Perverted thus, but weakness in all good,
And strength in evil? Hence an after-call
For chastisement, and custody, and bonds,
And oft-times death, avenger of the past,
And sole guardian in whose hands we dare
Entrust the future. - Not for these sad issues
Was Man created; but to obey the law

Of life, and hope, and action. And 't is known
That when we stand upon our native soil
Unelbowed by such objects as oppress

Our active powers, those powers themselves become
Strong to subvert our noxious qualities:
They sweep distemper from the busy day,
And make the Chalice of the big round Year
Run o'er with gladness; whence the Being moves
In beauty through the world; and all who see
Bless him, rejoicing in his neighborhood."

Vol. IV. p. 305.

But notwithstanding this, we have little faith in Wordsworth's democracy. He is a kind-hearted man, that would hurt no living thing, and who shudders to see a single human being suffer. So far, so good. But he has no faith in anything like social equality. He compassionates the poor, and would give the beggar an "awmous"; but measures which would prevent begging, which would place the means of a comfortaable subsistence in the hands of all men, so that there should be no poor, he apparently contemplates not without horror. A man is not necessarily inclined to democracy because he sings wagoners, pedlers, and beggars, any more than he is necessarily inclined. to aristocracy because he brushes his coat, and maintains his personal dignity and independence. Aristocracy may be found clad in rags, scarcely less often than in embroidery. True democracy compassionates the poor no more than it does the rich. It reverences all men, and seeks to put all men into possession of their native, inalienable rights. It rarely gives alms, except to relieve present suffering; it discovers no beauty in the beggar, and cannot pause to idealize him. It loathes the beggar, though it

loves the man, and seeks to convert him into an independent man, able to live without begging.

Wordsworth sings beggars, we admit, and shows very clearly that a man who begs is not to be despised; but does he ever fire our souls with a desire so to perfect our social system, that beggary shall not be one of its fruits? A Wordsworthian society without beggars, or such feeble old paupers as Simon Lee, would be shorn of all its poetic beauty. Herein lies the defect we discover in his democracy. He would lead us to love all men, but always in the conIdition in which we find them. This is to us the height of aristocracy. Aristocracy always delights in giving alms, in doing something for the poor and needy; but it never delights in taking measures to prevent there being any poor and needy, or to enable the poor and needy to work out their own salvation. Democracy, on the other hand, attempts to do little for the people. It believes the people do not need so many dry nurses as it has been thought; it believes the people, if their kind masters will let them alone, are fully competent to take care of themselves. It labors therefore to remove oppression, to take off the restraints which have been imposed upon their natural liberty, and to leave them free to employ their own limbs in procuring the means of their own wellbeing. Aristocracy gives alms to the poor, and nurses them as dependents; democracy proclaims their rights as men, and seeks to secure to them their possession. Aristocracy, with much kindness of look and voice, seeks to relieve the hunger of to-day; democracy seeks, often with a stern look and a harsh voice, to lay down principles and establish an order of things which shall relieve the hunger of all coming time. Good Henry the Fourth of France, in the benevolence of his heart, wished he could put a chicken into the pot of every man in his kingdom; democracy would so arrange matters that every man in its kingdom shall have it in his power to boil a chicken whenever he pleases. We have seen nothing

in Wordsworth to induce us to believe that his feeling towards the poor differs essentially from that of good king Henri Quatre.

The tendency of a man's soul is usually to be ascertained by the party with which he arranges himself. Wordsworth goes with the high Tory party of his country, and opposes, as much as a man of his inertness can, the the efforts of the friends of freedom. During the wars created by the French Revolution all his sympathies and all his powers were consecrated to the defence of the tyrants. His odes and his sonnets, blasphemously inscribed to Liberty, were in praise of those who fought for old abuses, never in praise of those who sided with the people. If he loves the people and desires their freedom, he has taken an odd way of showing it. We are aware that the French Revolution is a bugbear to many; but we dare be known among those who see in it a great, though terrible, effort of Humanity to gain possession of those rights which Christianity had taught her to regard as her inalienable patrimony, and to cherish as the apple of her eye, and we can own no man as a friend to his God, to his race, or to his country, who sided with those who took up arms against it, and sought to perpetuate old wrongs, time-hallowed oppressions. He must repent of his doings in sackcloth and ashes, with deep humility, with all the marks of sincere contrition, acknowledge his error, before we can believe the love of liberty lives in his heart. That Revolution had doubtless its excesses, but it needs no apology. Its apology stands in the fact that it has been. Its excesses will be forgotten much sooner than the excesses, the proscriptions, the murders, the soul-destroying tyrannies, of kings and aristocracies. The day will come when Humanity shall regard the chapter which records that Revolution as the brightest in her history. We should be the most shameless of all the world, citizens as we are of a country which owes its national existence to a Revolution, whose institutions are based on the very principles

of Liberty and Equality, which France sought, but sought in vain, yet not wholly in vain, to make the basis of her own, did we not sympathize with the French Revolution, and pity the blindness of a Wordsworth, who could not see that the cause of Humanity was in it.

But we can continue our remarks no further. We say in conclusion, that we regard Wordsworth as endowed by nature with a fine poetic temperament, and respectable talents, which he has assiduously cultivated. He has a reflective as well as a dreamy turn of mind, though his mind has but a limited horizon, and is full of narrow and local prejudices, as is unfortunately the case with most Englishmen. We regard him as the Cowley of the nineteenth century, though on this point we will not insist, for we are not very familiar with Cowley's works. As the poet of external nature, he is inferior to our own Bryant. We have read nothing of his that pleases us so much as Bryant's" Death of the Flowers," and we would by no means exchange "The Ages" for "The Excursion." Wordsworth is gentle and amiable, but he wants vigor, force of soul. We should like him altogether better were he made of sterner stuff, were he more robust and manly. But enough. There are moods of mind when we can read some of his pieces without any extraordinary effort. He does not address himself to the broad, universal soul of the race, but there will always be individuals and coteries to admire him.

ART. II.-Cours de Philosophie professé à la Faculté des Lettres pendant l'année 1818, par M. VICTOR COUSIN, sur le fondement des idées absolues du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien; publié avec son autorisation et d'après les meilleures rédactions de ce Cours, par M. ADOLPHE GARNIER, maître de conférences à l'École Normale. Paris. 1836. 8vo. pp.

391.

WE proceed now to answer the ontological question started near the conclusion of the paper on the Eclectic Philosophy in our last number; and, since ontology must have its root in psychology, since we must attain to the reality existing out of us, by a careful analysis of the facts which exist within us, we have thought it best to introduce what we have to say in answer to the question proposed, by returning for a few moments upon psychology, which we do by translating some appropriate extracts from the instructive volume before us, the title of which we have for a second time quoted.

"The last century was divided into two great schools,— both exclusive, and both incomplete. On one side was the school of Locke, Condillac, and their disciples; on the other that of Reid, Kant, and their adherents. The first considers thought or the human ME simply as a sort of reflex of the material world, incapable in itself of creating anything; the second considers it as drawing all its ideas from itself, constituting the external world by its own intellectual energy. A profounder analysis of the intelligence must lead, we think, to the discovery that the ME is neither the slave of the material world, nor its creator. Independently of sensation, which subjects the ME to the physical world, independently of the will, which renders it master of itself, there exists a third element, which has not been sufficiently analyzed and described, and which we may call the World of Reason, regarded not as a faculty, but as the rule of our judgments, Reason, which is neither you nor I nor any one else, but which commands us all,reign and absolute truth, which communicates itself to all men, but is the property of no man;—in a word, the impersonal

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