WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. WITH A PORTRAIT. BY GEORGE GILFILLAN. "HE was," says some one of Rousseau,, a lonely man-his life a long soliloquy." And the same words may be applied to the "sole king of Rocky Cumberland," the lord of Rydal Mount, the sultan of Skiddaw, the warlock of Windermere, William Wordsworth. He has indeed, mingled much with men, but reluctantly; and even while amidst them, his spirit has preserved its severe seclusion. He has strode frequently into society, but with an impatient and hasty step. It is this lofty insulation which marks out Wordsworth from the eminent of his era. While they have been tremulously alive to every breath of public praise or blame, and never so much so as when pretending to despise the one and defy the other; he has maintained the tenor of his way, indifferent to both. While his name was the signal for every species of insult-while one Review was an incessant battery against his poetical character, and another, powerful on all other topics, returned it only a feeble reply on this -while stupidity itself had learned to laugh and sneer at him-while the very children of the nursery were taught to consider his rhymes as too puerile even for them, he remained unmoved; and leaving poor Coleridge to burst into tears, the majestic brow of Wordsworth only acknowledged by a transient frown the existence of his assailants. And now that his name is a household word, and that his works have found their way to the heart of the nation, we believe that he has never once been betrayed into an expression of undue complacency-that he feels himself precisely the man he was before that he moves in his elevated sphere as "native and endued" unto its element; and that the acclamations as well as the abuse of the public have failed to draw him forth from the sublime solitudes of his own spirit. And we do think that this manly self-appreciation is one of the principal marks of true greatness. We find it in Dante, daring, in his gloomy banishment, to make himself immortal, by writing the "Inferno." We find it in Milton, "in darkness, and with dangers compassed round," rolling out nevertheless the deep bass notes of his great poem as from some mighty organ, seated in his own breast. We find it in Burns, confessing that, at the plough, he had formed the very idea of his poems to which the public afterwards set its seal. We find it not in Byron, who, while professing scorn for the finest contemporary specimens of his species, nay, for his species in the abstract, was yet notoriously at the mercy of the meanest creature that could handle a quill, to spurt venom against the crest of the noble Childe. But we do find it in Wordsworth, and still more in Scott, the one sustaining a load of detraction, and the other a burden of popularity, with a calm, smiling, and imperturbable dignity. The author of the "Excursion" has indeed been called an egotist; but while there is one species of egotism which stamps the weak victim of a despicable vanity, there is another which adheres to a very exalted order of minds, and is the needful defense of those who have stout burdens to bear, and severe sufferings to undergo. The Apostle Paul, in this grand sense, was an egotist when he said, "I have fought a good fight, I have kept the faith." Dante was an egotist. Luther was an egotist. Milton was an egotist; and in this sense Wordsworth is an egotist too. But what, it may be asked, is his burden and his mission? It is seen now not to have been the composition of pedler poems-the sacrifice of great powers to petty purposesthe indulgence of a weak, though amiable eccentricity; or the mere love of being singular at the expense of good taste and common sense. But many still, we fear, are not aware of its real nature and importance. Wordsworth's mission has been a lofty one, and loftily fulfilled-to raise the mean, to dignify the obscure, to reveal that natural nobility | which lurks under the russet gown and the clouted shoe; to extract poetry from the cottage, and from the turf-fire upon its hearth, and from the solitary shieling, and from the mountain tarn, and from the gray ancestral stone at the door of the deserted mansion, and from the lichens of the rock, and from the furze of the melancholy moor. It is to hang a weight of interest"-of brooding, and passionate, and poetical feeling upon the hardest, the remotest, and the simplest objects of nature-it is to unite gorgeousness of imagination with prosaic literality of fact-it is to interweave the deductions of a subtle philosophy with the "short and simple annals of the poor." And how to the waste and meaningless parts of creation has he, above all men, given a voice, an intelligence, and a beauty! The sweet and solitary laugh of a joyous female, echoing among the hills, is to his ear more delightful than the music of many forests. A wooden bowl is dipped into the well, and comes out heavy, not merely with water, but with the weight of his thoughts. A spade striking into the spring ground moves in the might of his spirit. A village drum, touched by the strong finger of his genius, produces a voice which is poetry. The tattered cloak of a poor girl is an Elijah's mantle to him. A thorn on the summit of a hill, "known to every star and every wind that blows," bending and whispering over a maniac, becomes a banner-staff to his imagination. A silent tarn collects within and around it the sad or terrible histories of a sea; and a fern-stalk floating on its surface has the interest of a forest of masts. A leech gatherer is surrounded with the sublimity of "cloud, gorse, and whirlwind, on the gorgeous moor. A ram stooping to see his "wreathed horns superb," in a lake among the mountains, is to his sight as sublime as were an angel glancing at his features in the sea of glass which is mingled with fire. A fish leaps up in one of his tarns like an immortal thing. If he skates, it is "across the image of a star." Icicles to him are things of imagination. A snowball is a Mont Blanc; a little cottage girl a Venus de Medicis, and more; a water-mill, turned by a heart-broken child, a very Niagara of woe; the poor beetle that we tread upon is "a mailed angel on a battle day;" and a day-dream among the hills, of more importance than the dates and epochs of an empire. Wordsworth's pen is not a fork of the lightning-it is a stubblestalk from the harvest field. His language has not the swell of the thunder, nor the dash of the cataract-it is the echo of the "shut of eve" "When sleep sits dewy on the laborer's eye." His versification has not the "sweet and glorious redundancy" of Spenser, nor the lofty rhythm of Milton, nor the uncertain melody of Shakspeare, nor the rich swelling spiritual note of Shelley, nor the wild, airy, and fitful music of Coleridge, nor the pointed strength of Byron-it is a music sweet and simple as the running brook, yet profound in its simplicity as the unsearchable ocean. His purpose is to extract what is new, beautiful, and sublime, from his own heart; reflecting its feelings upon the simplest objects of nature, and the most primary emotions of the human soul. And here lies the lock of his strength. It is comparatively easy for any gifted spirit to gather off the poetry creaming upon lofty subjects-to extract the imagination which such topics as heaven, hell, dream-land, faery-land, Grecian or Swiss scenery, almost involve in their very sounds; but to educe interest out of the every-day incidents of simple life-to make every mood of one's mind a poem-to find an epic in a nest, and a tragedy in a tattered cloak-thus to "hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear"-to find sermons in stones," and poetry in everything—to have "thoughts too deep for tears" blown into the soul by the wayside flower-this is one of the rarest and most enviable of powers. And hence Wordsworth's song is not a complicated harmony, but a "quiet tune"-his instrument not a lyre, but a rustic reed-his poetic potation not Hippocrene, but simple water from the stream—his demon no Alecto or Tisiphone, but a sting-armed insect of the airhis emblem on earth not the gaudy tulip nor the luscious rose, but the bean-flower with its modest, yet arrowy odor-his emblem in the sky not the glaring sun, nor the gay star of morning, nor the "sun of the sleepless, melancholy star," nor the "star of Jove, so beautiful and large❞—it is the mild and lonely moon shining down through groves of yew upon pastoral graves. 66 The mind of Wordsworth is a combination of the intellectual, the imaginative, and the personal. His intellect, though large and powerful, does not preside over the other faculties with such marked superiority as in the case of Milton, the most intellectual of all poets; but it maintains its ground, and, unlike the reasoning faculty of many men of eggs are gleaming there," to him a dearer sight. He turns to the works of nature the same minutely magnifying lens as Pope to the works of art. The difference is, that while the bard of Twickenham uses his microscope to a lady's lock, or to a gentleman's clouded cane, the poet of Windermere applies it to a mountain daisy or a worn-out spade. In speaking of Wordsworth's writings, we must not omit a juvenile volume of poems, which we have never seen, but which we believe is chiefly remarkable as showing how late his genius was of flowering, and how far in youth he was from having sounded the true depths of his understanding. We have somewhere read extracts from it, which convinced us, that at an age when Campbell wrote his "Pleasures of Hope," Pope his sparkling "Essay on Criticism," Keats his "Hyperion," Wordsworth, so far from being a like miracle of precocity, could only produce certain puerile prettinesses, with all the merit which arises from absence of fault, but with all the fault which arises from absence of merit. genius, never submits to a degrading vassal- | star. Talk of the Pleïades! "Lo, five blue age. Destitute of Milton's scholastic training, it has evidently gone through the still severer crucible of a self-taught and sublime metaphysics. His imagination, again, is not rich and copious like Spenser's, nor is it omnivorous and omnific like Shakspeare's, nor uniformly gigantic like Milton's, nor is it the mere handmaid of the passions like Byron's, nor voluptuous and volatile like Moore's, nor fastidious like Campbell's, nor fantastic like Southey's. It is calm, profound, still, obscure, like the black eye of one of his own tarns. The objects he sets before us are few; the colors he uses are uniform; the tone is somewhat sombre, but the impression and intensity with which they stamp themselves on the view are immense. A sonnet with Wordsworth often goes as far as an ordinary epic; a single line does the work of an ordinary canto. This power of concentration, however, is only occasional-it is spontaneous, not involuntary, and alternates with a fine diffusion, so that, while at one time he compresses meaning into his words as with the Bramah press of Young, at another his poetry is as loosely and beautifully dispread as the blank-verse of Wilson or Graham. But that which undoubtedly gives to the poetry of Wordsworth its principal power is its personal interest. His works are all confessions, not of crimes, (unless to love nature too well be a sin,) but of all the peculiarities of a poetical temperament. He retains and reproduces the boyish feelings which others lose with their leading-strings; he carries forward the first fresh emotions of childhood into the powers and passions of manhoodhe links the cradle to the crutch by the strong tie of his genius. Nothing which reminds him of his own youth-which awakens some old memory-which paints on an airy canvass some once familiar face-which vibrates on some half-forgotten string, comes amiss to Wordsworth. His antiquity may be said to begin with his own birth; his futurity to extend to the day of his own funeral. His philosophy may be summed up in the one sentence, "the child is father of the man." If we were to try to express our idea of Wordsworth's poetry in a word, we might call it microscopic. Many apply a telescope to nature, to enlarge the great; he employs a microscope to magnify the small. Many, in their daring flights, treat a constellation with as much familiarity as if it were a bunch of violets; he leans over a violet with as much interest and reverence as if it were a The "Lyrical Ballads" was the first effusion of his mind which bore the broad arrow of a peculiar genius; the first to cluster round him troops of devoted friends, and the first to raise against him that storm of ridicule, badinage, abuse, and misrepresentation, which has so recently been laid forever. And, looking back upon this production through the vista of years, we cannot wonder that it should so have struck the mind of the public. Poetry was reduced to its beggarly elements. In the florid affectation of Darwin, and the tame, yet turgid verse of Hayley, it was breathing its last. Cowper, meanwhile, had maddened and died. It was not surprising, that in the dreary dearth which succeeded, a small bunch of wild flowers, with the scent of the moors, and the tints of the sun, and the freshness of the dew upon them, shot suddenly into the hands of the public, should attract immediate notice; that while they disgusted the fastidious, they should refresh the dispirited lovers of truth and nature; that, while the vain and the worldly tore and trampled them under foot with fierce shouts of laughter, the simple-hearted took them up and folded. them to their bosoms; and that while the old, prepossessed in favor of Pope and Voltaire, threw them aside as insipid, the young, inspired by the first outbreak of the French Revolution, and flushed by its golden hopes, caught and kissed them in a transport of passing over one smaller poem of exquienthusiasm. Such a bunch were the "Lyri- site beauty on the "Eclipse in Italy," and cal Ballads," and such was their reception. with still more reluctance Laodamia," the Destitute of all glitter, glare, pretension, most chaste and classic of his strains, and they were truly "wildings of nature." Not which, says one, "might have been read that they mirrored the utmost depth or aloud in Elysium to the happy dead," we power of their author's mind-not that they would offer a few remarks upon the huge gave more than glimpses of the occasional half-finished pile called the "Excursion," the epic grandeur of the "Excursion," or the national monument of its author's mind. Miltonic music of the "Sonnets;"-but they discovered all the simplicity, if not all the strength of his genius. They were like droppings from the rich honey-comb of his mind. Their faults we seek not to disguise or palliate-the wilful puerility, the babyish simplicity which a few of them affected-but still, as long as Derwentwater reflects the burning west in her bosom, and Windermere smiles to her smiling shores, and the Langdale Giants "parley with the setting sun," shall men remember Harry Gill, chattering forever more; and Ruth with the water-mills of her innocence, and the "tumultuous songs" of her frenzy; and Andrew Jones, with his everlasting drum; and the Indian mother, with her heart-broken woes; and last, not least, glorious old Matthew, with his merry rhymes and melancholy moralizings. The next poetic production from his pen was entitled, "Poems, in two volumes." And here, interspersed with much of the childishness of the Ballads, are some strains of a far higher mood. Here we meet, for instance, with the song of Brougham Castle, that splendid lyric which stirs the blood like the first volley of a great battle. Here too, are some of his sonnets, the finest we think, ever written, combining the simplicity, without the bareness of Milton's, the tender and picturesque beauty of Warton's, with qualities which are not prominent in theirs-originality of sentiment, beauty of expression, and lofti ness of tone. Passing over his after effusions-his "Peter Bell" and the " Wagoner," two things resembling rather the wilder mood of Coleridge than the sobriety of their actual parent, and his "Ecclesiastical Sonnets," a production scarcely worthy of the subject or author, though relieved by gleams of real poetry, and the "White Doe of Rylstone," with this single remark that of all the severe criticisms inflicted on Wordsworth, the review of this particular poem in the Edinburgh stands facile princeps for glaring injustice; and his series of "Sonnets on the River Duddon," a most original and happy thought, which we would like to see applied to other streams, as the Tay, the Earn, the Nith, the Dee, &c. It professes to be part of a poem called the "Recluse." So many witty, or wouldbe witty things, have been said about this profession by so many critics and criticasters, that we have not a single joke to crack on the subject. The magnitude of the entire poem is to us, as well as to them, a wonder and a mystery. Its matter is a topic more attractive. We remember asking De Quincey if he had seen the "Recluse," and why it was not given to the world? He answered, that he had read, or heard read, large portions of it; that the principal reason for its non-publication as yet was, that it contained (who would have expected it!) much that was political, if not personal, and drew with a strong and unflattering hand some of the leading characters of the day. He added that it abounded with passages equal to anything in the "Excursion," and instanced one, descriptive of France during the Revolution, contrasting the beauty and fertility of its vine-covered valleys and summer landscapes with the dark and infernal passions which were then working like lava in the minds of its inhabitants, as magni ficent. So much for the "Recluse," which the people of the millennium may possibly see. The "Excursion," professing to be only part of a poem, was, nevertheless, criticised as a finished production, and condemned accordingly. A finished production it certainly is not. Cumbrous, digressive, unwieldy, abounding with bulky blemishes, not so witty as "Candide," nor so readable as "Nicholas Nickleby"-these are charges which must be allowed. But after granting this, what remains? Exquisite pathos, profound philosophy, classic dignity, high-toned devotion, the moral sublime. The tale of Margaret opens new fountains in the human heart. The account of the first brilliant sun-burst of the French Revolution is sublime. The description of the church-yard among the mountains, with its tender memories and grass-green graves, would float many such volumes. But far the finest passage is that on the origin of the Pagan mythology. And yet we never feel so much, as when reading it, the greater grandeur which our system possesses from its central principle, the Unity of the Divine Nature; a doctrine which collects all the scattered rays of beauty and excellence from every quarter of the universe, and condenses them into one august and overpowering conception; which traces. back the innumerable rills of thought and feeling to the ocean of an infinite mind, and thus surpasses the most elegant and ethereal polytheism infinitely more than the sun does the "cinders of the element." However beautiful the mythology of Greece, as interpreted by Wordsworth-however instinct it was with imagination--however it seemed to breathe a supernatural soul into the creation, and to rouse and startle it all into life-to fill the throne of the sun with a divine tenant -to hide a Naïad in every fountain-to crown every rock with its Oread-to deify shadows and storms-and to send sweeping across "old ocean's gray and melancholy waste' a celestial emperor-it must yield, without a struggle, to the thought of a great one Spirit, feeding by his perpetual presence the lamp of the universe; speaking in all its voices; listening in all its silence; storming in its rage; reposing in its calm; its light the shadow of his greatness; its gloom the hiding-place of his power; its verdure the trace of his steps; its fire the breath of his nostrils; its motion the circulation of his untiring energies; its warmth the effluence of his love; its mountains the altars of his worship; and its oceans the "mirrors" where his form "glasses itself in tempests." Compared to this idea, how does the fine dream of the Pagan Mythos tremble and melt away -Olympus, with its multitude of stately celestial natures, dwindle before the solitary, immutable throne of Jehovah-the poetry, as well as the philosophy of Greece, shrink before the single sentence, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord "-and Wordsworth's description of the origin of its multitudinous gods look tame beside the mighty lines of Milton: "The oracles are dumb; No voice or hideous hum Shall we rob ourselves of the varied beauties of the " Excursion," because one of the dramatis persona is a pedler, and because the book was originally a quarto of the largest size? No. Wordsworth is like his own cloud, ponderous, and moveth altogether, if he move at all. His excursions are not those of an ephemeron, and disdain duodecimos. We dare not put this chefd'œuvre of his genius on the same shelf with the "Paradise Lost;" but there are passages in both which claim kindred, and the minds of the twain dwell not very far apart. Having no wish to sacrifice one great man to the manes of another-to pull down the living that we may set up the cold idol of the dead-we may venture to affirm, that if Milton was more than the Wordsworth of the seventeenth, Wordsworth is the Milton of the nineteenth century. Among his later and smaller poems, the best, perhaps, is his "Ode on the Power of Sound." It is a little labored and involved, but the labor is that of a giant birth, and the involution is that of a close-piled magnificence. Up the gamut of sound how does he travel, from the sprinkling of earth on the coffin-lid to the note of the eagle, who rises over the arch of the rainbow, singing his own wild song; from the Ave Maria of the pilgrim to the voice of the lion, coming up vast and hollow on the winds of the midnight wilderness; from the trill of the blackbird to the thunder speaking from his black orchestra to the echoing heavens; from the "Distress gun on a leeward shore, Repeated, heard, and heard no more," to the murmur of the main, for well "The towering headlands crowned with mist, Their feet among the billows, know That ocean is a mighty harmonist;" Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. from the faintest sigh that stirs the stagnant Apollo from his shrine, Can no more divine With hollow shriek the sleep of Delphos leaving. cell. He feels from Judah's land The dreadful Infant's hand. The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne. air of the dungeon, to the "word which cannot pass away," and on which the earth and the heavens are suspended. This were, lyric fit to be placed beside Shelley's "Ode but for its appearance of having effort, a to Liberty," and Coleridge's "France." Appropriately, it has a swell of sound, and a pomp of numbers, such as he has exhibited |