suppose such a character: for the every-day experience of human life will have shown him that the faculties of men, so far from being cramped by circumstances, perpetually escape from them, and follow the irresistible bent of some strong, and probably inborn, propensity. If the cheapening of duffel and sheeting be supposed necessarily to confine and degrade the intellect, so might the cutting out of soles and upper-leathers for ladies' shoes: yet the author of "The Baviad," and of the matchless version of Juvenal, worked mathematical problems with an awl, in default of pen and paper: and Bloomfield, while occupied with the hammer and the lap-stone, meditated a genuine English Georgic, agreeably descriptive of local scenery, and of rural manners and incidents.

It is an arrogant ignorance of the nature of the human mind that ventures thus to prescribe to the poet his probabilities of character. They, indeed, who sneer at the fine sentiments of a pedlar have conveniently overlooked the whole of his existence, prior to his taking up this wandering occupation: which among the solitary villages of Cumberland or Scotland must be acknowledged to be precisely that which affords a man no opportunities of conversing with the scenes of nature. All the innumerable items that contribute to fill up the sum of human character: all the imperceptible, yet indelible, impressions of early childhood; all the obscure vestiges of thought; the expanded inclinations; the stimulated tastes; the created fondnesses or aversions; which are brought about by a thousand causes: by circumstance or chance that has eluded remembrance, or that would baffle analysis: all, in short, that prepares the foundations and builds up the future structure of the man, is left completely out of the account. It is, indeed, far more easy to ask with "the mob of Gentlemen who think with ease," "How should a shoe-maker write poetry? How can a pedlar philosophize?"

The whole process of mind in this intelligent mountaineer is, in fact, traced by Mr. Wordsworth with beautiful consistency and truth. We extract the description of those first hints which a child collects from external nature, and of which the impression never forsakes him. The school-house, which the boyherdsman frequented during the winter,

"Stood alone,

Sole building on a mountain's dreary edge,
Far from the sight of city spire, or sound
Of minster clock. From that bleak tenement
He, many an evening, to his distant home
In solitude returning, saw the hills
Grow larger in the darkness, all alone
Beheld the stars come out above his head,

And travell❜d through the wood, with no one near
To whom he might confess the things he saw."

This boy is now an old man: the pensive historian of many who have died before him. He tells the painfully interesting story of a kind-hearted woman who dwelt in the ruined cottage; and who, after her husband had left her in the hope of bettering his condition by a soldier's life, pined away in his protracted absence, and died. The reflections on the desolate well are ori ginal, and affecting in the highest degree:

"Beside yon spring I stood,
And eyed its waters, till we seem'd to feel
One sadness, they and I. For them a bond
Of brotherhood is broken: time has been
When, every day, the touch of human hand
Dislodged the natural sleep that binds them up
In mortal stillness: and they minister'd
To human comfort. As I stoop'd to drink,
Upon the slimy foot-stone I espied

The useless fragment of a wooden bowl,
Green with the moss of years."

The most interesting personage of the poem is distinguished by the name of " the Solitary." The conception of this character indicates a deep knowledge of the motives of human action. It is the instance of an amiable and cultivated mind, shattered and thrown from the balance of its principles by the heavy stroke of affliction, in the sudden and complex loss of a wife and two children. Such a tumultuous interest as that produced by the French revolution would naturally seize on such a mind; left naked of all that constituted its resources and enjoyments; and eagerly grasping at an occasion to fill the dreadful and insupportable vacuum by scenes of political agitation; and by a transfer of individual affections to the whole human race. A sceptical distrust of Providence from the imagined insufficiency of religious consolations; a tendency to bitter questionings of the reality of virtue, and the certainty of revealed truth, might also be natural food for a despair thus disdainful of comfort. But in deducing this taint of infidelity by necessary consequence from the spirit which operated the revolution in France, the reasoning is unphilosophical. Mr. Wordsworth, as we conceive, has mistaken the signs of the times; and has seen nothing but the agency of evil in the subversion of an ancient government and hierarchy. We venture to regard the French revolution as not only a scourge, but a mean: we see in it, through all its progresses and relapses, the hand of that Being, who by his mysterious agency educes good of evil, preparing by the shock of principles and passions,

the collision of opinions, and the conflict of experiments, a recognition of justice and virtue in rulers and people; and probably the universal downfall of anti-christian superstition and of lawless power.

Our introduction to the Recluse is prepared with much of wellcontrived interest. The old man and his companion, while on their way to his retired cottage, are startled by the characteristic local circumstance of a dirge chaunted in the hollow of the mountains:

"From out the heart

Of that profound abyss a solemn voice,

Or several voices in one solemn sound,

Was heard ascending: mournful, deep, and slow,
The cadence as of psalms.

"God rest his soul!'

The wanderer cried, abruptly breaking silence;
'He is departed, and finds peace at last!'”

Passing on, they find between the angle, formed by a rock and a ruinous wall, a rustic seat screened by a pent-house of sods. The plan betrays the hand of children; who have cut the turf into walks, as a miniature garden, and reared babyish houses of stones and moss; an incident very much beneath the dignity of great wits, but interesting, perhaps, to those fond and silly beings who love the ways of children. One of the props of these artificial fairy palaces is a book: and this book is the " Candide" of Voltaire.

"Gracious Heaven!'

The wanderer cried: It cannot but be his :
And he is gone!'

"Here, then, has been to him
Retreat within retreat: a sheltering place
Within how deep a shelter! He had fits
E'en to the last of genuine tenderness,
And loved the haunts of children."

The burial had, however, belonged to another: and they encounter the Recluse:

"I knew from the appearance and the dress
That it could be no other: a pale face,

A tall and meagre person, in a garb

Not rustic, dull and faded, like himself."

After a repast, described with an appropriation of poetry to the purposes of common life, by some poets perhaps carried a little too far, and by others squeamishly rejected, they walk abroad amidst this calm and beautiful assemblage of rural images:

« A humming bee, a little tinkling rill,
A pair of falcons, wheeling on the wing
In clamorous agitation round the crest
Of a tall fock, their airy citadel;

By each and all of these the pensive ear
Was greeted, in the silence that ensued;

When through the cottage threshold we had pass'd
And deep within that lonesome valley stood

Once more, beneath the concave of the blue
And cloudless sky."

The Solitary relates his history: and while describing the dreariness of his state of mind during a voyage across the Atlantic, breaks out into an apostrophe, which is full of the bitter wisdom of melancholy experience:

"Ye Powers

Of soul and sense, mysteriously allied!
O never let the wretched, if a choice
Be left him, trust the freight of his distress
To a long voyage on the silent deep!
For, like a plague, will memory break out,
And, in the blank and solitude of things,
Upon his spirit, with a fever's strength,
Will conscience prey."

To promote the cheerfulness of those who consider pure poetry as a most risible absurdity, a most wild and unintelligible sort of raving, we extract the following passage:

"Here you stand:

Adore and worship, when you know it not?
Pious, beyond the intention of your thought:
Devout, above the meaning of your will.

Yes, you
have felt, and may not cease to feel:
The estate of man would be indeed forlorn,
If false conclusions of the reasoning power
Made the eye blind, and closed the passages
Through which the ear converses with the heart.
Has not the soul, the being of your life,
Received a shock of awful consciousness,
In some calm season, when these lofty rocks
At night's approach bring down the unclouded sky,
To rest upon their circumambient walls:
A temple framing of dimensions vast,
And yet not too enormous for the sound
Of human anthems-choral song, or burst
Sublime of instrumental harmony
To glorify th' Eternal! What if these
Did never break the stillness that prevails
Here, if the solemn nightingale be mute,
And the soft wood-lark here did never chaunt

The vespers, Nature fails not to provide
Impulse and utterance. The whispering air
Sends inspiration from the shadowy heights,
And blind recesses of the cavern'd rocks:
The little rills and waters numberless,
Inaudible by day-light, blend their notes
With the loud streams; and often, at the hour
When issue forth the first pale stars, is heard,
Within the circuit of this fabric huge,
One voice-the solitary raven, flying
Athwart the concave of the dark blue dome
Unseen, perchance above the power of sight,
An iron knell, with echoes from afar,

Faint, and still fainter."

The company of the ramblers is increased by a rural vicar; who points out the graves in a mountain church-yard, and gives the stories and the characters of those who are buried beneath its turf. The description which we shall select seems new to poetry; and leaves in our opinion no room for doubt whether Mr. Wordsworth be, or be not, a poet:

"Almost at the root

Of that tall pine, the shadow of whose bare
And slender stem, while bere I sit at eve,

Oft stretches towards me, like a long straight path
Traced faintly in the green-sward; there beneath
A plain blue stone a gentle dalesman lies,

From whom in early childhood was withdrawn
The precious gift of hearing. He grew up
From year to year in loneliness of soul:
And this deep mountain valley was to him
Soundless, with all its streams. The bird of dawn
Did never rouse this cottager from sleep
With startling summons: not for his delight
The vernal cuckoo shouted: not for him

Murmur'd the labouring bee. When stormy winds
Were working the broad bosom of the lake

Into a thousand thousand sparkling waves,
Rocking the trees, or driving cloud on cloud
Along the sharp edge of yon lofty crags,
The agitated scene before his eye
Was silent as a picture: evermore

Were all things silent, wheresoe'er he moved."

The description of the joys of blooming youth and sportive innocence, and the sad reverse of blighted youth and poisoned innocence in a beautiful cottage girl, is so enchantingly poetical and tender, that we cannot part with Mr. Wordsworth without again holding him forth to the taste of his countrymen in the following specimen :