amid such heavy features. The habit of taking opium was but an outward expression of the transports and depressions to which he was inly prone. In him glided up in the silence, equally vivid, the Christabel, the Geraldine. Through his various mind "Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea." He was one of those with whom “The metcor offspring of the brain Unnourished wane, Faith asks her daily bread, And fancy must be fed." And when this was denied, "Came a restless state, 'twixt yea and nay, His faith was fixed, his heart all ebb and flow; Or like a bark, in some half-sheltered bay, Above its anchor driving to and fro." Thus we cannot wonder that he, with all his vast mental resources and roble aims, should have been the bard elect to sing of Dejection, and that the pages of his prose works should be blistered by more painful records of personal and social experiences, than we find in almost any from a mind able to invoke the aid of divine philosophy, a mind touched by humble piety. But Wordsworth, who so early knew, and sought, and found the life and the work he wanted, whose wide and equable thought flows on like a river through the plain, whose verse seemed to come daily like the dew to rest upon the flowers of home affcc. tions, we should think he might always have been with his friend, ase describes two who had grown up together, "Each other's advocate, each other's stay, And strangers to content, if long apart, Or more divided than a sportive pair A. "Why art thou silent? Is thy love a plant Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air Of absence withers what was once so fair? Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant? Yet have my thoughts for thee been vigilant, (As would my deeds have been) with hourly care, The mind's least generous wish a mendicant For naught but what thy happiness could spare. Speak, though this soft warm heart, once free to hold A thousand tender pleasures, thine and mine, Be left more desolate, more dreary cold, Than a forsaken bird's nest filled with snow, Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine; Speak, that my torturing doubts their end may know." less palsy that precedes the death of love. "Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant ?" But Laurie, how could you ever fancy a mind of poetic sensibility would be a stranger to this sort of sadness? What signifies the security of a man's own position and choice? The peace and brightness of his own lot? If he has this intelligent. sensibility can he fail to perceive the throb that agitates the bosom of all nature, or can his own fail to respond to it ? In the eye of man, or in the sunset clouds, from the sobs of literature, or those of the half-spent tempest, can he fail to read the secrets of fate and time, of an over-credulous hope, a too much bewailed disappointment? Will not a very slight hint convey to the mind in which the nobler faculties are at all developed, a sense of the earthquakes which may in a moment upheave his vineyard and whelm his cottage beneath rivers of fire. Can the poet at any time, like the stupid rich man, say to his soul, "Eat, drink, and be merry." No, he must ever say to his fellow man, as Menelaus to his kingly brother, "Shall my affairs Go pleasantly, while thine are full of woe?" Oh, never could Wordsworth fail, beside his peaceful lake, to know the tempests of the ocean. And to an equable temperanent sorrow seems sadder than it really is, for such know less of the pleasures of resistance. It needs not that one of deeply thoughtful mind be passionate, .o divine all the secrets of passion. Thought is a bec that cannot miss those flowers. Think you that if Hamlet had held exactly the position best fitted to his nature, had his thoughts become acts, without any violent willing of his own, had a great people paid life-long homage to his design, had he never detected the baseness of his mother, nor found cause to suspect the untimely fate of his father, had that "rose of May, the sweet Ophelia," bloomed safely at his side, and Horatio always been near, with his understand. ing mind and spotless hands, do you think all this could have preserved Hamlet from the astounding discovery that "A man may smile, and smile, and be a villain ?” That line, once written on his tables, would have required the commentary of many years for its explanation. L. He was one by nature adapted to "consider too curiously," for his own peace. A. All thoughtful minds are so. L. All geniuses have not been sad. A. So far as they are artistic, merely, they differ not from instinctive, practical characters, they find relief in work. But so far as they tend to evolve thought, rather than to recreate the forms of things, they suffer again and again the pain of death, because they open the gate to the next, the higher realm of being. Shakspeare knew both, the joy of creation, the deep pang of knowledge, and this last he has expressed in Hamlet with a force that vibrates almost to the centre of things. L. It is marvellous, indeed, to hear the beautiful young prince catalogue "The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks • The whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes." To thee, Hamlet, so complete a nature, "The expectancy and rose of the fair state, The noble and most sovereign reason, The unmatched form and feature of blown youth," could such things come so near? Who then shall hope a refuge, except through inborn stupidity or perfected faith? A. Ay, well might he call his head a globe! It was fitted to comprehend all that makes up that "quintessence of dust, how noble in reason; how infinite in faculties; in form, and moving, how express and admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!" yet to him, only a quintessence of dust! L. And this world only "a sterile promontory." |