pure, is conversant with the ways of men, observant of their passions and transactions, and interested in all that concerns them. It is true that nothing can be more unpoetical than a strong and vivacious spirit which is also hard and selfish; and true also that this may be the more common combination: but it is the uncommon combination of great susceptibility and tenderness with not less of strength and vivacity, which makes the truly poetical temperament. And with regard to sympathy for suffering, though it is often supposed to belong more peculiarly to those who suffer in themselves, yet we are to distinguish between the occasional sufferings of a strong spirit bending, but not broken, and the absolute subjection of the mind to suffering as a permanent state. In the former case the recollection of past sufferings is keen enough to quicken the sympathies, whilst there is nothing to abate the courage or the genial freshness of the heart. In the latter, after the suffering has been for a long time unmixed and unintermitting, there will be hardly anything left alive in the heart except the desire to escape from pain; and if the sympathy with pain be not deadened (which it probably will be in the general prostration and self-involvement of the feelings), then there will be the desire to escape from that also. And here we must again bring the Excursion' to our assistance :

Unoccupied by sorrow of its own,

His heart lay open; and by Nature tuned
And constant disposition of his thoughts
To sympathy with man, he was alive
To all that was enjoyed where'er he went,
And all that was endured; for in himself
Happy, and quiet in his cheerfulness,
He had no painful pressure from without
That made him turn aside from wretchedness
With coward fears. He could afford to suffer
With those whom he saw suffer. Hence it came
That in our best experience he was rich
And in the wisdom of our daily life.'

Thus, to resume the sonnet, it is not from grief that the poet's friend is exhorted to free himself, not from grief the natural tribute to calamity, but from dejection and darkness, and as their necessary consequent, the unprofitable yoke of care.' For let no man suppose that he can surrender himself to an undue and interminable sorrow without becoming the slave of petty, fretful, miserable cares. To put on perpetual mourning is to put on the livery of a very abject servitude. And again the exhortation is addressed, not to one who was subjugated by some constitutional weakness or malady conspiring with circumstances to make sorrow immedicable

immedicable for to such a man exhortation would be addressed in vain-but to one whose despondency was in some measure wilful, a mistaken man who was voluntarily devoting himself to sorrow, and whom to enlighten might be to reanimate; for that such was the case in question is clearly intimated in those two lines (so exquisitely musical) which precede the close of the

sonnet

Droop not thou,

Erroneously renewing a sad vow

In the low dell 'mid Roslin's faded grove."

The principal aim of the sonnet having been this exhortation to the exercise of intellectual powers, the rewards and conditions of true genius are noticed incidentally., The rewards are promised to 'minds that dare:' but the courage is not to be that of temperament for such courage is rash and presumptuous, and can expect only the rebuke of Bellerophon who fell headlong. It is to be a courage founded in faith and fortified by the judgment-intellectual, spiritual, reasonable-such as shall be attendant upon endeavours directed towards the highest objects: for when is it that a rich guerdon waits on minds that dare?-Only

'If aught be in them of immortal seed,

And reason govern that audacious flight
Which heavenward they direct.'

It is to the intrepidity of high and sacred thoughts and a
genuine inspiration, that rewards are promised, and amongst them
that restoration for an afflicted spirit which is not to be found in
permanent seclusion, but only in the consecrating of active life to
nobler purposes.
And how much more is to be expected from
an appeal like this, than from the exhortations to patience and
fortitude which are so often employed with so little effect!—

'Consolatories writ

With studied argument,

Extolling patience as the truest fortitude,'*

do not produce the patience they extol, precisely because they extol it to this false extent. For excellent and commendable though it be, there are few cases of affliction in which, so soon as the earliest stage is past, something better than patience may not be looked to with better hope, and patience be met with by the way. Active energies, high aspirations must be awakened; the resiliency of the heart must be called upon rather than its passive strength, and oftentimes when the admonition to be patient would do little else than impose silence upon grief, such exhortations as are contained in this sonnet (and at greater length in the

Fourth Book of the Excursion') may-not in poetry merely, but in practice and in very deed, be found full of consolationanimating, exalting, invigorating, and

' able to drive

All sadness but despair.'

This sonnet was addressed to a man of poetical talents* who had the world before him and the 'gales of youth' to bear him forward. Let us turn now to a tribute rendered in the same form to a great man whose career was rapidly drawing to a close :— In the autumn of 1831 Mr. Wordsworth paid a visit to Sir Walter Scott, at Abbotsford, a few days before Sir Walter's departure for Naples; and that departure became the subject of a sonnet, which we are desirous to quote-not for the purposes of criticism, for indeed it needs no comment-but because the grace, and melody, and tenderness by which it is characterised, will say more to some readers than Mr. Wordsworth's abstruser inspirations::

A trouble, not of clouds or weeping rain,
Nor of the setting sun's pathetic light,
Engendered, hangs o'er Eildon's triple height:
Spirits of Power, assembled there, complain

For kindred Power departing from their sight;

While Tweed, best pleased in chanting a blithe strain,
Saddens his voice again, and yet again.

Lift up your hearts, ye Mourners! for the might
Of the whole world's good wishes with Him goes;
Blessings and prayers in nobler retinue

Than sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows,
Follow this wondrous Potentate. Be true,

Ye winds of ocean and the midland sea,

Wafting your Charge to soft Parthenope!'-p. 213.

Let it be written in the literary annals of this age at least, if not of others, that the men who were greatest in intellect amongst us were also great in heart and spirit, and lived together delighting in each other's society and rejoicing in each other's fame. Nor was it the fellowship of a school' which united them. This has been supposed of Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Coleridge, and Mr. Southey, though never of Sir Walter Scott; and yet it could scarcely have been more absurd to class him with them as forming a school, than to class them with each other. The truth is that these four men came together merely because they were the men

The tribute has been recently repaid by one who is (we believe) a relative, in another walk of art, Miss Gillies, the painter. Her portrait of Mr. Wordsworth is the only representation of him we have seen which presents us with the real man as he lives and breathes. It is engraved by M'Innis and published by Moon.

of

of the greatest literary genius in their generation, and because, being also men of large natures, any spirit of rivalry or jealousy was utterly foreign to their dispositions. Such men could not but be congenial associates, not owing to any peculiarity of genius common to them or any of them, but in spite of very great diversity. Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge are the two in whom most points of resemblance might be discerned, the genius of both being essentially philosophic; and yet how wide is the difference!—the one living, amongst books and amongst the wonderful creations of his own mind, a life of thinking for thinking's sake, led by the infirmities of his constitution to turn away from realities,

'And haply by abstruse research to steal

From his own nature all the natural man

dealing therefore with thoughts untried in action, unverified by application, perpetual evolutions of the thinking faculty which revolved into themselves, and which, though governed by the curb of a severe logic, were not encountered by the checks and responsibilities of life-the other seeking rather the wisdom of philosophy than philosophy in itself, drawing from the well-spring of life and fact, to which books afforded merely tributary streams, acting as occasions arose, or giving or seeking advice as to what was to be done when this or that happened, living apart from that world which sees its own reflection in the newspapers, but for that very reason penetrating further into individual natures and transactions-

'Sheltered, but not to social duties lost;
Secluded, but not buried.' +

* Coleridge's 'Ode to Dejection. One of the few profound writers of the present day has described with singular force and truth the intellectual characteristics of which this extraordinary man afforded (as we conceive) an example-an example illustrious, no doubt, and wonderful, but to our minds not less melancholy :-'But the imagination is not the only interceptor of affections divinely destined to the purposes of action. The understanding may be excited simultaneously, and when set to work in reasoning upon the relations of any given phenomena, or upon reducing them into a system, it may thus, with speculative truth for its end, be so delighted with its own energies as to lead us into forgetfulness of action. Thus it absorbs in intellectual exercise the strength that ought to have been spent in practical exertion; and, while it seems to be doing the work of the affections, it diverts them from their own end, employing all the mental powers in the verification of terms instead of the execution of acts, and then applying them to its own work of classifying, comparing, concluding, or otherwise as the case may be. Thus again, when a religious creed is presented, say to a disputatious and subtle mind, in which the action of the critical faculty overbears and absorbs all other energies, that faculty regards the creed proposed polemically, considers it with reference to logical and technical precision, and not in respect to its moral characteristics and tendencies, and wastes upon this theoretic handling of sacred themes all the sedulity which ought to be employed in seeking to give effect to the proffered means of spiritual amelioration.-Gladstone's Church Principles, 1810, p. 67. Excursion, book v.

and

and exercising his judgment in the only way which tends to its rectification-with the consciousness, namely, that according as it concludes there will follow joy or sorrow, loss or gain, injury, anger and resentment, or love and gratitude, on the part of some friend, neighbour, or well-known individual who is frequently met with face to face. From the judgment so exercised and the knowledge accruing with the exercise, comes practical wisdom, and by duly generalising from practical wisdom we advance to philosophic wisdom. But the principle which lies at the root of all is, that thoughts should either tend towards acts or issue out of them, in order to be justly determined.

'Give to no unproportioned thought his act,'*

is a negative injunction, to which may be appended an affirmative and a converse of equal truth. Give to each well-proportioned thought his act' is the affirmative: the converse (if it can be so called) is, 'Give your thoughts their acts, and they will have thereby the better chance to be well proportioned.' For when a thought is to have an act and a consequence, its justness will be the quality principally regarded by the thinker: whereas, if it is to be merely a meditative effort, to end in itself or in another thought, or in being written down in prose or rhyme, its novelty or brilliancy will have a principal instead of a secondary place in the estimation of the thinker; and by the habit of thus thinking without acting, and therefore without fear of consequences, the justness of the judgment will be impaired, and neither practical nor philosophic wisdom will be attained in their highest degrees. Of course we do not mean to say that, for the purposes of a writer, there must not be much thinking which neither begins nor ends in acting, nor perhaps has any direct reference to it; but what we do contend for is, that the habits of the mind must be formed by the thinking which has this reference, if there is to be any such 'gift of genuine insight' as may constitute a great ethical writer, whether in prose or poetry.

It is thus to the cultivation of Mr. Wordsworth's mind in real life that we attribute his pre-eminence as a philosophic poet; for with him the justness of the thought is always the first consideration: what is commonplace, so it be but true, has its due place and proportion in his mind; and the degree to which plain and acknowledged truth enters into his writings gives them their breadth, and perhaps, when they are regarded as a whole, even adds to their originality; for there is no mind so rare, nor consequently so original, as one which is intellectually capable of the most brilliant aberrations, and is yet so tempered by the love of

Shakspeare, in Hamlet.

truth