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How much of literary history is called up in the mind by these few vivid touches, and how much of biography and criticism is contained in them! Yet in this sonnet condensation occasions no obscurity-historical allusion, sentiment, imagery, exquisite music, distinctive portraiture-all find a place and yet nothing is crowded. And as a fit introduction to the other sonnet upon sonnets, which deals with some abstruser thoughts, we may beg those who complain of obscurity in Mr. Wordsworth's writings to bear in mind the clearness of his language when the subject is merely narrative or picturesque, and to ask themselves whether, when any difficulty occurs, it may not be owing to the subjectmatter rather than to the treatment.

'Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels:
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth, the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence to me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground:
Pleased if some souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,

Should find brief solace there, as I have found.'—p. 5.

We

This is one of those doctrinal poems, abounding in Mr. Wordsworth's works, which we have heard some persons complain that they cannot understand, having read them probably as rapidly as they would read any erotic effusion of any glowing gentleman who writes verses. Let us take more time than such readers have to spare and more space than is permitted to a sonnet, and it will not be difficult to evolve the doctrine. should say, then, that the leading doctrine suggested by this sonnet is, that no enlargement of a man's liberty of action can take place without a corresponding aggravation of his moral responsibility, and that there must needs be some souls which feel the weight of too much liberty,'-such, that is, whose liberty of action is disproportionate to their strength of judgment or of selfcontrol, and must therefore either oppress their conscience, or vex them with the perplexities of an undetermined choice or the consequences of an ungoverned will. Many, indeed, are they who feel in one way or another this weight of too much liberty.' The youth who is free to choose a profession has a liberty disproportionate to his knowledge and experience, which is a burthen.

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The heiress who is free to choose amongst many suitors, finds the difficulty of selection insuperable, and though perhaps any one of them might have been better than no husband, she lives and dies unmarried. The child who knows that obedience will not be enforced upon him, finds no peace for his soul; and the man who is too absolutely his own master, will find that he has got a troublesome servant. 'Heaven bless thee from a tutor, and discipline come not near thee!' was a deep imprecation, though put into the mouth of the common railer Thersites.* For Shakspeare would often speak his deepest truths in his lightest moods. And by another and a graver poetical moralist, Obedience has been personified in the groom of the chambers who puts the Red-Cross Knight to bed when he is tired:

'Then called she a groom that forth him led
Into a goodly lodge, and 'gan despoil
Of puissant arms, and laid in easy bed:
His name was meek OBEDIENCE rightfully ared.'

Fairy Queen, i. x. 17.

Assuming then that only so much liberty as can be steadily guided and readily subjected to the law of conscience will conduce to our ease—no other liberty in truth than the 'service which is perfect freedom'—the second conclusion which we draw from the sonnet is, that in parting with any excess of liberty beyond this quantum, our contentment is best secured when this is done spontaneously, and we are ourselves the choosers of the yoke to which we will submit:

In truth, the prison, unto which we doom

Ourselves, no prison is '

For to have felt the weight of too much liberty is one assurance that we shall be contented with restraint, and when the choice of the species and quantum of restraint has been our own, we should be accusing ourselves if we should quarrel with it. This is the case of the nun, the hermit, and the student. But thirdly, there is noticed the case of those who have never felt the weight of too much liberty, and who have been spared the perplexities of choice by a necessity of circumstances born with them and rendering the restraint which it imposes easy because habitual-

· Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom.

And this restraint by habit and necessity comes nearest in contentment to-fourthly, restraint by instinct, that of the bees

which

'Murmur by the hour in foxglove bells.'

Such, then, are the views of moral restraint indicated in this poem; Troilus and Cressida, Act ii. Scene 3.

and

and the drift of it is to bring this species of restraint into a comparison mutually illustrative with the restraint imposed by the laws of the sonnet upon an exuberant and discursive imagination. As of the moral will, so of the intellect: as in life, so in art. The law to which the sonnetteer submits himself, substitutes the restraint of a mechanical limitation for restraint by effort of the judgment; and the 'steed of the pen,' to borrow from a Persian metaphor, is enclosed, and cannot get loose upon the plain of prolixity.' The fence is, to a certain extent, a substitute for the bridle. We must not quit the subject of this sonnet without adverting to some passages in Mr. Wordsworth's other works, which have a bearing upon the same doctrine.

In the ode entitled The Pass of Kirkstone' (which we wish it were our business to quote at length), the poet having by a toilsome ascent and somewhat against his inclination reached that Pass, describes the scene which presents itself, and addresses the road by which he had gained the summit of the mountain :— Aspiring road! that lov'st to hide

Thy daring in a vapoury bourn,
Not seldom may the hour return
When thou shalt be my guide;
And I (as often we find cause,
When life is at a weary pause,
And we have panted up the hill
Of duty with reluctant will)

Be thankful, even tho' tired and faint,
For the rich bounties of constraint;

Whence oft invigorating transports flow,

That choice lack'd courage to bestow!'

In other poems Mr. Wordsworth seems to have had in view the difficult question, whether there may not be some individuals, to whom, by a rare purity of moral constitution, Nature herself may afford a restraint adequate for the government of a life led under the influence of natural objects and a natural piety :Three years she grew in sun and shower;

Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower

On earth was never sown ;

This child I to myself will take;

She shall be mine, and I will make

A lady of my own.

Myself will to my darling be

Both law and impulse: and with me

The girl, in rock and plain,

In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,

Shall feel an overseeing power,

To kindle or restrain."'

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In the ode to Duty again, he speaks in the same sense as in the

sonnet

'Me this unchartered freedom tires,

I feel the weight of chance desires.'

But the spirit of a moral liberty as growing out of the spirit of duty or tempered by it, is, in truth, the subject of the whole of this ode, and we request the reader to refresh his remembrance of it in connexion with the Sonnet last quoted.

There are other passages in Mr. Wordsworth's works more or less bearing upon the subject; but we have quoted enough to exemplify the manner in which we would recommend that the doctrinal class of Mr. Wordsworth's sonnets should be studiedby the light, that is, of his works at large and of the moral views which pervade them.

Is Mr. Wordsworth, then,' it may be asked, 'so prone to repeat himself?' We answer, undoubtedly he is; and we will venture to add that self-repetition is almost invariably incident to men of genius, and constitutes a great element of their power. The difference between such men and others is not only in the importance of the truths which occur to them, but in the impression which a truth makes. A great truth coming into the mind of a great man lives with him from that time forth, mixes itself with his thoughts in all moods of his mind, reproduces itself in many combinations, passes from him in sundry shapes, and, according as his own mind is multiform and cognizant of many varieties of mind and mood in others, this truth proceeding from it thus repeatedly and variously, finds access to one reader in the shape of a passage in an ethical poem, to another in that of a sonnet-to one in a form in which he can comprehend it in its entire scope and extent, to another, or to the same in another mood, in a form in which he can remember and quote it. The same truth may have entered a thousand minds before, but the ordinary mind grew tired of it and dismissed it, whilst to the other its value as a truth is more than its novelty as a thought, and gives it an eternal freshness. It has been our good fortune to have listened to the conversation of most of the great writers of the present age, and we have observed that they all repeated themselves more than other men, and that this did in no respect detract from the interest of their discourse, but rather enhanced it, as what recurred often was what we most wished to dwell upon.

The sonnet at page 48 is an exhortation to temperance in grief, on the ground that the gifts of genius are impaired by excess in it :

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Rise, GILLIES, rise: the gales of youth shall bear
Thy genius forward like a winged steed.
Though bold Bellerophon (so Jove decreed
In wrath) fell headlong from the fields of air,
Yet a rich guerdon waits on minds that dare,
If aught be in them of immortal seed,
And reason govern that audacious flight
Which heavenward they direct.-Then droop not thou,
Erroneously renewing a sad vow

In the low dell 'mid Roslin's faded grove:
A cheerful life is what the Muses love,

A soaring spirit is their prime delight.'—p. 48.

To a mind of high intellectual aspirations, there is perhaps no earthly motive for conquering a sorrow so likely to be effective as that which is here suggested; for though earthly, it is not worldly; on the contrary, it harmonizes with a state of the feelings in which worldly pursuits are set aside. But we advert to it chiefly for the sake of placing the view expressed in the last two lines, in opposition to a belief almost universal in the zenith of Lord Byron's reputation and still somewhat prevalent, that a melancholy temperament is favourable to poetic genius; a belief from which the practical consequence followed that in our time, as in the days of Prince Arthur

Young gentlemen would be as sad as night
Only for wantonness.'

We do not deny that a poetical mind will have its melancholy moods and seasons, and we would even admit that a pensive melancholy, as an occasional mood, may be more frequent with such a mind than with others. In these very sonnets of Mr. Wordsworth's, there is a strain of melancholy feeling to be met with in many a page: but Mr. Wordsworth's melancholy is not that of a languid self-occupied recluse; it is a melancholy which alternates with the spirit of enjoyment and carries with it the spirit of consolation, and is penetrating and rational,— a melancholy compounded of many simples and the sundry contemplation of his travels.' We speak of Mr. Wordsworth therefore, as well as with him, when we say that a mind which is strong and elastic in its general texture, is as propitious to the highest order of poetic genius as to any other agency which is to be powerful over mankind. The reveries of a fantastic sadness or of a gloomy seclusion can yield but a meagre product in poetry, as compared with the meditations of a mind which is not only contemplative but vigorous and buoyant, and above all, active in its social sympathies. For the highest poetry must be founded in knowledge and wisdom, and informed by a spirit which, though clear and

pure,

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