passages of the fourth book of the Excursion. The sympathy descending to the mute creation is also especially shown in the "White Doe of Rylstone" and the "Hart-leap Well." The stanzas "September, 1819," finely illustrate Wordsworth's spirit, expressing not only the communion of the human heart with other forms of being to which life and sense are given – but that both receive an impulse from "the outward shows of sky and earth”—and that all, — the lifeless masses - the unthinking birds and the human spirit, are looked on by the eye of their common God:

"The sylvan slopes with corn-clad fields
Are hung, as if with golden shields,
Bright trophies of the sun!

Like a fair sister of the sky,

Unruffled doth the blue lake lie,

The mountains looking on.

And, sooth to say, yon vocal grove,
Albeit uninspired by love,
By love untaught to ring,
May well afford to mortal ear
An impulse more profoundly dear
Than music of the Spring.

For that from turbulence and heat
Proceeds, from some uneasy seat
In nature's struggling frame,
Some region of impatient life:
And jealousy, and quivering strife,
Therein a portion claim.

This, this is holy; while I hear
These vespers of another year,
This hymn of thanks and praise,
My spirit seems to mount above
The anxieties of human love,
And earth's precarious days.

But list!-though winter storms be nigh,
Unchecked is that soft harmony:

There lives Who can provide

For all his creatures; and in Him,

Even like the radiant Seraphim,

These choristers confide."

In the piece on "Gold and Silver Fishes in a Vase," the con

summate pictorial power of the language is not the chief beauty : -the vase becomes a "type of a sunny human breast," and its inmates, with forms so unessential, are instinct with meanings of their own, not uninstructive to the passions of thinking man. Who, remembering these lines, can ever look on such creatures without a deeper and better emotion than blank admiration?

"How beautiful! - Yet none knows why
This ever-graceful change,

Renewed,

renewed incessantly

Within your quiet range.

Is it that ye with conscious skill
For mutual pleasure glide;

And sometimes, not without your will,
Are dwarfed, or magnified?

Whate'er your forms express,
Whate'er ye seem, whate'er ye are
All leads to gentleness."

At the very time that his fancy is thus luxuriating, Wordsworth's faithfulness to truth is still apparent, for while he is adding by his imagery brightness to their "golden flash and silver gleam,' there are signs of a deeper emotion in his heart, because the rays come from a "glassy prison." Bright and beautiful as the creatures are to the poet's eye, he is true to nature, which he feels is violated, and in the sequel, "Liberty," when they are removed "to the fresh waters of a living well,"

"On whose smooth breast, with dimples light and small
The fly may settle, or the blossom fall,"

his heart beats with a freer motion. The little beings are invested with man's dread of slavery-a childlike fearfulness in their unnatural durance and the human passion for freedom is made an endowment of all sentient life:

-

"Who can divine what impulses from God
Reach the caged lark, within a town abode,
From his poor inch or two of daisied sod?
O, yield him back his privilege! - No sea
Swells like the bosom of a man set free;
A wilderness is rich with liberty.

Roll on, ye spouting whales, who die or keep
Your independence in the fathomless Deep!
Spread, tiny nautilus, the living sail;

Dive, at thy choice, or brave the freshening gale!

If unreproved the ambitious eagle mount
Sunward to seek the daylight in its fount,
Bays, gulfs, and ocean's Indian width, shall be,
Till the world perishes, a field for thee!"

Wordsworth's strong affection for the inferior kinds never tempts him into extravagances from the ways of truth. It is not indulged at the expense of the dignity of human nature: it is his care at once to cultivate feelings of benignity towards all visible beings, and to preserve the natural station of each in the scale of creation. A delicate proof of this occurs in the first part of the "Tribute to the memory of a favorite Dog." This is a subject, which, in the hands of a poet of lighter feelings or of morbid temperament, tends invariably to exaggeration. The lifeless creature is raised to the level of humanity—or above it. The epitaph is made the vehicle of a cynical irritability, and the mourner over the dead dog begins himself to snarl at his fellow men. The reader will have no difficulty in recalling such instances. Now, if the remains of the old animal, who had his share in a thousand household thoughts, are cast out to be devoured by birds, nature is violated-and feeling is violatedbut they are also violated by the sacred honors of human sepulture. There is therefore a beauty in the simple rectitude of feeling in these lines:

"Lie here, without a record of thy worth,
Beneath a covering of the common earth!
It is not from unwillingness to praise,

Or want of love, that here no Stone we raise;
More thou deserv'st; but this man gives to man,
Brother to brother, this is all we can.

Yet they to whom thy virtues made thee dear
Shall find thee through all changes of the year:
This oak points out thy grave; the silent tree
Will gladly stand a monument of thee."

Before passing from the poems especially devoted to external nature, we must allude to one, among the poet's later productions, which, when perused with the thought that is due to it, will be ranked among the most illustrious effusions in English poetry. The Stanzas "on the power of Sound," present the most sublime single illustration of the genius of Wordsworth in spiritualizing the world of sense. The gigantic scope of his imagination in gathering the vast variety of audible impulses on the air, is not more wonderful than the sagacity with which they are 7

NO. VII.-VOL. IV.

associated with our moral being. The pulses of the ear and the pulses of the heart are made to beat so in unison, that the sensuous and the spiritual are blended into one. This is one of the few of Wordsworth's poems prefaced by an explanatory argument, which is some indication of the depth of its inspiration. It peculiarly requires a continuous as well as thoughtful examination, but we venture to refer to some passages in it. fragment is but a part of the range of observation :

"The headlong streams and fountains

Serve Thee, invisible Spirit, with untired powers;
Cheering the wakeful tent on Syrian mountains,
They lull, perchance, ten thousand thousand flowers.
That roar, the prowling lion's Here I am,

How fearful to the desert wide!

That bleat, how tender! of the dam

Calling a straggler to her side.

Shout, cuckoo! — let the vernal soul

Go with thee to the frozen zone;

Toll from thy loftiest perch, lone bell-bird, toll!
At the still hour to Mercy dear,

Mercy from her twilight throne

Listening to nun's faint throb of holy fear,

To sailor's prayer breathed from a darkening sea,
Or widow's cottage lullaby.

Ye Voices, and Ye Shadows,

And Images of voice to hound and horn

From rocky steep and rock-bestudded meadows
Flung back, and in the sky's blue caves, reborn-
On with your pastime! till the church-tower bells
A greeting give of measured glee;

And milder echoes from their cells
Repeat the bridal symphony.
Then, or far earlier, let us rove
Where mists are breaking up, or gone,
And from aloft look down into a cove
Besprinkled with a careless quire,
Happy milk maids, one by one
Scattering a ditty, each to her desire,

A liquid concert, matchless by nice Art,
A stream as if from one full heart.

Blest be the song that brightens

The blind man's gloom, exalts the veteran's mirth;
Unscorned the peasant's whistling breath, that lightens
His duteous toil of furrowing the green earth;

This

For the tired slave, Song lifts the languid oar,
And bids it aptly fall, with chime
That beautifies the fairest shore,
And mitigates the harshest clime.

The passage of deepest impression, and manifesting how faithfully Wordsworth clings to the real heart of human nature, is the sublime recalling of his imagination from its flights into the region of fable:

"The gift to King Amphion

That walled a city with its melody

he craves,

Was for belief no dream:
:- thy skill, Arion !
Could humanize the creatures of the sea,
Where men were monsters. A last
grace
Leave for one chant; - the dulcet sound
Steals from the deck o'er willing waves,
And listening dolphins gather round.
Self-cast, as with a desperate course,
'Mid that strange audience, he bestrides
A proud One, docile as a managed horse;
And singing, while the accordant hand
Sweeps his harp, the Master rides ;

So shall he touch at length a friendly strand,
And he, with his preserver, shine star-bright
In memory, through silent night.

The pipe of Pan, to shepherds

Couched in the shadow of Mænalian pines,
Was passing sweet; the eye-balls of the leopards
That in high triumph drew the Lord of vines,
How did they sparkle to the cymbal's clang!
While Fauns and Satyrs beat the ground

In cadence,

and Silenus swang

This way and that, with wild-flowers crowned.

To life, to life give back thine ear :

Ye who are longing to be rid

Of fable, though to truth subservient, hear

The little sprinkling of cold earth that fell

Echoed from the coffin-lid;

The convict's summons in the steeple's knell;
'The vain distress-gun' from a leeward shore
Repeated-heard and heard no more!"

There is the might of Wordsworth's genius, in thus awakening a sense of the loftiest moral sublimity by the utterance of simple truth and in simple language. But his soaring is carried higher into a sphere yet holier. It is characteristic that a