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WORDSWORTH.

O CROWN of venerable age!

O brighter crown of well-spent years!
The bard, the patriot, and the sage,
The heart that never bow'd to fears!
That was an age of soaring souls;
Yet none with a more liberal scope
Survey'd the sphere of human things;
None with such manliness of hope.

Others, perchance, as keenly felt,
As musically sang as he;
To Nature as devoutly knelt,
Or toil'd to serve humanity;

But none with those ethereal notes,
That star-like sweep of self-control;
The insight into worlds unseen,
The lucid sanity of soul.

The fever of our fretful life,
The autumn poison of the air,

The soul with its own self at strife,
He saw and felt, but could not share:
With eye made clear by pureness, pierced
The life of Man and Nature through;
And read the heart of common things,
Till new seem'd old, and old was new.

To his own self not always just,
Bound in the bonds that all men share
Confess the failings as we must,
The lion's mark is always there!
Nor any song so pure, so great,
Since his, who closed the sightless eyes,
Our Homer of the war in Heaven,
To wake in his own Paradise.

WORDSWORTH.

F. T. Palgrave.

AND Wordsworth! Ah, pale ghosts, rejoice!
For never has such soothing voice
Been to your shadowy world conveyed,
Since erst, at morn, some wandering shade
Heard the clear song of Orpheus come
Through Hades and the mournful gloom.
Wordsworth has gone from us,
Oh, may ye feel his voice as we!
He, too, upon a wintry clime
Had fallen,- on this iron time

and ye,

Of doubts, disputes, distractions, and fears,
He found us when the age had bound
Our souls in its benumbing round,—
He spoke and loosed our hearts in tears.
He laid us as we lay at birth
On the cool, flowery lap of earth;
Smiles broke from us, and we had ease,
The hills were round us and the breeze
Went o'er the sunlit fields again;
Our foreheads felt the winds and rain,
Our youth returned, for there was shed
On spirits that had long been dead,
Spirits dried up and closely furled,
The freshness of the early world.

Ah, since dark days still bring to light
Man's prudence and man's fiery might,
Time may restore us in his course,
Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force;
But when will Europe's latter hour
Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
Others will teach us how to dare,
And against fear our hearts to steel;
Others will strengthen us to bear,
But who, ah! who, will make us feel!
The cloud of mortal destiny,
Others will front it fearlessly,
But who, like him, will put it by?

Keep fresh the grass upon his grave,
O Rotha! with thy living wave,
Sing him thy best! for few or none,
Hear thy voice right, now he is gone.
Matthew Arnold.

VOICE OF NATURE IN THE HEART.

- VOICE of Nature in the heart, Narrow though our science, though Here we only know in part,

Give us faith in what we know!
To a fuller life aspiring,
Satisfy the heart's desiring.

Tell us of a force behind
Nature's force, supreme, alone;
Tell us of a larger mind

Than the partial power we own:
Tell us of a being wholly
Wise and great and just and holy:-

Toning down the pride of mind
To a wiser humbleness,
Teach the limits of mankind,

Weak to know, and prompt to guess, On the mighty shores that bound us Childlike gathering trifles round us: —

Teach how, yet, what here we know
To the unknown leads the way,
As the light that, faint and low,
Prophesies consummate day;
How the little arc before us
Proves the perfect circle o'er us:

How the marr'd unequal scheme,

That on all sides here we meet, Either is a lawless dream,

Or must somewhere be complete: Where or when, if near, or distant, Known but to the One Existent.

- He is. We meanwhile repair From the noise of human things To the fields of larger air.

To the shadow of his wings; Listening for his message only In the wild with Nature lonely.

Lyrical Poems. F. T Palgrave.

From Fraser's Magazine.
THE EMPEROR JULIAN.

of Julian. Strauss's exposition of a new Christianity almost independent of Christ was already before the world, and had produced no small effect in Germany. With these expectations, we can well imagine that the German doctor regarded with vexation and contempt the reluctance of Frederick William to fling his sceptre into the scale of the new era, and that he should seek in the dying days of old pa

SOME three-and-twenty years ago or thereabouts Herr David Friedrich Strauss (the well-known author of the Leben Jesu) published a Vortrag on the character and motives of the Emperor Julian, under the title of "The Romanticist (Romantiker) on the Throne of the Cæsars." Although this essay purported to set before itself nothing more than a purely historical ob-ganism for a parallel to such strange and ject, it was well understood that the au- wayward devotion to by-gone faiths and thor designed the application of his sketch fealties. not so much for Julian himself as for In his eyes Frederick William was Frederick William IV. of Prussia, with simply a Romantiker — a man prompted by whom at that time the thoughts of politic- mere sentiment to an abortive effort al speculators in Germany were much en- towards reviving a dead past, in preference gaged, both as regarded the development to associating himself with the vigorous of constitutional government in Prussia future. The Romanticist (we quote the herself, and perhaps to a still greater de- words of the Edinburgh reviewer in sumgree in connection with the various proj-marizing Strauss's explanations on the ects of Teutonic unity. The parallel subject) is one who refuses to accept the which Strauss wished to suggest is traced fiat of history; refuses to acknowledge and illustrated in an interesting article that the past is past, that it has grown contained in the 88th volume of the Ed- old and obsolete: one who regards the inburgh Review. The reviewer (as might present age as in a state of chronic malabe expected during the summer of 1848) dy, curable only by a reproduction of is more occupied with the bearing of some distant age, of which the present is Strauss's volume on the Prussian politics not the child but the abortion. And this of that exciting crisis than with the accu- class of men, Strauss will have it, spring racy of the representation given of Julian. up more particularly in those epochs of Under the circumstances, however, it is human history when an old system has alhardly likely that this picture should be ready fallen into decay, and the new one faithfully drawn. Probably Strauss would which is to succeed has not yet fully dehimself admit that he had stretched his veloped itself; - still wearing the charachistorical judgment for the purpose of ter of an innovation, and exciting the giving point to his modern application. alarm and disgust of those whose fancy Perhaps there was something of personal still lingers round the old system though bitterness in the feeling with which he con- their convictions are but feebly enlisted templated the weakness, as it seemed to on its side. Such men are Romanticists. him, of Frederick William in throwing away the brilliant opportunity offered him by destiny. Strauss thought he saw a grand new epoch just ready to unfold itself in religion, in politics, in society. All the rising influences were calling across the deep to Frederick William of Prussia, claiming his hand to give them bian potentate? practical operation on German soil. And

But was Julian such a man? That is to say, are we to suppose that the carnest desire to rehabilitate the old religion, to which he devoted his life, was nothing more than a fancy or a sentiment-perhaps even a foppery and a pretence, like the Romanticism of Mr. Browning's Danu

in such a proffered career of a new Con- All that the old Dukes had been, without knowstantine, who so fit to bear a distinguished

ing it,

part as Herr Strauss himself? The old This Duke would fain know he was, without he

Christianity was worn out, like the old

ing it.

idolatries of the Pagan world in the days If the German doctor meant this, and this

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