SPECIMEN OF WORDSWORTH'S VERSE.

THOUGHTS ON REVISITING THE WYE.

Oh! how oft,

In darkness, and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight, when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart,
How oft in spirit have I turned to thee,

O silvan Wye! thou wanderer through the woods-
How often has my spirit turned to thee !

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again,

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food

For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when, like a roe,
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led; more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then-
The coarser pleasures of my boyish days

And their glad animal movements all gone by-
To me was all in all-I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest

Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed, for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

459

460

SPECIMEN OF WORDSWORTH'S VERSE.

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains, and of all that we behold

From this green earth,—of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half create
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature, and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

DISTINGUISHED as a descriptive poet by his fine Lays of Ancient Rome, and yet more distinguished as a master of English prose by his Essays and his noble History of England, Macaulay stands prominent among the highest literary names of the nineteenth century. When, amid the Christmas festivities of 1859, а mournful whisper crept into almost every home in the land, telling of his death, there were few hearts so thoroughly engrossed by the pleasures of the passing hour as not to send a thought of affectionate sorrow into that quiet room at Kensington, where the great Historian and Essayist-the only man whom England ever made a lord for the power of his pen-lay mute and still among his cherished books and the half-written sheets of his unfinished volume.

Macaulay was of Scottish lineage, being a descendant of the Macaulays of Lewis in Ross-shire. His grandfather, John, was a Presbyterian minister. His father, Zachary, who spent part of his life in Jamaica, became well known for his exertions in opposition to the hateful slave-trade. At Rothley Temple in Leicestershire, the seat of Zachary's brother-in-law, a rich English merchant and member of Parliament, the future historian was born in 1800, and was named Thomas Babington, after the uncle in whose house he first saw the light.

Young Macaulay's career as a student of Trinity College, Cambridge, was crowned with high honours. Entering in 1818, he

462

ARTICLE ON "MILTON."

obtained in the following year the Chancellor's medal for a poem called Pompeii; in 1821 he received a similar distinction for a poem on Evening, and was, besides, elected to the Craven scholarship; and he had been for a year Fellow of Trinity when, in 1825, he took his degree of Master of Arts. And in the arena of the Union Debating Society, where the keenest and brightest minds of Cambridge met to display their skill in fence, few could measure weapons with Babington Macaulay. Such honours formed no unfitting prelude for the career of literary and political renown upon which he entered without delay. While yet an undergraduate, he had contributed to The Etonian, a short-lived serial conducted by Praed, his most formidable rival at the Union; and had also, in company with that author of "Quince" and the "Red Fisherman," written for Knight's Quarterly Magazine. Here his first public laurels were won. But the young student of law he was now working away at Lincoln's Inn in preparation for his call to the bar-before donning the legal robe, had achieved a success of which many older men might well be proud. Milton's newly-found treatise on "Christian Doctrine" having been rendered into English, Macaulay contributed to an August number of the "Edinburgh Review" that article on Milton, which must be regarded as the starting-point of his literary fame. It was brilliant

1825 A.D.

even to excess. The writer himself, when the added skill and taste of nearly twenty years had chastened his style, condemned this article, as being "overloaded with gaudy and ungraceful ornament." But its appearance was felt, by all the reading public, to mark the rising of a new star of uncommon lustre above the horizon; and it is easier to forgive an excess of real brilliance, which, we know, coming years must purify and subdue, than to endure a poverty of light, or, still worse, that display of pinchbeck jewels, glittering with affected lustre, of which our young literature is too full.

About six months after the appearance of Milton, the writer was called to the English bar. We pass lightly over his professional and political career. His Whig friends soon made him a

MACAULAY'S POLITICAL CAREER.

463

Commissioner of Bankruptcy. He took his seat in 1830 as member for Calne. He spoke often and with great power in the battle of the Reform Bill, and won considerable reputation as an orator, although his delivery was monotonous and he lacked some of the physical qualities of a telling speaker. His orations were rather brilliant political essays than great outbursts of natural eloquence, like the speeches of Chatham or Burke. From 1832 to 1834 he was member for Leeds. And then he went out to India as legal adviser to the Supreme Council of Calcutta, his principal business there being the preparation of a new penal code of Indian law. The formation of this code led him to the investigation of Indian history, a study which bore fine fruit in his Essays on Lord Clive and Warren Hastings, the principal literary results of the two years and a half which he spent in the East. Many of his best articles in the "Edinburgh" came home by the Indian mail, recreations of his leisure at Calcutta. In 1839 Macaulay, then newly returned from India, became member for Edinburgh, upon taking office under Lord Melbourne as Secretary at War, and this connection with the Scottish capital lasted for eight years. Under Lord John (now Earl) Russell, he was in 1846 appointed Paymaster-General of the Forces; but, in the following year, his vote in favour of the Maynooth grant having given offence to some of the Edinburgh electors, he was beaten at the poll by Mr. Cowan.

The defeat was a victory. Macaulay the meinber for Edinburgh, sinking out of public view for two years, emerges as Macaulay the historian of England. Living chiefly at the Albany, and spending many of his mornings among the literary treasures of the British Museum, quartering himself for weeks at a country ale-house in the village of Weston Zoyland, that he might write his stirring and vivid description of the battle of Sedgemoor on the very spot, he devoted all his strength to more enduring work than Essays in the "Edinburgh Review." The first two volumes of The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, published in 1849, were received with an 1849 enthusiasm fully equal to the reception of Gibbon's

A.D.