thistles spring above the primeval curse, the 'meanest flower that blows' gives

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.' The creation is neither unduly exalted nor contemptuously trampled under-foot, but maintains its dignified position, as an ambassador from the Divine King. The glory of something far beyond association-that of a divine and perpetual presence-is shed over the landscape, and its golden-drops are spilled upon the stars. Objects the most diverse the cradle of the child, the wet hole of the centipede, the bed of the corpse, and the lair of the earthquake, the nest of the lark, and the crag on which sits, half asleep, the dark vulture, digesting blood-are all clothed in a light the same in kind, though varying in degree

'A light which never was on sea or shore.'

In the poetry of the Hebrews, accordingly, the locusts are God's great army;'-the winds are his messengers, the thunder his voice, the lightning a 'fiery stream going before him,' the moon his witness in the heavens, the sun a strong man rejoicing to run his race-all creation is roused and startled into life through him-its every beautiful, or dire, or strange shape in the earth or the sky, is God's moveable tent; the place where, for a season, his honour, his beauty, his strength, and his justice dwell-the tenant not degraded, and inconceivable dignity being added to the abode.

His mere 'tent,' however-for while the great and the infinite are thus connected with the little and the finite, the subordination of the latter to the former is always maintained. The most magnificent objects in nature are but the mirrors to God's face the scaffolding to his future purposes; and, like mirrors, are to wax dim; and, like scaffolding, to be removed. The great sheet is to be received up again into heaven. The heavens and the earth are to pass away, and to be succeeded, if not by a purely mental economy, yet by one of a more spiritual materialism, compared to which the former shall no more be remembered, neither come into mind. Those frightful and fantastic forms of animated life, through which God's glory seems to shine with a struggle, and but faintly, shall disappear-nay, the worlds which bore, and sheltered them in their rugged dens and caves, shall flee from the face of the regenerator. A milder day' is to dawn on the universe-the refinement of matter is to keep pace with the elevation of mind. Evil and sin are to be eternally banished to some Siberia of space. The word of the poet is to be fulfilled—

And one eternal spring encircles all!'

The mediatorial purpose of creation, fully subserved, is to be abandoned, that we may see eye to eye,' and that God may be all in all.'

That such views of matter-its present ministry-the source of its beauty and glory-and its future destiny, transferred from the pages of both Testaments to those of our great moral and religious poets, have deepened some of their profoundest, and swelled some of their highest, strains, is unquestionable. Such prospects as were in Milton's eye, when he sung

'Thy Saviour and thy Lord

Last in the clouds from heaven to be revealed,
In glory of the Father to dissolve

Satan with his perverted world; then raise
From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined,
New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date,'

may be found in Thomson, in his closing Hymn to the Seasons,in Coleridge's 'Religious Musings' (in Shelley's 'Prometheus' even, but perverted and disguised), in Bailey's 'Festus' (cumbered and entangled with his religious theory); and more rootedly, although less theologically, than in all the rest, in the poetry of Wordsworth.

The secret of Wordsworth's profound and peculiar love for Nature, even in her meaner and minuter forms, may lie, perhaps, here. De Quincey seeks for it in a peculiar conformation of the eye, as if he actually did see more in the object than other men-in the rose a richer red, in the sky a deeper azure, in the broom a yellower gold, in the sun a more dazzling ray, in the sea a finer foam, and in the star a more sparkling splendour than even Nature's own sweet and cunning" hand put on; but the critic has not sought to explain the rationale of this peculiarity. Mere acuteness of vision it cannot have been, else the eagle might have felt, though not written, The Excursion'-else the fact is not accountable why many of weak sight, such as Burke, have been rapturous admirers of Nature; and so, till we learn that Mr. De Quincey has looked through Wordsworth's eyes, we must call this a mere fancy. Hazlitt again, and others since, have accounted for the phenomenon by association -but this fails, we suspect, fully to explain the deep, native, and brooding passion in question-a passion which, instead of being swelled by the associations of after life, rose to full stature in youth, as Tintern Abbey' testifies. One word of his own, perhaps, better solves the mystery-it is the one word 'consecration'

'The consecration and the poet's dream.'

His eye had been anointed with eye-salve, and he saw, as his

poet-predecessors had done, the temple in which he was standing, heard in every breeze and ocean billow the sound of a templeservice, and felt that the grandeur of the ritual, and of its recipient, threw the shadow of their greatness upon every stone in the corners of the edifice, and upon every eft crawling along its floors. Reversing the miracle, he saw trees as men walking heard the speechless sing, and, in the beautiful thought of the Roman,' caught on his ear the fragments of a divine soliloquy,' filling up the pauses in a universal anthem. Hence the tumultuous, yet awful joy of his youthful feelings to Nature. Hence his estimation of its lowliest features; for does not every bush and tree appear to him a pillar in the temple of his God? The leaping fish pleases him, because its 'cheer' in the lonely tarn is of praise. The dropping of the earth on the coffin lid is a slow and solemn psalm, mingling in austere sympathy with the raven's croak, and in his Power of sound' he proceeds elaborately to condense all those varied voices, high or low, soft or harsh, united or discordant, into one crushing chorus, like the choruses of Haydn, or of heaven. Nature undergoes no outward change to his eye, but undergoes a far deeper transfiguration to his spirit -as she stands up in the white robes, and with the sounding psalmodies of her mediatorial office, between him and the Infinite I AM.

Never must this feeling be confounded with Pantheism. All does not seem to him to be God, nor even (strictly speaking) divine; but all seems to be immediately from God-rushing out from him in being, to rush instantly back to him in service and praise. Again the natal dew of the first morning is seen lying on bud and blade, and the low voice of the first evening's song becomes audible again. Although Coleridge in his youth was a Spinozist, Wordsworth seems at once, and for ever, to have recoiled from even his friend's eloquent version of that creedless creed, that baseless foundation, that system, through the phenomenon of which look not the bright eyes of Supreme Intelligence, but the blind face of irresponsible and infinite necessity. Shelley himself-with all the power his critics attribute to him of painting night, animating Atheism, and giving strange loveliness to annihilation-has failed in redeeming Spinoza's theory from the reproach of being as hateful as it is false; and there is no axiom we hold more strongly than this-that the theory which cannot be rendered poetical, cannot be true. 'Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty,' said poor Keats, to whom time, however, was not granted to come down from the first glowing generalization of his heart, to the particular creeds which his ripened intellect would have, according to it, rejected or received.

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Nor, although Wordsworth is a devoted lover of Nature, down to what many consider the very blots-or, at least, dashes and commas in her page, is he blind to the fact of her transient character. The power he worships has his dwelling in the light of setting suns,' but that dwelling is not his everlasting abode. For earth, and the universe, a milder day' (words certifying their truth by their simple beauty) is in store when 'the monuments' of human weakness, folly, and evil, shallall be overgrown.' He sees a far off the great spectacle of Nature retiring before God; the ambassador giving place to the King; the bright toys of this nursery-sun, moon, earth, and starsput away, like childish things; the symbols of the Infinite lost in the Infinite itself; and though he could, on the Saturday evening, bow before the midnight mountains, and midnight heavens, he could also, on the Sabbath morn, in Rydal church, bow as profoundly before the apostolic word, All these things shall be dissolved.'

With Wordsworth, as with all great poets, his poetical creed passes into his religious. It is the same tune with variations. But we confess that, in his case, we do not think the variations equal. The mediation of Nature he understands, and has beautifully represented in his poetry; but that higher mediation of the Divine Man between man and the Father, does not lie fully or conspicuously on his page. A believer in the mystery of godliness he unquestionably was; but he seldom preached it. Christopher North, many years ago, in Blackwood,' doubted if there were so much as a Bible in poor Margaret's cottage (Excursion). We doubt so too, and have not found much of the true cross ' among all his trees. The theologians divide prayer into four parts adoration, thanksgiving, confession, and petition. Wordsworth stops at the second. Nowhere do we find more solemn, sustained, habitual, and worthy adoration, than in his writings. The tone, too, of all his poems, is a calm thanksgiving, like that of a long blue, cloudless sky, colouring, at evening, into the hues of more fiery praise. But he does not weep like a penitent, nor supplicate like a child. Such feelings seem suppressed and folded up as far-off storms, and the traces of past tempests are succinctly enclosed in the algebra of the silent evening air. And hence, like Milton's, his poetry has rather tended to foster the glow of devotion in the loftier spirits of the race previously taught to adore than like that of Cowper and Montgomery, to send prodigals back to their forsaken homes; Davids, to cry, Against thee only have I sinned;' and Peters, to shriek in agony, Lord, save us, we perish.'

To pass from the essential poetic element in a writer of genius, to his artistic skill, is a felt, yet necessary descent-like

the painter compelled, after sketching the man's countenance, to draw his dress. And yet, as of some men and women, the very dress, by its simplicity, elegance, and unity, seems fitted rather to garb the soul than the body-seems the soul made visible— so is it with the style and manner of many great poets. Their speech and music without are as inevitable as their genius, or as the song for ever sounding within their souls. And why? The whole ever tends to beget a whole-the large substance to cast its deep, yet delicate, shadow-the divine to be like itself in the human, on which its seal is set. So it is with Wordsworth. That profound simplicity-that clear obscurity-that night-like noon-that noon-like night-that one atmosphere of overhanging Deity, seen weighing upon ocean and pool, mountain and molehill, forest and flower-that pellucid depth-that entireness of purpose and fulness of power, connected with fragmentary, wilful, or even weak execution-that humble, yet proud, precipitation of himself, Antæus-like, upon the bosom of simple scenes and simple sentiments, to regain primeval vigour―that obscure, yet lofty isolation, like a tarn, little in size, but elevated in site, with few visitors, but with many stars-that ToryRadicalism, Popish-Protestantism, philosophical Christianity, which have rendered him a glorious riddle, and made Shelley, in despair of finding it out, exclaim

'No Deist, and no Christian he;
No Whig, no Tory.

He got so subtle, that to be

Nothing was all his glory,'

all such apparent contradictions, but real unities, in his poetical and moral creed and character, are fully expressed in his lowly but aspiring language, and the simple, elaborate architecture of his verse-every stone of which is lifted up by the strain of strong logic, and yet laid to music; and, above all, in the choice of his subjects, which range, with a free and easy motion, up from a garden spade and a village drum, to the 'celestial visages' which darkened at the tidings of man's fall, and to the organ of eternity,' which sung pæans over his recovery.

We sum up what we have further to say of Wordsworth, under the items of his works, his life and character, his death; and shall close by inquiring, Who is worthy to be his successor?

His works, covering a large space, and abounding in every variety of excellence and style, assume, after all, a fragmentary aspect. They are true, simple, scattered, and strong, as blocks torn from the crags of Helvellyn, and lying there low, but mighty still.' Few even of his ballads are wholes. They leave too much untold. They are far too suggestive to satisfy. From