POETRY.-The Two Bees, 544.-The Goblin Telegraph, 547.-The Moravian Requiem, 569. Truth Stranger than Fiction, 559.-Checks on Poisonings in England, 575.

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Or all the Periodical Journals devoted to literature and science which abound in Europe and in this country, this has appeared to me the most useful. It contains indeed the exposition only of the current literature of the Englis language, but this, by its murrense extent and comprehension, includes a portraiture of the human mind in the utmost expansion of the present age, J. Q. ADAMS.

LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 332.-28 SEPTEMBER, 1850.

From the North British Review.

The Poetical Works of WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, D.C.L., Poet Laureate, &c. London, 1849. ANOTHER great spirit has recently gone from the midst of us. It is now three months since the nation heard, with a deep though quiet sadness, that an aged man of venerable mien, who for fifty years had borne worthily the name of English poet, had at length disappeared from those scenes of lake and mountain, where, in stately care of his own worth, he had fixed his recluse abode, and passed forward, one star the more, into the still unfeatured future, whither all that lives is rolling, and whither, as he well knew and believed, the Shakespeares and Miltons, whom men count dead, had but as yesterday transferred their kindred radiance. When the news spread, it seemed as if our island were suddenly a man the poorer; some pillar or other notable object, long conspicuous on its broad surface, had suddenly fallen down. It is right, then, that we should detain our thoughts for a little in the vicinity of this event; that, the worldly course of such a man having now been ended, we should stand for a little around his grave, and think solemnly of what he was. Neither few nor unimportant, we may be sure, are the reflections that should suggest themselves over the grave of William Wordsworth.

tion and sternest moral resolve be nearest the hour of most absolute obliviousness and most profound degradation? Has not humanity also its moods, now brutal and full-acorned, large in physical device, and pregnant with the wit of unconcern; again, touched to higher things, tearful for very goodness, turning an upward eye to the stars, and shivering to its smallest nerve with the power and the sense of beauty? In rude and superficial expression of which fact, have not our literary men coined the common-place that a critical and sceptical age always follows an age of heroism and creative genius? These, we say, are queries which, though they may not be answered to their depths, it is still useful to point out and ponder. One remark only will we venture in connexion with them. According to one theory it is a sufficient explanation of these moral and intellectual changes in the spirit of nations, to suppose that they take place by a law of mere contagion or propagation from individual to individual. One man of powerful and original nature, or of unusually accurate perceptions, makes his appearance in some central, or, it may be, sequestered spot; he gains admirers or makes converts; disciples gather round him, or try to form an opinion of him from a distance; they, again, in their turn, affect others, till, at last, as the gloom of the largest church is slowly changed Of the various mysteries that the human mind into brilliance by the successive lighting of all its can contemplate none is more baffling, and at the lamps, so a whole country may, district by district, same time more charming, to the understanding, succumb to the peculiarity of a new influence. than the nature of that law that determines the Now, this is perfectly true; and it would be indeed differences of power and mental manifestation be- difficult to estimate the amazing efficacy of such a tween age and age. That all history is an evolu- law of incessant diffusion from point to point over tion, that each generation inherits all that had been a surface; but we are convinced that this mode of accumulated by its predecessor, and bequeathes in representing the fact under notice does not convey turn all that itself contains to its successor, is an the whole truth. Concerning even the silent pestiidea to which, in one form or another, science binds lences we have been recently taught that they do us down. But, native as this idea now is in all not wholly depend on transmission from individual cultivated minds, with how many facts, and with to individual, but are rather distinct derangements what a large proportion of our daily speech, does in the body of the earth itself, tremors among its it not still stand in apparent contradiction! Look- electricities and imponderables, alterations of the ing back upon the past career of our race, does not sum-total of those material conditions wherewith the eye single out, as by instinct, certain epochs that human life has been associated. In like manner, are epochs of virtue and glory, and others that are as appears to us, must those streaming processes epochs of frivolity and shame? Do we not speak of of sympathy and contagion, whereby a moral or the age of Pericles in Greece, of the Augustan age intellectual change is diffused over a community, in Rome, of the outburst of chivalry in modern Eu- be regarded as but the superficial indications of a rope, of the noble era of Elizabeth in England, and deep contemporaneous agitation pervading the of the sad decrepitude that followed it? And is whole frame of nature. From the mineral core there not a certain justice of perception in this of this vast world, outwards to the last thoughts, mode of speaking? Does it not seem as if all ages impulses, and conclusions of us its human inhabiwere not equally favored from on high, gifts both tants, there runs, as science teaches, a mystic law moral and intellectual being vouchsafed to one that of intercourse and affinity, pledging its parts to act are all but withheld from another? As with indi- in concert. The moral and intellectual revolutions vidual men so with nations and with humanity at of our world, its wars, its new philosophies, its large, may not the hour of highest spiritual eleva-outbursts of creative genius, its profligate sinkings, CCCXXXII. LIVING AGE. VOL. XXVI. 37

and its noble recoveries, all must rest, under the | being one constant thing, a certain specific and decree of supreme wisdom, on a concurrent basis invariable quality or state of the human soul, not of physical undulations and vicissitudes. When, capable of change from century to century, but the therefore, a man starts up in any locality, charged same of old, now, and forever, it follows that the with a new spirit or a new desire, there, be sure, history of poetry can present no other appearance the ground around him is similarly affected. New than that of alternate excess and deficiency, alterintellectual dispositions are like atmospheres; they nate extinction and renovation. That is to say, overhang whole countries at once. It is not neces- accepting the poetry of Chaucer and Milton as true sarily by communication or plagiarism that the poetry, we cannot go on to defend the poetry of thought excogitated to-day in London breaks out Pope and Johnson as true poetry of a different to-morrow in Edinburgh, or that persons in Göt- kind, and then, coming down to our own age, tingen and Oxford are found speculating at the assert that its poetry is true poetry of a different same time in the same direction. In our own kind still. Except in a very obvious sense, renisland, for example, it is a fact capable of experi- dered necessary by convenience, it cannot be said mental verification, that whatever is being thought these are kinds of poetry. The materials on which at any one time in any one spot, is, with a very the poetic sense works are constantly varying; insmall amount of difference, being independently finite, also, are the combinations of human faculty thought at the same time in fifty other places at all and will with which this sense may be structurally distances from each other. And yet it is equally true associated; but the sense itself, whensoever and in that in every moral or spiritual revolution there is whomsoever it may be found, is still the same old always a leader, a forerunner, a man of originality, thing that trembled in the heart of Homer. An in whose individual bosom the movement seems to age may have it or want it; may have more of it have been rehearsed and epitomized; and that, in or less of it; may have it in conjunction with this the beginning of every such revolution, the power or with that aggregate of other characteristics, of contagion from man to man, and the machinery but cannot abandon one form of it and take up of the clique, school, or phalanx, must come into another. play.

We do not think that these remarks are too remote or abstract for the present occasion. The nineteenth century, it appears to us, is a sufficiently large portion of historic time: England is a sufficiently large portion of the historic earth; and the poetical literature of England, or of any other nation, is a sufficiently important element in that nation's existence to justify our viewing that remarkable phenomenon, the revival of English poetry in the nineteenth century, in the light of the most extreme general conceptions that can be brought to bear upon it. Against the preceding observations, therefore, as against what seems an appropriate background, let us try to bring out the main features of the phenomenon itself, so far at least as these can be exhibited with reference to the life and writings of its most representative man." And first, of Wordsworth regarded historically.

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From Dryden till about fifty years ago, say our authorities in literary history, was an era of poetical sterility in England. When Coleridge gave lectures in London on the English poets, he divided them into three lists or sections; the first including all the poets from Chaucer to Dryden; the second, all those from Dryden inclusive till the close of the eighteenth century; and the third, all those of his own generation. The view presented by him of the characters of these three periods relatively to each other, was essentially that conveyed in the strange theory of alternate ebb and flow, alternate immission and withdrawal of power, as regulating the progress of the universe. In other words, the first period was a period of strength, youth, and outburst; the second was a period of cleverness, conceit, and poverty; and the third was a period of revival. For, the poetic spirit

In these remarks we have embodied what we consider a very necessary caution. If much good has been done by that exaltation of meaning which the words poet and poetry have received from the hands of Coleridge and others, as well as by their kindred services in distinguishing so constantly and so emphatically between the terms reason and understanding, genius and talent, creation and criticism, we are not quite sure but that, at the same time, this infusion of new conceptions into our language has been productive of some mischief. Agreeing, upon the whole, with the sentence of condemnation which has been of late passed upon the poor eighteenth century; believing that it was a critical, negative, and unpoetic age; nay, even believing (however the belief is to be reconciled with the doctrine of continuous historic evolution) that it was one of those seasons of comparative diminution of the general vital energy of our species that we have already spoken of, we still think that too sweeping a use has been made of this notion and its accessories by a certain class of writers. Let us illustrate our meaning by an example. Keats, the poet, and James Mill, the historian of India, were contemporaries. The one, according to the language introduced by Coleridge, was a man of genius; the other was a man of talent. In the soul of Keats, if ever in a human soul at all, there was a portion of the real poetic essence-the real faculty divine; Mr. Mill, on the other hand, had probably as little of the poet in his composition as any celebrated man of his time; but he was a man of hard metal, of real intellectual strength, and of unyielding rectitude. In certain exercises of the mind he could probably have crushed Keats, who certainly was no weakling, as easily as a giant could crush a babe. But, suppose the two men to have set together on Hampstead Heath

The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally and as men; feeling powerfully as they succeeding time, poets, and men ambitious of the did, their language was daring and figurative. In fame of poets, perceiving the influence of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect without being animated with the same passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of these figures of speech, and made use of them, sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently applied them natural connexion whatsoever. A language was to feelings and thoughts with which they had no thus insensibly produced, differing materially from the real language of men in any situation. The reader or hearer of this distorted language found himself in a perturbed and unusual state of mind; when affected by the genuine language of passion mind also; in both cases he was willing that his he had been in a perturbed and unusual state of common judgment and understanding should be laid asleep, and he had no instinctive and infallible perception of the true to make him reject the false; the one served as a passport for the other. The emotion was in both cases delightful, and no wonder if he confounded the one with the other, and believed them both to be produced by the same, or the character of a man to be looked up to, a man of Besides, the poet spake to him in genius and authority. Thus, and from a variety of other causes, this distorted language was received with adiniration; and poets, it is probable, who had before contented themselves for the most part with misapplying only expressions which at first still further, and introduced phrases composed aphad been dictated by real passion, carried the abuse parently in the spirit of the original figurative language of passion, yet altogether of their own invention. and characterized by various degrees of wanton deviation from good sense and nature. *** Perhaps in no way, by positive example, could be more easily given a notion of what I mean by the phrase poetic diction than by referring to a comparison between the metrical paraphrases which we have of passages in the Old and New Testament, with those passages as they exist in our common translation. By way of immediate example, take the following of Dr. Johnson :

in a starry night, which of them would have been it? Here Wordsworth himself comes to our aid. the stronger-which would have known the most The following is from an Appendix to the Preface ecstatic pulses? Or, to make the case still more to the second edition of his "Lyrical Ballads," decisive, suppose the two men to have been Keats published in 1800; the subject under discussion and Aristotle; Keats a consumptive poetic boy, is Poetic Diction. and Aristotle the intellect of half a world. Does not such a contrast bring out the real injustice that has been done to many truly great and good men by the habit which, since the time of Coleridge, has become general, of placing all the men that belong to the so-called category of genius in one united mass above all that only rank in the category of talent? For, granting, as we certainly do, the reality of some such distinction as implied between the two substantives, is it not clear that the general mass of mind possessed by a man reputed to belong to the inferior category, and consequently, also, his general power to influence the soul of the world, may exceed a thousand times that possessed by a man of the other? In other words, may not a man rank so high in the one kind, that even allowing the kind itself to be inferior, it may be said with truth that he is a hundred times greater a man than some specified lower man in the other? Practically, the tenor of these remarks is that we are in the present day committing an injustice by following the tendency of our young Coleridgians to restrict the meaning of the quantitative word 'greatness" within the limits of the merely qualitative word "genius." And, speculatively, their tenor may be expressed in the proposition that this quality or mode of mind called genius, the poetic sense, creative power, and so on, may exist in association with all possible varieties of intellectual or cerebral vigor, from the mediocrity of a Kirke White or an Anacreon up to the stupendousness of a Shakspeare. It is thus, that while agreeing in the main with the opinion that from Dryden to the close of the next hundred years was a poetic interregnum, we would still make our peace with those who would fight the battle of the much abused eighteenth century; and that we would steer clear of the controversy whether Pope was a poet. As deficiency in poetic power does not imply corresponding deficiency in what may be called ordinary cerebral vigor, so the eighteenth century, though admitted to have been unpoetic, may have been a very respectable century notwithstanding; and even were we to exclude Pope from the class of poets (which most certainly we would not) we might still hold him to have been a phenomenon in literature, not, on that account, a whit the less remarkable. A deeper analysis would carry us further into the question as to the connection between poetic power and general intellect in individuals and in ages; but here we must stop.

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Having thus explained in what sense we understand that general assertion regarding the low state of English poetry in the eighteenth century, (part of the seventeenth included,) with which the name of Wordsworth is irrevocably associated, let us attend a little to the facts of the case. In what did the sterility of English poetry in that age consist, and what words would best describe

similar causes.

Turn on the prudent ant thy heedless eyes,
Observe her labors, sluggard, and be wise;
No stern command, no monitory voice,
Prescribes her duties, or directs her choice;
Yet, timely provident, she hastes away
To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day;
When fruitful summer loads the teeming plain,
She crops the harvest, and she stores the grain.
How long shall sloth usurp thy useless hours,
Unnerve thy vigor, and enchain thy powers?
While artful shades thy downy couch enclose,
And soft solicitation courts repose,
Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight,
Year chases year with unremitted flight,
Till want now following, fraudulent and slow,
Shall spring to seize thee, like an ambushed foe.

From this hubbub of words pass to the original.

Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise; which having no guide, overseer, or

ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gath- fence of the poets of that time, as well as their ereth her food in the harvest. How long wilt thou condemnation. Of many of them it may be desleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy nied that they were poets; but of almost all of sleep? Yet a little sleep, yet a little slumber, a them it may be asserted that they were men of little folding of the hands to sleep. So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want

as an armed man."

general mental vigor. In our disquisitions concerning them, therefore, let not this be forgotten. If Johnson was no poet, he was a very ponderous and noble old fellow, nevertheless; and even the purists that would clip the laurels of Dryden and Pope, must admit that we have no such manly literati as the former now-a-days about Leicester Square, and that the other was a diamond of the first water.

To sum up the views thus presented by Wordsworth of the state of English poetry after Milton, it may be said that at that time the nation, having lost much of the genuine poetical power it had formerly possessed, but still preserving a form of composition to which it had been so long and so powerfully accustomed, began to regard the es- But the change came at length. By the myssence of poetry as lying in metre, accompanied by terious operation of those laws that determine the a certain peculiar and artificial phraseology called risings and the sinkings of the mental state of hupoetic diction; thus begetting that exaggerated manity as a whole there seemed to be effected, toantithesis between poetry and prose with which wards the close of the eighteenth century, a sudour language is still infected. Instead of regard- den increase of the vital energy of the species. ing the poetic faculty as consisting in a mode or Humanity assumed a higher mood; a deep agitaattitude of the mind, distinguishable, on the one tion, as if from a fresh electric discharge out of hand, from the scientific mode or attitude whose space into the solid body of our planet, shook the function is investigation or exposition, and, on the soul of the world, and (God so willing) left it other hand, from the oratorical mode or attitude troubled and excited. The two most conspicuous whose function is to excite or stimulate in a par- and extensive manifestations of this heightened ticular direction—they made poetry to consist in state of the world's consciousness were, in the rea mode of language, and they estimated the value gion of speculation, the promulgation of the tranof a poet according to the degree of mastery he scendental philosophy in Germany, and in the rehad attained in the use of this mode of language, gion of action, the French Revolution. But as if and the degree of general mental power and re- the same spirit which burst forth in these two source he could manifest through it. Hence, in great eruptions also sought vent through smaller the first place, a gradual increase of departure in and apparently unconnected orifices all over Eumetrical composition from the idioms and combi- rope, there were not wanting other significant innation of words deemed appropriate to prose; and, dications of the change that was transacting itself. in the second place, a gradual reduction of the In Germany, seemingly apart from the transcenrange of metre itself to certain fixed varieties and dental philosophy, though in reality deriving methods of versification, which the older poets, strength from it through a subterranean conduit, a who did not so much assort their thoughts to new literature came forth under the care, first of rhymes as let the thoughts flow out in their own Lessing, and then of Goethe. And in our own rhythm, would have disdained as much as a natural country, sprinkled over as it had been in spots by cascade would disdain the assistance of pipes. the sound and fertile philosophy of Reid, there But while an exaggerated antithesis was thus was a feebler exhibition of the same phenomenon. established between prose and poetry, it by no Even in the age of reputed degeneracy there had means followed that a very wide separation was been men of the true poetic spark. Dryden and drawn between the devotees of the one and those Pope may not have kept it pure, but they assurof the other. Poetry was indeed a different form edly had it; Gray, notwithstanding the dreadful of diction from prose; but then, as it was not dif- disintegration to which his Elegy has been subficult for a clever man to acquire two forms of dic-mitted by modern critics, did certainly possess the tion, one might very well be both a poet and a prose-writer. To pass from prose to poetry was but to pass, as it were, from one's town to one's country house. Hence it was that so many of the literary men of last century had a reputation both in prose and in verse. General mental vigor carried an author triumphantly through either form of composition. Wit, sarcasm, strength, manliness, whatever qualities of intellect or disposition could earn respect for a writer in prose, were all capable-with a little training, or a slight native impulse towards the picturesque, to aid himof being transfused into metre. The best poetry of the age was, accordingly, rather wit or reflection expressed in metre than real poetry in the strict sense of the word. And here lies the de

ear and sensibility of a poet; Collins and Goldsmith were men of musical heart; and Thomson, Wordsworth himself being judge, was a genuine child of rural nature. Nor here, whatever other names are left unmentioned, let his be forgotten, the Boy of Bristol, the drunken choir-singer's posthumous son, who was found dead in his garret in Brook Street, Holborn, on the 25th of August, 1770. But the real poetic outburst came after these men had been removed from the scene, and was plainly a consequence of that general commotion of the whole earth to which we have already alluded. Its earliest unmistakable signs may be said to have been given in the works of Cowper and Burns. In the bard of Olney, valetudinarian as he was, the new force that was pent