are interesting, yet you might do without trailing them all out before us. 'You must consider your emotions very precious, that you put them all under glass! There are only three or four events of our lives worthy of being related; our powerful sensations deserve to be exhibited, because they recapitulate our whole existence; but not the little effects of the little agitations which pass through us, and the imperceptible oscillations of our every-day condition. 'The speciality of the artist is to cast great ideas in moulds as great as they; Wordsworth's moulds are of bad common clay, notched, unable to hold the noble metal which they ought to contain. But the metal is genuinely noble; and besides several very beautiful sonnets, there is now and then a work, amongst others, The Excursion, in which we forget the poverty of the scenery to admire the purity and elevation of the thought. In truth the author hardly puts himself to the trouble of imagination; he walked along and conversed with an old Scotch pedlar: this is the whole of the history. The poets of this school always walked, regarding nature, and thinking of human destiny; it is their permanent attitude. He converses then, with the pedlar, ‚—a meditative character, who had become educated by a long experience of men and things; who spoke well (too well!) of the soul and of God'. We will not quote M. Tain's descriptions of the other personages introduced into the 'Excursion', suffice it to remark that they are in the same strain. He then goes on to complain, as we expect a lively Frenchman to do, of the dulness of the poem. 'Observe that passim and gradually, reflections and moral discussions, scenery and moral descriptions, spread before us in hundreds, dissertations entwine their long thorny hedgerows, and metaphysical thistles multiply in every corner. In short, the poem is grave and sad as a sermon'. Having thus freely expressed his sense of the gravity and tedium of the work, our French author thus concludes with a more just estimate of its value. 'Well! in spite of this ecclesiastical air and the tirades against Voltaire and his age, we feel ourselves impressed as by a discourse of Theodore Jouffroy. After all, the man is convinced; he has spent his life in meditating on these kinds of ideas, they are the poetry of his religion, race, climate; he is imbued with them; his pictures, stories, interpretations of visible nature and human life, tend only to put the mind in the grave disposition which is proper to the inner man. 'I come here as into the valley of Port Royal: a solitary nook, stagnant waters, gloomy woods, ruins, gravestones, and above all the idea of responsible man, and the obscure beyond, to which we involuntarily move. I forget the careless French fashion, the custom of not disturbing the even tenor of life. There is an imposing seriousness, an austere beauty in this sincere reflection; respect comes in, we stop and are touched. This book is like a Protestant temple, august, though bare and monotonous. The poet sets forth the great interests of the soul. . . . . . The verses sustain these serious thoughts by their grave harmony, as it were a motet accompanying a meditation or a prayer. They resemble the grand monotonous music of the organ, which in the eventide, at the close of the service, rolls slowly in the twilight of arches and pillars'. At a later period, we find Wordsworth writing to Moxon that there did not appear to be much genuine relish for poetical publications in Cumberland, if he might judge from the fact of not one copy of his poems having been sold there by one of the leading booksellers, though Cumberland was his native county. He added his conviction that Byron and Scott were the only popular, or rather fashionable, writers in that line. A friend who accompanied the poet to Cockermouth, in 1816, mentions as a singular illustration of the maxim, 'A prophet is not without honour save in his own country', that a gentlemanly and intelligent professional man asked, 'Is it true, as I have heard reported, that Mr. Wordsworth ever wrote verse?' It was at one time currently reported in literary circles, that Rogers said to Wordsworth,' If you would let me edit your poems, and give me leave to omit some half dozen, and make a few trifling alterations, I would engage that you should be as popular a poet as any living'. Wordsworth's answer is said to have been, ' I am much obliged to you, Mr. Rogers, I am a poor man, but I would rather remain as I am.' As amendments in poetry, even when made by the writer himself, are seldom without some token of a rent, it may be readily imagined how the Rydal Bard, with his fastidiousness as to style, would shrink from the idea of submitting his verses to be revised by another. If Wordsworth sold very few of his books, he certainly did not give much encouragement as a buyer. He expressed his astonishment at the account which Archdeacon Wrangham gave of his books, and adds that he should have been still more astonished if he had heard that the archdeacon had read a third or even a tenth part of them. His own reading powers, never very good, he describes as diminishing, especially by candlelight; and as to buying books, he says, 'I can affirm that in new books, I have not spent five shillings, in the last five years. As to old books, my dealings in that way, for want of means, have been very trifling; nevertheless, small and paltry as my collection is, I have not read a fifth part of it'. To another friend he writes:-'As to poetry, I am sick of it; it over-runs the country in all the shapes of the plagues of Egypt — frog poets (the croakers) — mice poets (the nibblers); a class which Gray, in his dignified way, calls flies, (the insect youth) --a term wonderfully applicable on this occasion. But let us desist, or we shall be accused of envying the rising generation'. This indifference to books, especially those by modern authors, is a noticeable feature in a man of such high culture, and we are involuntarily led to contrast him with his neighbour, Southey, who seemed endowed with the faculty of grappling with whole libraries. Or, if in this particular we compare him with Milton, of whom Dryden remarked too broadly, that 'he saw nature through the spectacles of books', how wide is the difference. Milton's classical knowledge was profusely displayed yet often most gracefully and with admirable effect; and Wordsworth is perhaps more happy in those classic allusions introduced as it were incidentally, than in his more sustained efforts, such as his 'Dion' or 'Laodamia': take, for instance, one of the 'Duddon Sonnets', where, after conducting us along the more placid course of that stream, he at length introduces us to one of its wilder scenes, and makes the bounding river Dance, like a Bacchanal, from rock to rock, See also the lines on 'Amphion' and 'Orion' in his poem on 'The Power of Sound', or more notably the rich Titianesque painting which follows. 'The pipe of Pan, to shepherds Couched in the shadow of Moenalian pines, This way and that, with wild-flowers crowned'. But, suddenly the spell is broken: we are no longer suffered to follow this rabble rout, the offspring of Pagan illusion, we are startled by the poet's sterner voice recalling us. To life, to life, give back thine ear : Of fable, though to truth subservient, hear The convict's summons in the steeple's knell ; The summer of 1820 was occupied by a foreign tour, in which the poet was accompanied by his wife and sister. Nothing in Paris interested Wordsworth so much as the Jardin des Plantes with its vast collection of living animals and its noble museum. 'Scarcely', says he, 'could I refrain from tears of admiration at the sight of this apparently boundless exhibition of the wonders of the creation. The statues and pictures of the Louvre affected me feebly in comparison'. After visiting the field of Waterloo, though far from indifferent to the glory acquired there, he writes |