as the Lyrical Ballads. It affects a system without having any intelligible clue to one; and instead of unfolding a principle in various and striking lights, repeats the same conclusions till they become flat and insipid. Mr. Wordsworth's mind is obtuse, except as it is the organ and the receptacle of accumulated feelings: it is not analytic, but synthetic; it is reflecting, rather than theoretical. The EXCURSION, we believe, fell still-born from the There was something abortive, and clumsy, and ill-judged in the attempt. It was long and laboured. The personages, for the most part, were low, the fare rustic: the plan raised expectations which were not fulfilled, and the effect was like being ushered into a stately hall and invited to sit down to a splendid banquet in the company of clowns, and with nothing but successive courses of apple-dumplings served up. It was not even toujours perdrix ! Mr. Wordsworth, in his person, is above the middle size, with marked features, and an air somewhat stately and Quixotic. He reminds one of some of Holbein's heads, grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour, kept under by the manners of the age or by the pretensions of the person. He has a peculiar sweetness in his smile, and great depth and manliness and a rugged harmony, in the tones of his voice. His manner of reading his own poetry is particularly imposing; and in his favourite passages his eye beams with preternatural lustre, and the meaning labours slowly up from his swelling breast. No one who has seen him at these moments could go away with an impression that he was a "man of no mark or likelihood." Perhaps the comment of his face and voice is necessary to convey a full idea of his poetry. His language may not be intelligible, but his manner is not to be mistaken. It is clear that he is either mad or inspired. In company, even in a tête-à-tête, Mr. Wordsworth is often silent, indolent, and reserved. If he is become verbose and oracular of late years, he was not so in his better days. He threw out a bold or an indifferent remark without either effort or pretension, and relapsed into musing again. He shone most (because he seemed most roused and animated) in reciting his own poetry, or in talking about it. He sometimes gave striking views of his feelings and trains of association in composing certain passages; or if one did not always understand his distinctions, still there was no want of interest-there was a latent meaning worth inquiring sta a vein of ore that one cannot exactly hit upon at the mutes of which there are sure indications. His standard of por: high and severe, almost to exclusiveness. He admits of t below, scarcely of any thing above himself. It is fine to him talk of the way in which certain subjects should have treated by eminent poets, according to his notions of the Thus he finds fault with Dryden's description of Bacchus a dhe Alexander's Feast, as if he were a mere good-looking yuch a boon companion “Flushed with a purple grace, instead of representing the God returning from the eco-ex India, crowned with vine-leaves, and drawn by panthers, an lowed by troops of satyrs, of wild men and animals that be tamed. You would think, in hearing him speak on this 9that you saw Titian's picture of the meeting of Bachat an adne so classic were his conceptions, so glowing his sty ton is his great idol, and he sometimes dares to compare à with him. His Sonnets, indeed, have something of the same raised tone and prophetic spirit. Chaucer is another pome ite of his, and he has been at the pains to modern ze Canterbury Tales. Those persons who look upon Mr W. worth as a merely puerile writer, must be rather at a kiss to for his strong predilection for such geniuses as Dante and M Angelo. We do not think our author has any very nondial simpathy with Shakspeare How should he? Shakspeare was the least of an egotist of any body in the world He does DT BÀ relish the variety and scope of dramatic composition those interlocutions between Lucius and Carus Wordsworth himself wrote a tragedy when he was y we have heard the following energetic lines qued from its into the mouth of a person smit with remorse for some rush or Action is momentary, The motion of a muscle this way or that, He ha Yet V: Perhaps for want of light and shade, and the unshackled spirit of the drama, this performance was never brought forward. Our critic has a great dislike to Gray, and a fondness for Thomson and Collins. It is mortifying to hear him speak of Pope and Dryden, whom, because they have been supposed to have all the possible excellences of poetry, he will allow to have none. Nothing, however, can be fairer, or more amusing, than the way in which he sometimes exposes the unmeaning verbiage of modern poetry, Thus, in the beginning of Dr. Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes "Let observation with extensive view, he says there is a total want of imagination accompanying the words, the same idea is repeated three times under the disguise of a different phraseology: it comes to this "let observation, with extensive observation, observe mankind;" or take away the first line, and the second, 'Survey mankind from China to Peru," literally conveys the whole. Mr. Wordsworth is, we must say, a perfect Drawcansir as to prose writers. He complains of the dry reasoners and matter-of-fact people for their want of passion; and he is jealous of the rhetorical declaimers and rhapsodists as trenching on the province of poetry. He condemns all French writers (as well of poetry as prose) in the lump. His list in this way is indeed small. He approves of Walton's Angler, Paley, and some other writers of an inoffensive modesty of pretension. He also likes books of voyages and travels, and Robinson Crusoe. In art, he greatly esteems Bewick's wood-cuts, and Waterloo's sylvan etchings. But he sometimes takes a higher tone, and give his mind fair play. We have known him enlarge with a noble intelligence and enthusiasm on Nicolas Poussin's fine landscape-compositions, pointing out the unity of design that pervades them, the superintending mind, the imaginative principle that brings all to bear on the same end; and declaring he would not give a rush for any landscape that did not express the time of day, the climate, the period of the world it was meant to illustrate, e character of wholeness in it. His eye also does just brandt's fine and masterly effects In the way v artist works something out of nothing, and transf.com of a tree, a common figure into an ideal object, by light and shade thrown upon it, he perceives an as own mode of investing the minute details of nature phere of sentiment; and in pronouncing Rembrandt to be a man of genius, feels that he strengthens his own claim to the has been said of Mr. Wordsworth, that he hates cont he hates the Venus of Medicis." But these, we hope, are epigrams and jeuz-d'esprit, as far from truth as they are free tr malice; a sort of running satire or critical clenches "Where one for sense and one for rhyme, Is quite sufficient at one time.” We think, however, that if Mr. Wordsworth had been a liberal and candid critic, he would have been a more ster writer. If a greater number of sources of pleasure had been open to him, he would have communicated pleasure to the word frequently. Had he been less fastidious in pronouncing mez ram on the works of others, his own would have been received favourably, and treated more leniently. The current of ka ter ings is deep, but narrow; the range of his understand g and aspiring rather than discursive. The force, the ur the absolute truth and identity with which he fees a makes him indifferent to so many others. The sim, AV thusiasm of his feelings, with respect to nature, renders hom ed and intolerant in his judgments of men and thin Et happens to him, as to others, that his strength lies in ha ness; and perhaps we have no right to complain We got rid of the cynic and the egotist, and find in his stead a cue place man We should take the good the Gods provide fine and original vein of poetry is not one of their most contem;a ble gifts, and the rest is scarcely worth thinking of, except za may be a mortification to those who expect perfection from huma nature; or who have been idle enough at some period of lives, to deify men of genius as possessing claims above it. But this is a chord that jars, and we shall not dwell upon it. Lord Byron we have called, according to the old proverb, "the spoiled child of fortune:" Mr. Wordsworth might plead, in mitigation of some peculiarities, that he is "the spoiled child of disappointment." We are convinced, if he had been early a popular poet, he would have borne his honours meekly, and would have been a person of great bonhommie and frankness of disposition. But the sense of injustice and of undeserved ridicule sours the temper and narrows the views. To have produced works of genius, and to find them neglected or treated with scorn, is one of the heaviest trials of human patience. We exaggerate our own merits when they are denied by others, and are apt to grudge and cavil at every particle of praise bestowed on those to whom we feel a conscious superiority. In mere self-defence we turn against the world, when it turns against us; brood over the undeserved slights we receive; and thus the genial current of the soul is stopped, or vents itself in effusions of petulance and self-conceit. Mr. Wordsworth has thought too much of contemporary critics and criticism; and less than he ought of the award of posterity, and of the opinion, we do not say of private friends, but of those who were made so by their admiration of his genius. He did not court popularity by a conformity to established models, and he ought not to have been surprised that his originality was not understood as a matter of course. He has gnawed too much on the bridle; and has often thrown out crusts to the critics, in mere defiance or as a point of honour when he was challenged, which otherwise his own good sense would have withheld. We suspect that Mr. Wordsworth's feelings are a little morbid in this respect, or that he resents censure more than he is gratified by praise. Otherwise, the tide has turned much in his favour of late years— he has a large body of determined partisans-and is at present sufficiently in request with the public to save or relieve him from the last necessity to which a man of genius can be reduced-that of becoming the God of his own idolatry! |