep wisdom, such as must ever exert the happiest moral influence. And yet he never moves me; there is no passion in him; there seems to be a want of naturalness in most that he has written; he never warms me to admiration, or melts me to tenderness. Southey himself has, to my mind, well expressed the real fault of both his mystical brethren :-"Both Coleridge and Wordsworth, powerfully as they can write, and profoundly as they usually think, have been betrayed into the same fault,-that of making things easy of comprehension in themselves, difficult to be comprehended by their way of stating them. Instead of going to the natural springs for water, they seem to like the labor of digging wells."3

The following estimate of his character, from a recent critic, seems to me very just:-"His devotion to external nature had the power and pervasiveness of a passion; his perception of its most minute beauties was exquisitely fine; and his portraitures, both of landscapes and figures, were so distinctly outlined as to impress them on the mind almost as vividly and deeply as the sight of them could have done. But he was defective in the stronger passions, and hence, in spite of the minuteness of his portraitures of character, he failed to produce real human beings capable of stirring the blood: and what was

1 And they are no less names than Professor Wilson, De Quincey, Lockhart, Coleridge, and Talfourd.

2 Lord Jeffrey, in republishing a portion of his Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, thus writes, in a note to the article on Wordsworth's Excursion, thirty years after the article first appeared:

I have spoken in many places rather too bitterly and confidently of the faults of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, and forgetting that, even on my own view of them, they were but faults of taste, or venial self-partiality, have sometimes visited them, I fear, with an asperity which should be reserved for objects of moral reprobation. If I were now to deal with the whole question of his poetical merits, though my judgment might not be substantially different, I hope I should repress the greater part of these vivacités of expression; and, indeed, so strong has been my feeling in this way that, considering how much I have always loved many of the attributes of his genins, and how entirely I respect his character, it did at first occur to me whether it was quite fitting that,

in my old age and his, I should include in this publication any of those critiques which may have formerly given pain or offence to him or his admirers. But, when I reflected that the mischief, if there really ever was any, was long ago done, and that I still retain, in substance, the opinions which I should now like to have seen more gently expressed, I felt that to omit all notice of them on the present occasion might be held to import a retraction which I am as far as possible from intending, or even be represented as a very shabby way of backing out of sentiments which should either be manfully persisted in, or openly renounced and abandoned as untenable."

3 This from a friend and a member of the brotherhood is nearly as severe," says a writer in the North British Review, "as any thing Jeffrey ever said of them." Sir Walter Scott. too, expresses his wonder "why Wordsworth will sometimes choose to crawl upon all-fours when God has given him so noble a countenance to lift to heaven."

4 Chambers's Papers for the People, vol. v.