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and entire the impression is, which the totality of each of them is calculated to leave upon the mind of an honouring, but not a bigotted observer. In listening to Wordsworth, it is impossible to forget for a single moment that the author of " The Excursion" is before you. Poetry has been with him the pure sole business of life-he thinks of nothing else, and he speaks of nothing else-and where is the man who hears him, that would for a moment wish it to be otherwise? The deep sonorous voice in which he pours forth his soul upon the high secrets of his divine artand those tender glimpses which he opens every now and then into the bosom of that lowly life, whose mysteries have been his perpetual inspirations-the sincere earnestness with which he details and expatiates-the innocent confidence which he feels in the heart that is submitted to his working--and the unquestioning command with which he seeks to fasten to him every soul that is capable of understanding his words-all these things are as they should be, in one that has lived the life of a hermit-musing, and meditating, and composing in the seclusion of a lonely cottage-loving and worshipping the Nature of Man, but partaking little in the pursuits, and knowing little of the habits, of the Men of the World.

There is a noble simplicity in the warmth with which he discourses to all that approach him, on the subject of which he himself knows most, and on which he feels most-and of which he is wise, enough to know that every one must be most anxious to hear him speak. His poetry is the poetry of external nature and profound feeling, and such is the hold which these high themes have taken of his intellect, that he seldom dreams of descending to the tone in which the ordinary conversation of men is pitched. Hour after hour his eloquence flows on, by his own simple fireside, or along the breezy slopes of his own mountains, in the same lofty strain as in his loftiest poems

"Of Man and Nature, and of human life,
His haunt and the main region of his song."

His enthusiasm is that of a secluded artist; but who is he that would not rejoice in being permitted to peep into the sanctity of such a seclusion—or that, being there, would wish for a moment to see the enthusiasm that has sanctified it, suspended or interrupted in its work? The large, dim, pensive eye, that dwells almost for ever upon the ground, and the smile of placid abstraction, that clothes his long, tremulous, me

lancholy lips, complete a picture of solemn, wrapped-up contemplative genius, to which, amid the dusty concussions of active men and common life, my mind reverts sometimes for repose, as to a fine calm stretch of verdure in the bosom of some dark and hoary forest of ve nerable trees, where no voice is heard but that of the sweeping wind, and far-off waters-what the Ettrick Shepherd finely calls

"Great Nature's hum,

Voice of the desert, never dumb.”

S, again, is the very poet of active life, and that life, in all its varieties, lies for ever stretched out before him, bright and expanded, as in the glass of a magician. Whatever subject be mentioned, he at once steals a beam from his mirror, and scatters such a flood of illustration upon it, that you feel as if it had always been mantled in palpable night before. Every remark gains, as it passes from his lips, the precision of a visible fact, and every incident flashes upon your imagination, as if your bodily eye, by some new gift of nature, had acquired the power of seeing the past as vividly as the present. To, talk of exhausting his light of gramourie to one that witnessed its play of radiance, would sound

as absurd as to talk of drying up the Nile. It streams alike copiously, alike fervently upon all things, like the light of heaven, which "shineth upon the evil and upon the good." The eye, and the voice, and the words, and the gestures, seem all alike to be the ready unconscious interpreters of some imperial spirit, that moves irresistibly their mingled energies from within. There is no effort-no semblance of effort-but everything comes out as is commanded-swift, clear, and radiant through the impartial medium. The heroes of the old times spring from their graves in panoply, and "drink the red wine through the helmet barred" before us; or

"Shred their foemen's limbs away,

As lops the woodman's knife the spray"

But they are honoured, not privileged-the humblest retainers quit the dust as full of life as they do-nay, their dogs and horses are partakers in the resurrection, like those of the Teutonic warriors in the Valhalla of Odin. It is no matter what period of his country's story passes in review. Bruce-Douglas-their Kingly Foe, in whose

eye was set

Some spark of the Plantagenet."

James-Mary-Angus-Montrose-ArgyleDundee these are all alike, not names, but realities-living, moving, breathing, feeling, speaking, looking realities-when he speaks of them. The grave loses half its potency when he calls. His own imagination is one majestic sepulchre, where the wizard lamp burns in never-dying splendour, and the charmed blood glows for ever in the cheeks of the embalmed, and every longsheathed sword is ready to leap from its scabbard, like the Tizona of the Cid in the vault of Cardeña,

Of all this more anon,

P. M.