WORDSWORTH'S ORIGINALITIES.

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feature which belongs to the situation, or marks the character in common apprehension, is scornfully discarded by Mr. Wordsworth; who represents his grey-haired rustic pedagogue as a sort of half crazy, sentimental person, overrun with fine feelings, constitutional merri. ment, and a most humorous melancholy. Here are the two stanzas in which this consistent and intelligible character is portrayed. The diction is at least as new as

the conception.

"The sighs which Matthew heav'd were sighs
Of one tir'd out with fun and madness;
The tears which came to Matthew's eyes
Were tears of light-the oil of gladness.

"Yet sometimes, when the secret cup

Of still and serious thought went round
He seem'd as if he drank it up,

He felt with spirit so profound.

Thou soul of God's best earthly mould," &c.

A frail damsel again is a character common enough in all poems; and one upon which many fine and pathetic lines have been expended. Mr. Wordsworth has written more than three hundred on the subject: but, instead of new images of tenderness, or delicate representation of intelligible feelings, he has contrived to tell us nothing whatever of the unfortunate fair one, but that her name is Martha Ray; and that she goes up to the top of a hill, in a red cloak, and cries "O misery!" All the rest of the poem is filled with a description of an old thorn and a pond, and of the silly stories which the neighbouring old women told about them.

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The sports of childhood, and the untimely death of promising youth, is also a common topic for poetry. Mr. Wordsworth has made some blank verse about it; but, instead of the delightful and picturesque sketches with which so many authors of moderate talent have presented us on this inviting subject, all that he is pleased to communicate of his rustic child, is, that he used to amuse himself with shouting to the owls, and hearing them anTo make amends for this brevity, the process of lis mimicry is most accurately described.

swer.

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-CHILDREN AND LOVERS.

With fingers interwoven, both hands

Press'd closely palm to palm, and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him.".

This is all we hear of him; and for the sake of this one accomplishment, we are told, that the author has frequently stood mute, and gazed on his grave for half an hour together!

Love, and the fantasies of lovers, have afforded an ample theme to poets of all ages. Mr. Wordsworth, however, has thought fit to compose a piece, illustrating this copious subject by one single thought. A lover trots away to see his mistress one fine evening, gazing all the way on the moon; when he comes to her door,

"O mercy! to myself I cried,

If Lucy should be dead."

And there the poem ends!

Now, we leave it to any reader of common candour and discernment to say, whether these representations of character and sentiment are drawn from that eternal and universal standard of truth and nature, which every one is knowing enough to recognise, and no one great enough to depart from with impunity; or whether they are not formed, as we have ventured to allege, upon certain fantastic and affected peculiarities in the mind or fancy of the author, into which it is most improbable that many of his readers will enter, and which cannot, in some cases, be comprehended without much effort and explanation. Instead of multiplying instances of these wide and wilful aberrations from ordinary nature it may be more satisfactory to produce the author's own admission of the narrowness of the plan upon which he writes, and of the very extraordinary circumstances which he himself sometimes thinks it necessary for his readers to keep in view, if they would wish to understand the beauty or propriety of his delineations.

A pathetic tale of guilt or superstition may be told, we are apt to fancy, by the poet himself, in his general character of poet, with full as much effect as by any

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other person. An old nurse, at any rate, or a monk or parish clerk, is always at hand to give grace to such a narration. None of these, however, would satisfy Mr. Wordsworth. He has written a long poem of this sort, in which he thinks it indispensably necessary to apprise the reader, that he has endeavoured to represent the language and sentiments of a particular character- of which character he adds, "the reader will have a general notion, if he has ever known a man, a captain of a small trading vessel, for example, who, being past the middle age of life, has retired upon an annuity, or small independent income, to some village or country town, of which he was not a native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live!"

Now, we must be permitted to doubt, whether, among all the readers of Mr. Wordsworth (few or many), there is a single individual who has had the happiness of knowing a person of this very peculiar description; or who is capable of forming any sort of conjecture of the particular disposition and turn of thinking which such a combination of attributes would be apt to produce. To us, we will confess, the annonce appears as ludicrous and absurd as it would be in the author of an ode or an epic to say, "Of this piece the reader will necessarily form a very erroneous judgment, unless he is apprised, that it was written by a pale man in a green coat -sitting cross-legged on an oaken stool-with a scratch on his nose, and a spelling dictionary on the table." *

* Some of our readers may have a curiosity to know in what manner this old annuitant captain does actually express himself in the village of his adoption. For their gratification, we annex the two first stanzas of his story; in which, with all the attention we have been able to bestow, we have been utterly unable to detect any traits that can be supposed to characterise either a seaman, an annuitant, or a stranger in a country town. It is a style, on the contrary, which we should ascribe, without hesitation, to a certain poetical fraternity in the West of England; and which, we verily believe, never was, and never will be, used by any one out of that fraternity.

From these childish and absurd affectations, we turn with pleasure to the manly sense and correct picturing of Mr. Crabbe; and, after being dazzled and made giddy with the elaborate raptures and obscure originalities of these new artists, it is refreshing to meet again with the spirit and nature of our old masters, in the nervous pages of the author now before us.

The poem that stands first in the volume, is that to which we have already alluded as having been first given to the public upwards of twenty years ago. It is so old, and has of late been so scarce, that it is probably new to many of our readers. We shall venture, therefore, to give a few extracts from it as a specimen of Mr. Crabbe's original style of composition. We have already hinted at the description of the Parish Workhouse, and insert it as an example of no common poetry:

"There is yon house that holds the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapours flagging play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;
There children dwell who know no parents' care;
Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there;
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;

Not higher than a two-years' child,

It stands erect; this aged thorn!
No leaves it has, no thorny points;
It is a mass of knotted joints:
A wretched thing forlorn.
It stands erect; and like a stone,
With lichens it is overgrown.
"Like rock or stone, it is o'ergrown

With lichens; - to the very top;
And hung with heavy tufts of moss
A melancholy crop.

Up from the earth these mosses creep,
And this poor thorn, they clasp it round
So close, you'd say that they were bent,
With plain and manifest intent!

To drag it to the ground;
And all had join'd in one endeavour,
To bury this poor thorn for ever."

And this, it seems, is Nature, and Pathos, and Poetry!

PICTURE OF WORKHOUSE.

Dejected widows with unheeded tears,

And crippled age with more than childhood-fears;
The lame, the blind, and far the happiest they!
The moping idiot and the madman gay.

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Here, too, the sick their final doom receive,
Here brought amid the scenes of grief, to grieve;
Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow,
Mixt with the clamours of the crowd below.

Say ye, opprest by some fantastic woes,

Some jarring nerve that baffles your repose;
Who with sad prayers the weary doctor tease,
To name the nameless ever-new disease;
How would ye bear in real pain to lie,
Despised, neglected, left alone to die?

How would ye bear to draw your latest breath,
Where all that's wretched paves the way

for death?
Such is that room which one rude beam divides,
And naked rafters form the sloping sides;

Where the vile bands that bind that thatch are seen,

And lath and mud are all that lie between;

Save one dull pane, that, coarsely patch'd, gives way
To the rude tempest, yet excludes the day:

Here, on a matted flock, with dust o'erspread,
The drooping wretch reclines his languid head;

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For him no hand the cordial cup applies," &c.— p. 12-14. The consequential apothecary, who gives an impatient attendance in these abodes of misery, is admirably described; but we pass to the last scene:

"Now to the church behold the mourners come,
Sedately torpid and devoutly dumb;

The village children now their games suspend,
To see the bier that bears their ancient friend;
For he was one in all their idle sport,
And like a monarch ruled their little court;
The pliant bow he form'd, the flying ball,
The bat, the wicket, were his labours all;
Him now they follow to his grave, and stand,
Silent and sad, and gazing, hand in hand;
While bending low, their eager eyes explore
The mingled relics of the parish poor!
The bell tolls late, the moping owl flies round,
Fear marks the flight and magnifies the sound;
The busy priest, detain'd by weightier care,
Defers his duty till the day of prayer;
And waiting long, the crowd retire distrest,
To think a poor man's bones should lie unblest."

- p. 16, 17.

The scope of the poem is to show, that the villagers of real life have no resemblance to the villagers of