The tender Palinodia is beyond Petrarch: Though I beheld at first with blank surprise Ever too heedless, as I now perceive : More beautiful, as being a thing more holy; Thanks to thy virtues, to the eternal youth cast Into one vision, future, present, past! That 'more beautiful' is most beautiful! all human love's cunning is in it; besides the full glorifying smile of Christian love! Last in the volume is the tragedy of The Borderers, which, having lain for some fifty years 'unregarded' among its author's papers-a singular destiny for these printing days when our very morning talk seems to fall naturally into pica type-caused, in its announcement from afar, the most faithful disciples to tremble for the possible failure of their master. Perhaps they trembled with cause. The master, indeed, was a prophet of humanity; but he was wiser in love than terror, in admiration than pity, and rather intensely than actively human; capacious to embrace within himself the whole nature of things and beings, but not going out of himself to embrace anything; a poet of one large sufficient soul, but not polypsychical like a dramatist. Therefore his disciples trembled and we will not say that the tragedy, taken as a whole, does not justify the tear. There is something grand and Greek in the intention which hinges it, showing how crime makes crime in cursed generation, and how black hearts, like whiter ones (Topaze or Ebéne), do cry out and struggle for sympathy and brotherhood; granting that black heart (Oswald) may stand something too much on the extreme of evil to represent humanity broadly enough for a drama to turn upon. The action, too, although it does not, as might have been apprehended, lose itself in contemplation, has no unhesitating firm dramatic march—perhaps it 'potters' a little, to take a word from Mrs. Butler;—and when all is done we look vainly within us for an impression, the response to the unity of the whole. But, again, when all is done, the work is Mr. Wordsworth's, and the conceptions and utterances living and voiceful in it bear no rare witness to the master. The old blind man, left to the ordeal A grove of darker and more lofty shade leaves. Who can overpass the image of the old innocent man praying?— The name of daughter on his lips, he prays! With nerves so steady, that the very flies Sit unmolested on his staff. And now to give a fragment from a scene in which Oswald, the black genius of the drama, brings his blackness to bear on Marmaduke, who is no genius at all. A passage, well known and rightly honoured, will be recognized in the extract :— Osw. It may be That some there are, squeamish half-thinking cowards, Who will turn pale upon you, call you murderer, And you will walk in solitude among them. less How 'twill burn down the taller; and they all Shall prey upon the tallest. Solitude!— The Eagle lives in Solitude! Mar. Even so, The sparrow so on the house-top, and I, The weakest of God's creatures, stand resolved To abide the issue of my act, alone. Osw. Now would you? and for ever?— As time advances either we become Ill names, can render no ill services, So meet extremes in this mysterious world, has never moved With such a weight upon his wings as now; Osw. Cast round you your mind's eye, and you will learn Anxious to conclude our extracts by something truer to Mr. Wordsworth's personal opinions than this strong black writing we have hesitated, as we turned the leaves, before many touching and before the Grave of Burns,' for instance, beautiful poems, wise in their beautyand the Widow of Windermere,' and the 'Address to the Clouds,' and others Aye, look up-beyond meaning-a certain sonnet which discovers our poet sitting on the chair of Dante at Florence, tempting us for many reasons. But the sun and air (by courtesy) are heavy on us while we write, and subdued besides by the charm of the loveliest, freshest landscapemaking (oh, never say painting) in the world, and by the.prospect presently of a little breeze,' we forget our difficulty of breathing and selecting, and fall from the elevation of Fahrenheit down in a swoon in 'Airey-Force Valley' : Fortitude is the child of Enterprise: Mar. Osw. Action is transitory-a step, a blow, Osw. It is the toy of fools, and little fit And what if you should never know them He is a puny soul who, feeling pain, Mar. It may be so. Remorse : -Not a breath of air trees Are steadfast as the rocks; the brook itself, Has entered, by the sturdy oaks unfelt, Of yon dim cave, in seeming silence makes To stay the wanderer's steps and soothe his 'The Borderers, Act III, II. 1507-67. But we start from the languor, and the dream floated upon our eyes by such charmed writing, and come hastily to the moral of our story,-seeing that Mr. Wordsworth's life does present a high moral to his generation, to forget which in his poetry would be an unworthy compliment to the latter. It is advantageous for us all, whether poets or poetasters, or talkers about either, to know what a true poet is, what his work is, and what his patience and successes must be, so as to raise the popular idea of these things, and either strengthen or put down the individual aspiration. 'Art,' it was said long ago, 'requires the whole man,' and 'Nobody,' it was said later, 'can be a poet who is anything else'; but the present idea of Art requires the segment of a man, and everybody who is anything at all is a poet in a parenthesis. And our shelves groan with little books over which their readers groan less metaphorically-there is a plague of poems in the land apart from poetry-and many poets who live and are true do not live by their truth, but hold back their full strength from Art because they do not reverence it fully; and all booksellers cry aloud and do not spare, that poetry will not sell; and certain critics utter melancholy frenzies, that poetry is worn out for ever-as if the morning-star was worn out from heaven, or 'the yellow primrose' from the grass! and Mr. Disraeli the younger, like Bildad comforting Job, suggests that we may content ourselves for the future with a rhythmetic prose, printed like prose for decency, and supplied, for comfort, with a parish allowance of two or three rimes to a paragraph. Should there be any whom such a 'New Poor Law' would content, we are far from wishing to disturb the virtue of their serenity-let them continue, like the hypochondriac, to be very sure that they have lost their souls, inclusive of their poetic instincts. In the meantime the hopeful and believing will hopetrust on; and, better still, the Tennysons and the Brownings, and other high gifted spirits, will work, wait on, until, as Mr. Horne has said— Strong deeds awake, And, clamouring, throng the portals of the hour. It is well for them and all to count the cost of this life of a master in poetry, and learn from it what a true poet's crown is worth-to recall both the long life's work for its sake-the work of observation, of meditation, of reaching past models into Nature, of reaching past Nature unto God! and the early life's loss for its sake-the loss of the popular cheer, of the critical assent, and of the 'money in the purse.' It is well and full of exultation to remember now what a silent, blameless, heroic life of poetic duty this man has livedhow he never cried rudely against the world because he was excluded for a time from the parsley garlands of its popularity; nor sinned morally because he was sinned against intellectually; nor, being tempted and threatened by paymaster and reviewer, swerved from the righteousness and high aims of his inexorable genius. And it cannot be ill to conclude by enforcing a high example by some noble precepts which, taken from the Musophilus of old Daniel, do contain, to our mind, the very code of chivalry for poets : Be it that my unseasonable song Come out of Time, that fault is in the |