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conception; which traces back the innumerable rills of thought and feeling to the ocean of an infinite mind, and thus surpasses the most elegant and ethereal polytheism infinitely more than the sun does the "cinders of the element.". However beautiful the mythology of Greece, as interpreted by Wordsworth-however instinct it was with imagination-however it seemed to breathe a supernatural soul into the creation, and to rouse and startle it all into life-to fill the throne of the sun with a divine tenant-to hide a Naiad in every fountain-to crown every rock with its Oread-to deify shadows and storms-and to send sweeping across "old ocean's grey and melancholy waste" a celestial emperor, it must yield, without a struggle, to the thought of a great one Spirit, feeding by his perpetual presence the lamp of the universe, speaking in all its voices, listening in all its silence, storming in its rage, reposing in its calm, its light the shadow of his greatness, its gloom the hiding-place of his power, its verdure the trace of his steps, its fire the breath of his nostrils, its motion the circulation of his untiring energies, its warmth the effluence of his love, its mountains the altars of his worship, and its oceans the "mirrors" where his form "glasses itself in tempests." Compared to this idea, how does the fine dream of the Pagan Mythos tremble and melt away-Olympus, with its multitude of stately, celestial natures, dwindle before the solitary, immutable throne of Jehovah-the poetry, as well as the philosophy of Greece, shrink before the single sentence, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord"-and Wordsworth's description of the origin of its multitudinous gods, look tame beside the mighty lines of Milton!

The oracles are dumb

No voice or hideous hum

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine,

Can no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.

No nightly trance or breathed spell

Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.
He feels from Judah's land

The dreadful Infant's hand.

The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne.
Nor all the gods beside

Dare longer now abide;

Nor Typhon huge, ending in snaky twine.
Our Babe, to show his Godhead true,

Can in his swaddling-bands control the damned crew.

Shall we rob ourselves of the varied beauties of the "Excursion," because one of the dramatis persona is a pedlar, and because the book was originally a quarto of the largest size? No. Wordsworth is, like his own cloud, ponderous, and "moveth altogether, if he move at all." His excursions are not those of an epheme

ron, and disdain duodecimos. We dare not put this chef d'œuvre of his genius on the same shelf with the "Paradise Lost;" but there are passages in both which claim kindred, and the minds of the twain dwell not very far apart. Having no wish to sacrifice one great man to the manes of another-to pull down the living, that we may set up the cold idol of the dead-we may venture to affirm, that, if Milton was more than the Wordsworth of the seventeenth, Wordsworth was the Milton of the nineteenth century.

Among his later and smaller poems, the best, perhaps, is his "Ode on the Power of Sound." It is laboured and involved, but the labour is that of a giant birth, and the involution is that of close-piled magnificence. Up the gamut of sound how does he travel, from the sprinkling of earth on the coffin-lid to the note of the eagle, who rises over the arch of the rainbow, singing his own wild song; from the Ave Maria of the pilgrim to the voice of the lion, coming up vast and hollow on the winds of the midnight wilderness; from the trill of the blackbird to the thunder speaking from his black orchestra to the echoing heavens; from the

Distress-gun on a leeward shore,
Repeated, heard, and heard no more,

to the murmur of the main-for well

The tow'ring headlands crown'd with mist,
Their feet among the billows, know

That ocean is a mighty harmonist;

from the faintest sigh that stirs the stagnant air of the dungeon to the "word which cannot pass away," and on which the earth and the heavens are suspended. This were, but for its appearance of heaving effort, a lyric fit to be placed beside Shelley's "Ode to Liberty," and Coleridge's "France." Appropriately, it has a swell of sound, and a pomp of numbers, such as he has exhibited in no other of his poems; and yet there are moods in which we would prefer his "We are Seven," or one of his little poems on Lucy, to all its laboured vehemence and crudded splendour.

Wordsworth had a forehead broad and high, and bent under the weight of brooding thought; a few grey hairs streaming over it; an eye which, when still, seemed to "see more in nature than the eyes of other men," and when roused beamed forth with singular meaning; a face furrowed with thought; a form bent with study; a healthy glow upon his cheek, which told of moorland walks and mountain solitude; a deep-toned voice; he excelled in reading his own poetry; was temperate in his habits; serene in his disposition; was fortunate in his circumstances and family connections; and lived and died one of the happiest of men. His

religion was cheerful, sanguine, habitual; and we need not say how much it did to colour his poetry, and to regulate his life.

It is much to have one's fame connected vitally with the imperishable objects of nature. It is so with Burns, who has written his name upon Coila's plains, and rivers, and woods, in characters which shall never die. It is so with Scott, who has for monument the "mountains of his native. land," and the rustling of the heather of Caledonia as a perpetual pibroch of lament over his ashes. So we believe that the memory of the great man whose character we have been depicting, is linked indissolubly with the scenery of the Lakes, and that men in far future ages, when awed in spirit by the gloom of Helvellyn-when enchanted by the paradisal prospects of the vale of Keswick-when catching the first gleam of the waters of Windermere-or when taking the last look of Skiddaw, the giant of the region-shall mingle with every blessing they utter, and every prayer they breathe, the name of William Wordsworth.

ROBERT POLLOK.

OUR readers are aware that there once existed a strong prejudice against what was called religious poetry. The causes of this feeling were long to tell and wearisome to trace. Not the least of them was the authority of Dr Johnson, who, though enamoured of the sanctimonious stupidity of Blackmore, had yet an inveterate prejudice against religious poetry per se, and was at the pains to enshrine this "folly of the wise" in some of the tersest and most energetic sentences which ever dropped from his authoritative pen. Another cause lay, we think, in the supreme badness of the greater part of the soi-disant poetry which professed to be religious. Lumbering versions of the winged words of inspired men of God-verses steeped in maudlin sentiment, when not touched into convulsive life by fanaticism-hymns, how different from those of Milton or of the Catholic litany, full of sickly unction, or of babyish prattle; such was, during the eighteenth century, the staple of our sacred song. If any one thinks our statement overcharged, let him put it to the test, by taking up one of our old hymn-books, and comparing it, in its pert jingle and impudent familiarities, to the "strains which once did sweet in Zion glide," to our own rough but manly ver

sion of the Psalms, or to the later hymns of Cowper and Montgomery. It is like a twopenny trump, or a musical snuff-box, beside the lyre of David, or the organ of Isaiah. And just when the splendid success of Cowper, Montgomery, &c., had wiped out this bad impression of religious poetry, and when the oracular dogma of the lexicographer was dying into echo, a new source of prejudice was opened in the uprise of a set of pretended pious poets, or poetasters-who, approaching the horns of the altar, not only held, but tugged with all their might-who treated Divine things with the utmost coolness of familiarity-rushing within the hallowed circle of Scripture truth to snatch a selfish excitement-passing their own tame thoughts across the flame of the sanctuary, if they might thus kindle them into life; and doing all in their power to render the great little, the reverend ridiculous, and the divine disgusting. These mock Miltons, though they had established a railway communication with the lower regions, and took monthly "Descents into hell"—were quite intimate with the angel Gabriel, and conflagrated the creation as coolly as you would set up a rocket-made no very deep impression upon the public mind. Dismay and disgust, dying into laughter, were the abiding feeling with which they were regarded. And we know no better proof of Robert Pollok's essential superiority, than the fact, that his poem, amid the general nausea of such things, has retained its place; that the sins of his imitators have not been visited on his head; and that, while their tiny tapers have been all eclipsed, his solemn star shines on undimmed, reminding us, in its sombre splendour, of Mars, that dark red hermit of the heavens.

In examining Pollok's character as a poet, we are greatly helped by the compact unity of his actual achievement. When we speak of Pollok, we mean the "Course of Time." He did not, like many of greater mark, fritter down his powers in fugitive effusions. He is not remembered or forgotten as the author of literary remains, occasional essays, or posthumous fragments. He has incontestably written a book aspiring to completeness, of proud pretensions, hewn out of the quarry of his own soul, begun early, prosecuted with heroic perseverance, and cemented by his own life's-blood. Whatever we may think of the design or the execution, of the taste or the style, honour to the man who, in this age of fragments, and fractions of fragments, and first drafts, and tentative and tantalising experiments, has written an undeniable book! Nor let us forget the age of the writer. The fact, that a youth so impressed, by one effort of his mind, many, who were not straightway deemed insane, as to draw forth the daring of equalling him with Milton, and his work with "Paradise Lost," speaks much in its favour. Ere the majority of educated men have completed their mental training, or even formed the first vague dream

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of a magnum opus, his was resolved, revolved, rolled over in his mind for years, written, re-written, published, praised, and the author himself was away! Was not this much? And whatever malignity may say or shriek," the mere unbounded and unequalled popularity of the book does prove a little more. We, indeed, look upon the nineteenth century as a very young century in the world's history-as but a babe in leading-strings. Still we do not think so little of it, after all, as to deem that a tissue of wordy worthlessness would run like wildfire-pass through some score of editions in less than eighteen years, and take its place, if not with the "Paradise Lost," with which it ought never to be named, yet certainly with the "Grave" and the " Night Thoughts." Let those who, in the face of the general estimate of a tolerably enlightened public, deny the "Course of Time" any merit, be "choked with their own bile!" There were, indeed, we admit, certain circumstances which, in some measure, explained the popularity of the poem, apart altogether from its intrinsic merit. First of all, it was a religious poem, and this at once awakened a wide and warm interest in its favour. Galled by the godless ridicule of Byron, and chagrined by what they thought the vague and mystic piety of the Lakers, the religious community hailed the appearance of a new and true poet, who was ashamed of none of the peculiarities of one of the straitest of all their sects, with a tumult of applause. It was, besides, a poem by a dissenter. And between the gentle but timid genius of Michael Bruce, and the far more energetic song of Pollok, no poetry deserving the name had been produced among them. It was natural, therefore, that when, at length, a brilliant star broke forth in their firmament, they should salute its arrival with lawful and general pride. A few, indeed, of the more malignant of those who found themselves eclipsed, felt hatred, and pretended to feel contempt, for the poem. But the principal cause of its popularity was the premature death of the poet. This lent instantly a consecrating magic to its every line-passed over it like a pitying hand, hiding its bulky faults caused the poisoned arrows of many an intended critic to fall powerless from his grasp-aroused a tide of universal sympathy, and sympathy is akin to applause-put, in a word, the copestone on its triumph. Still the book had much merit of its own. It was, in the first place, on the whole, an original production. There were, it is true, as in all youthful works, traces of resemblance, and even imitation of favourite authors. Here, Milton's majestic tones and awful sanctity were emulated; there, a shadow of a shade of Dante's terrible gloom was caught. In another place, the epigrammatic turns of Young were less successfully mimicked. Many passages resembled Blair's "Grave" in their rough vigour of style and unsparing anatomy of human feelings and foibles. Cowper's sarcasm and strong simplicity had also

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