anything, which was considered doing so well that it was about to be conducted on a larger scale. He visited the old capital of Cartago for the express purpose of ascending the volcano, at the foot of which it stands the especial attraction being the hope of beholding from its summit, at one glance, the two mightiest waters of the globe:-- The ascent was rough and precipitous; in one place a tornado had swept the mountain, and the trees lay across the road so thickly as to make it almost impassable: we were obliged to dismount, and climb over some and creep under others. Beyond this we came into an open region, where nothing but cedar and thorns grew; and here I saw whortleberries for the first time in Central America. In that wild region there was a charm in seeing anything that was familiar to me at home, and I should perhaps have become sentimental, but they were hard and tasteless. As we rose we entered a region of clouds; very soon they became so thick that we could see nothing; the figures of our own party were barely distinguishable, and we lost all hope of any view from the top of the volcano. Grass still grew, and we ascended till we reached a belt of barren rock and lava; and here, to our great joy, we emerged from the region of clouds, and saw the top of the volcano, without a vapour upon it, seeming to mingle with the clear blue sky; and at that early hour the sun was not high enough to play upon its top. . . . . The crater was about two miles in circumference, rent and broken by time or some great convulsion; the fragments stood high, bare, and grand as mountains, and within were three or four smaller craters. We ascended on the south side by a ridge running east and west till we reached a high point, at which there was an immense gap in the crater impossible to cross. The lofty point on which we stood was perfectly clear, the atmosphere was of transparent purity, and looking beyond the region of desolation, below us, at a distance of perhaps two thousand feet, the whole country was covered with clouds, and the city at the foot of the volcano was invisible. By degrees the more distant clouds were lifted, and we saw at the same moment the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This was the grand spectacle we had hoped, but scarcely expected to behold. My companions had ascended the volcano seve ral times; but on account of the clouds had only seen the two seas once before. The points at which they were visible were the Gulf of Nicoya and the harbour of San Juan, not directly opposite, but nearly at right angles to each other, so that we saw them without turning the body. In a right line over the tops of the mountains ⚫ neither was more than twenty miles distant, and from the great height at which we stood they seemed almost at our feet. It is the only point in the world which commands a view of the two seas.'— vol. i. pp. 364-366. (To be continued.) ENGLISH LITERATURE. PART V. WORDSWORTH. To appreciate rightly the character and merits of any school of poetry, to estimate the effect it may produce in its own, or to calculate its probable chance of endurance and immortality in future ages, it is not sufficient to examine it as a single and unconnected phenomenon. The Apostle tells us that one star differeth from another in glory; » and it demands the eye of the Astronomer, educated by the sublime science which furnishes him with a scale deduced from the position or the revolution of the bodies he is examining, to marshal the celestial host in its different ranks and orders, where the gaze of the benighted peasant beholds only a multitude of luminous orbs, glimmering with an equal radiance in the dark expanse of Heaven. That class of poetry, of which Lord Byron was at the same time a chief leader, and a true type, viewed in this light, may be said to have originated in the convulsions and violence of the times-that Sturm- und Drang-Periode, to use the expression of a great German philosopher-in which it appeared. Society was, by the tremendous events which preceded, accompanied, and followed the wonderful career of " Napoleon, stirred up from its deepest abysses; from the yeasty depths of this wild and tempest-tossed ocean not only were treasures rich and strange» cast up, but, as might be expected, foul and loathsome monsters shocked our eyes, then for the first time evoked from their dark abodes. The vigour, the passion, and the intense feeling of the Byronian poetry was alloyed by baser elements; the vigour was but too often polluted with profanity, the passion with vice, and the feeling excited rather by the agonized pangs of unrepentant and selfish pride, than by the pure and inexhaustible sympathies of virtue and of truth. At the same time it must be confessed that the prevalence of this style tended powerfully to destroy the illusions of that false and artificial mode of thought and language which resulted from feeble imitations of Pope, diluted gradually to the puerile elegance of Hayley; and recalled the aspirants after poetical renown once more to that source so long and so unaccountably neglected-that source so fresh and so inexhaustible, the great English writers of the Elizabethan Era. Crabbe, indeed, had begun to show us that the faithful representation of the virtues, the sorrows, and the crimes of peasants could be a subject of the highest, though, alas, sometimes of the most painful interest: poetry at this period may be said to have put off the tinsel trappings of an unnatural and artificial courtliness; and to have proved that the poor man's voice could pour forth accents as touching and as deep as are echoed by the gilded roofs of the noble and the proud. 41 The early and melancholy death of Byron, at a period of life, when he had not gathered all his fame; when his powers were gradually reaching their highest vigour and flexibility-the mists of Missolonghi which dimmed our shining star» when approaching its very plenitude of brightnessthe sad fate of that great and noble spirit, at a moment when, as in the case of Shakspeare, his intellect was but reaching its meridian, and was gradually dispelling the errors and imperfections which clouded its early career, yet left us not desolate; another star, of soft and cheerful light-a fair " large star serene had begun to illumine our poetical atmosphere. With the writings of Wordsworth, the greatest poet and philosopher of the age, as he has been justly designated by the () critic, we intend, in the following pages, to make our readers acquainted; and our object will be amply attained if our remarks have the effect of inducing the public of this great country to have recourse to the works of this tender, wise, and sublime writer, there to learn how the noblest and loftiest truths may be married to immortal verse ; » and to be convinced that the highest poetry is the fittest handmaid of virtue and religion. ་ Neither the poetry, however, nor the philosophy, of this writer, are of that kind which, lying on the surface, attract the attention of the reader immediately, and repay him with sudden and transient delight: his Muse yields her pleasures, like Eve, (2) «With sweet, reluctant, amorous delay,» and the very principal merit consisting, as it frequently does, in (3) Deep self-possession, an intense repose, will disappoint him who looks for those violent emotions and startling contrasts which are considered by shallow and shortsighted readers, as the true elements of poetical impressions. Wordsworth first appeared before the public as the expounder and apostle of a new system of poetical expression and poetical thought; and the novelty of his views long drew on him the contempt of the unthinking, and the sarcastic criticism of the sciolist. The eyes, dazzled with the glare of the glittering and impressive poetry which preceded the appearance of the «Lyri (Quarterly Review, N CIV. Page 317. (') Paradise Lost. (1) Coleridge. cal Ballads, were unable to distinguish the delicate and sober tints of nature-as the cool glades and dim recesses of the forest are but dull and unexciting to him who has just quitted the glare and artificial splendour of a theatre. Moreover, we have the authority of one of the greatest poets for the principle, that in examining a work of new character and of high pretensions, " He who reads and to his reading brings not will in vain hope either to appreciate its merits with justice, or to extract from it that pure and elevating pleasure which it is the object of all poetry to bestow. This author first appeared before the reader with a small volume of poems composed in accordance with a system, the total novelty of which, no less than its singular discrepancy with the theories then entertained upon the subject, equally exposed it to distrust and to ridicule. He imagined that the language of the common people would be the fittest vehicle for description and reflection; forgetting that such language, associated as it invariably must be, with low and ludicrous images, rendered it unfit for the purpose to which he would have applied it. Bacon, the Aristotle of England, whose philosophy has, by a singular chance, such a surprising similarity with the very system which it was his mission to destroy, has admirably defined the nature and object of Poetry (2)—« It is an accommodation," he says, of the shows of things to the desires of the mind; and it is inconceivable that these shows should be represented best to the desires of those minds to which after all poetry is addressed-the minds of the thoughtful, the educated, and the wise-by the medium of a language debased to the mean uses of the commonest, the least elevated, and the least important purposes. " The development, however, of the system, whose principles, pushed to their utmost extent, and exclusively adopted (') Milton. (2) Essays. |