When an inferior power is dealing with the task, the traces of "the 'prentice hand" are more boldly obtruded; and then we hear of this man's school and that man's school. But there may be periods when the love of the true and the natural has been set aside by artificial taste; and then, wherever artifice has grown into a second nature, the very attempt to break the bonds of custom will be looked on as artificial. Nature is not recognised when sophistication usurps her place, and then fidelity to the exiled sovereign encounters the odium of lawlessness. This, we doubt not, has encouraged the notion of some especial scheme of poetry, implied in the phrase "the school of Wordsworth." In this sense we protest against it. It cannot be maintained, if it signify that his poetry has a character so peculiar as widely to separate it from other poetry of equal elevation. We should not fear to put this to a test: let there be selected passages that may be taken as fairly characteristic of him, and we would engage to furnish selections parallel in the mode of thought and feeling from poems of long established fame. From the severe and chaste models of ancient imagination — from Pindar and Homer, (from the latter, especially, instances will suggest themselves to the classical student)—and from English literature in its best days, enough could be cited to show the kindred of genius. In all its great essentials there is but one school of poetry, because "poetry is the image of man and nature," and the world of sense and the world of the human soul are forever the same; and moreover, because truth, which is the high aim of the muse, is eternal. It is the school of such as Pindar and Homer, as Dante and Tasso, and Spenser, and Shakspeare, and Milton and, as has been felt by the meditative spirits, who cherished the belief when it was a persecuted truth, it is the school of such as Wordsworth.

In rejecting all imputations of mannerism, it may be fancied that we are abandoning the claim to originality. When we speak of the unity of poetry, it will scarcely be supposed that we are advocating a doctrine, like the rule of the dramatic unities, calculated to bind invention down to the wearisome repetitions of imitation. Wordsworth has been styled by some of his enthusiastic admirers "the regenerator of English poetry." This appears to us an exaggeration. The revolution which brought English poetry back to the vigor of its earlier days had previously begun. Its decline-probably a symptom of the decline of national character with which it was coeval in its commencement, after lasting from the time of Charles II., seemed to ap

proach its natural limit towards the close of the last century. The artificial style of poetry, which culminating in the exquisite polish of the versification of Pope, was sustained by the authority of Dr. Johnson, had in weaker hands begun to betray that it contained the seeds of its own dissolution. Warton had ventured, though with a timidity illustrative of the state of public taste, to maintain that Pope was not one of the great English poets, and a better day was dawning. The work of regeneration was begun by poets earlier than Wordsworth, as he has himself shown. Thomson, and Collins, and Cowper, and Goldsmith, were bringing the muse nearer, once more, to the path of truth and nature. But not only on account of such as these, is it unjust to appropriate to Wordsworth a title implying the sole championship in this revolution: it should not be forgotten that Coleridge and Southey took the field as early and as independently.

Disclaiming on the one hand this assumption for Wordsworth, and on the other denying the formation of any peculiar school of poetry by him, the question recurs, in what degree he is to be regarded as a poet of original powers. Now let it be borne in mind that mere novelty is not proof of originality: a whimsical fancy may produce combinations from which a sane imagination would recoil, and which arrogate the merit of invention for no other reason than that the heart can find nothing kindred to recognise. These spurious births-new indeed but uncouth -must not pass for legitimacy. The genuine creations of imagination bring with them none of this strangeness; we seem to have known them of old; lo! how familiarly do the fictions of Shakspeare come to us! The clay to be wrought by the plastic power of poets is nature, and when they seek any other materials than truth-truth of the imagination and the feelings as well as of the senses-they are no better than moon-struck madmen. It is the pride of a feeble imagination that spurns such materials. As the main principles of nature are ever the same, there is therefore an assimilative principle in all the high efforts of poetic genius, of which we may be made conscious by the reflection that we can pass from the one to the other without a thought of their being separated by the chasm of ages, or the barrier between living and dead languages. And what more than nature supplies, need be desired by the visionary faculty in its most ambitious moods? The poet wedded to nature is rich in the dowry she brings. She sets before his enraptured sight the earth with all its sublimity and beauty, of mountain and

vale-of ocean and lake-the heavens and all the lights that are looking from them-the mute creation-the human form and countenance- and more boundless than the world of sight and sound, the world within each human bosom-the unseen elements of humanity-its passions, its fears and hopes-its joys and sorrows-the first recollections of childhood-the blessed memory of the happy dead—and the undying aspirations that spring from a holy faith. Such as these are the poet's theme, and he is original, when he suffuses a spot of earth with the light of imagination-or when by the same creative power he reveals a single association between the outward world of sense and the inward world of the soul-when he unsensualizes what is bodily, or sends a ray into the depths of the heartwhen he breathes life and hope into any forsaken principle of our being-in a word, when he reclaims any desolate region of thought or feeling, and enlarges the sphere of enjoyment and sensibility for the honor of humanity. In some form, this has been the tendency of the great poets of all ages, modified by individual character and the times in which they lived. It is one spirit in Pindar moralizing the strife of national games and kindling heroic emotions-in Homer dealing with man in the larger theatre of hostile nations-in Spenser displaying human passions through his gorgeous allegory-in Shakspeare giving to the spirits of man's inner nature form and speech and action-in Milton elaborating the great tragedy of mankind—and in Wordsworth, his

restoring to the lowly conditions of society their native portion arraying homely life and household affections with a glory more enduring than the pomp of chivalry-creating an affinity between the objects of nature and our moral being-disclosing the forms of beauty still left on earth, and spiritualizing the senses, the intellect, and the passions, by teaching that within the soul there is an instinct aspiring beyond what is fugitive into the region of

"truths that wake

To perish never!"

The earliest date to any poem of Wordsworth is the year 1786-a juvenile effusion of his sixteenth year; the late edition of his works was issued in 1837;-more than half a centu

ry devoted to the Art. His productions in prose best known are the Essays interspersed among his poems, beside which are the Description of the Lake Country in the north of England," (restored in the Philadelphia edition to its connexion with the poems,) and the "tract on the Convention of Cintra," composed during the peninsular war. Our present purpose is with Wordsworth's poetry, and we allude to his writings in prose only as illustrative of it, and to remark that all is prompted by the same spirit. No matter what may be the subject, whether, in verse, some little trait of childhood—au incident in rural life -the description of an old beggar-a classical traditiona burst of indignant patriotisin to animate his countrymen in arms a high strain of thanksgiving for a nation bowing down in gratitude for victories which rescued Europe from military despotism-the history of the church in England-the mourning over some retired grave-the sage remonstrance with skepticism—or some deep intimation of immortality springing from communings with his own inmost soul; or whether, in prose, it be the description of some landscape, or the fervid exposure of an ignominious negotiation-the same animating spirit may be found in each. There is a symmetry in the productions of Wordsworth's youth, his manhood, and more advanced years. In the essential properties of his writings at different periods, we perceive no fluctuations, no recantation or backward movement. From the few lines bearing the earlist date down to the latest of his poems, the direction of his mind is the same—his imagination strengthening with his years. Let it not be thought that this implies a monotony in his poetry, or a uniformity in the modes in which it is conveyed. It is the unity of its spirit, and a consequent singleness of purpose, that we speak of-a zeal to call forth the divine part of man's nature, often slumbering or imbrated, and to guide the impulses of the heart, by teaching it "nobler loves and nobler cares." In the now rare tract on the convention of Cintra, amid many eloquent passages, whose impassioned strain needs only the garb of metre to transfigure them into poetry, we find the following philosophical estimate of human nature, which is admirably illustrative of the aims of the author's poetry:

"It is a belief propagated in books, and which passes currently among talking men as part of their familiar wisdom, that the hearts of the many are constitutionally weak; that they languish, and are elow to answer to the requisitions of things. I entreat those who are in this delusion, to look behind them and about them for the NO. VII.-VOL. IV.

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evidence of experience. Now, this, rightly understood, not only gives no support to any such belief, but proves that the truth is in direct opposition to it. The history of all ages; tumults after tumults; wars, foreign or civil, with short or no breathing-spaces, from generation to generation; wars- why and wherefore? Yet with courage, with perseverance, with self sacrifice, with enthusiwith cruelty driving forward the cruel man from its own terrible nakedness, and attracting the more benign by the accompa niment of some shadow which seems to sanctify it; the senseless weaving and interweaving of factions - vanishing and reviving and piercing each other like the northern lights; public commotions, and those in the bosom of the individual; the long calenture to which the lover is subject; the blast, like the blast of the desert, which sweeps perenially through a frightful solitude of its own. making in the mind of the gamester; the slowly quickening but ever quickening descent of appetite down which the miser is propelled; the agony and cleaving oppression of grief; the ghost-like hauntings of shame; the incubus of revenge; the life-distemper of ambition; these inward existences, and the visible and familiar occurrences of daily life in every town and village; the patient curiosity and contagious acclamations of the multitude in the streets of the city and within the walls of the theatre; a procession, or a rural dance; a hunting, or a horse-race; a flood, or a fire; rejoicing and ringing of bells for an unexpected gift of good fortune, or the coming of a foolish heir to his estate; these demonstrate incontestibly that the passions of men (I mean the soul of sensibility in the heart of man,) — in all quarrels, in all contests, in all quests, in all delights, in all employments which are either sought by men or thrust upon them - do immeasurably transcend their objects. The true sorrow of humanity consists in this: that the mind of man fails; but that the course and demands of action and life so rarely correspond with the dignity and intensity of human desires and hence, that which is slow to languish, is too easily turned aside and abused."

? — - not

It is the truth told in this last sentence, on which Wordsworth's poetry in all its varied forms is an imaginative commentary.

This contrariety of the course of life to the dignity of human desires is constantly changing in the progress of the world, and therefore the poet's efforts must be adapted to the form the antagonist power chances to assume. While the wisdom of a great author is in many respects mated to all time, there will still be a correspondence between his spirit and the age and country in which Providence has placed him. This is an important consideration in estimating the structure of a poet's mind. We hazard little in saying that Wordsworth's mission has been to an