stragglers, some long-haired enthusiasts, by chance. will come, one by one, and look, and look, and be hardly able to take their eyes from the fascination, so massive is the shade, so still the conception, so firm the execution.

Thus is it with Wordsworth and his poetry. Tacet loquiturque. Fashion apart, the million won't read it. Why should they ?-they could not understand it,don't put them out,-let them buy, and sell, and die ; -but idle students, and enthusiastic wanderers, and solitary thinkers, will read, and read, and read, while their lives and their occupations hold. In truth, his works are the Scriptures of the intellectual life; for that same searching, and finding, and penetrating power which the real Scripture exercises on those engaged, as are the mass of men, in practical occupations and domestic ties, do his works exercise on the meditative, the solitary, and the young.

'His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,

The sleep that is among the lonely hills.' 1

And he had more than others

'That blessed mood,

[In which the burthen of the mystery,]
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul!
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.' 2

1' Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle.'
2 Tintern Abbey.'

And therefore he has had a whole host of sacred imitators. Mr. Keble, for example, has translated him for women. He has himself told us that he owed to Wordsworth the tendency ad sanctiora which is the mark of his own writings; and in fact he has but adapted the tone and habit of reverence which his master applied to common objects and the course of the seasons, to sacred objects and the course of the ecclesiastical year,-diffusing a mist of sentiment and devotion altogether delicious to a gentle and timid devotee. Hartley Coleridge is another translator. He has applied to the sensuous beauties and seductive parts of external nature the same cultus which Wordsworth applied to the bare and the abstract. It is

'Of that fair beauty which no eye can see,

Of that sweet music which no ear can measure.' 1

It is, as it were, female beauty in wood and water; it is Rydal Water on a shining day; it is the gloss of the world with the knowledge that it is gloss: the sense of beauty, as in some women, with the feeling that yet it is hardly theirs :

'The vale of Tempe had in vain been fair,
Green Ida never deem'd the nurse of Jove,
Each fabled stream, beneath its covert grove,
Had idly murmur'd to the idle air;
The shaggy wolf had kept his horrid lair
In Delphi's cell, and old Trophonius' cave,
And the wild wailing of the Ionian wave
Had never blended with the sweet despair
Of Sappho's death-song: if the sight inspired
Saw only what the visual organs show;
If heaven-born phantasy no more required

Than what within the sphere of sense may grow;
The beauty to perceive of earthly things,

The mounting soul must heavenward prune her wings.'

1 Hartley Coleridge: 'Sonnet.'

2 Ibid.

And he knew it himself: he has sketched the essence of his works :

'Whither is gone the wisdom and the power,
That ancient sages scatter'd with the notes
Of thought-suggesting lyres? The music floats
In the void air; e'en at this breathing hour,
In every cell and every blooming bower
The sweetness of old lays is hovering still :
But the strong soul, the self-constraining will,
The rugged root that bare the winsome flower
Is weak and withered. Were we like the Fays
That sweetly nestle in the fox-glove bells,
Or lurk and murmur in the rose-lipp'd shells
Which Neptune to the earth for quit-rent pays,
Then might our pretty modern Philomels
Sustain our spirits with their roundelays.' 1

We had more to say of Hartley: we were to show that his Prometheus was defective; that its style had no Greek severity, no defined outline; that he was a critic as well as a poet, though in a small detached way, and what is odd enough, that he could criticise in rhyme. We were to make plain how his heart was in the right place, how his love-affairs were hopeless, how he was misled by his friends; but our time is done, and our space is full, and these topics must go without day of returning. We may end as we began. There are some that are bold and strong and incessant and energetic and hard, and to these is this world's glory; and some are timid and meek and impotent and cowardly and rejected and obscure. 'One man esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth every day alike.' And so of Hartley, whom few regarded; he had a resource, the stillness of thought, the gentleness of musing, the peace of nature.

'To his side the fallow deer

Came, and rested without fear;

1 Hartley Coleridge: 'Sonnet.'

The eagle, lord of land and sea,
Stooped down to pay him fealty ;
And both the undying fish that swim
In 1 Bowscale-tarn did wait on him;
The pair were servants of his eye,
In their immortality;

And glancing, gleaming, dark or bright,
Moved to and fro, for his delight.

He knew the rocks which Angels haunt
Upon the mountains visitant;

He hath kenned them taking wing;
And into caves where Faeries sing
He hath entered; and been told
By Voices how men lived of old.
Among the heavens his eye can see
The face of thing that is to be;
And, if that men report him right,

His tongue could whisper words of might.
-Now another day is come,

Fitter hope, and nobler doom;

He hath thrown aside his crook,

And hath buried deep his book.' 2

'And now the streams may sing for other's pleasure. The hills sleep on in their eternity.'

2' Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle.'
3 Hartley Coleridge: 'Sonnet.'

WILLIAM COWPER.1

FOR the English, after all, the best literature is the English. We understand the language; the manners are familiar to us; the scene at home; the associations our own. Of course, a man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the ocean. There is a great object of which he has no idea. But we cannot be always seeing the ocean. Its face is always large; its smile is bright; the eversounding shore sounds on. Yet we have no property in them. We stop and gaze; we pause and draw our breath; we look and wonder at the grandeur of the other world; but we live on shore. We fancy associations of unknown things and distant climes, of strange men and strange manners. But we are ourselves. Foreigners do not behave as we should, nor do the Greeks. What a strength of imagination, what a long practice, what a facility in the details of fancy is required to picture their past and unknown world! They are deceased. They are said to be immortal, because they have written a good epitaph; but they are gone. Their life and their manners have passed We read with interest in the catalogue of

away.

the ships

1 Poetical Works of William Cowper. Edited by Robert Bell. J. W. Parker & Son.

The Life of William Cowper, with Selections from his Correspondence. Being volume i. of the Library of Christian Biography, superintended by the Rev. Robert Bickersteth. Seeley, Jackson, & Co.

[This Essay was first published in National Review for July 1855.]

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