for the ends of self-aggrandisement, or perhaps more frequently to stave off a feeling of humiliation and self-reproach. But without insisting upon a qualification which the language employed may seem to some to refuse, we find in the proposition, taken even in all the absoluteness of its terms, no error, but, we should say, a peculiarity of sentiment, proceeding from a rare constitution of mind, adapted to that constitution, and when enjoined upon men whose minds are similarly constituted, not enjoined amiss.

The same sentiments are not to be cultivated by all sorts of minds. The standard of right and wrong is not so ill adapted to human nature as to take no account of its idiosyncracies, and to make all dispositions equally right or wrong in every frame and fabric of mind in which they are to be found throughout the infinite varieties of moral structure. There are men who are made to do more good by their just antipathies than by their sympathies, as there are others whose just sympathies are more available than

their antipathies. There are also men whose admirable gifts of contemplation, whose clear intellectual insights, whose singular powers of communicating charitable thoughts, would be in part obscured and defeated by the admission of feelings alien to their natures, however necessary and wholesome as ordinary elements in the great compound of human society. These men are chosen instruments, and it is for them so to order their being as shall best conduce to the development and unimpeded operation of their excellent gifts. They should therefore take into their hands the lyre alone, leaving in the hands of others, with due acknowledgment, nevertheless, of their use and necessity, the sword, the axe, and the halter. Accordingly, to whom is it that Mr. Wordsworth addresses his admonition ?—

'If thou be one whose heart the holy forms
Of young imagination have kept pure-'

It is one thus eminently endowed-one whose gift of imagination has filled his mind with pure and holy forms-that Mr. Wordsworth adjures to profit by this gift to its

fullest extent, to cultivate the knowledge which leads to love, and not to desecrate his heart by the admission of a contemptuous feeling, even in respect of objects which may be not unworthily visited with contempt by others. He, searching for the explication of all that happens, and understanding through what impulses of nature or temptations of circumstance one man or another comes to be weak and vile; regarding all human acts or characters as natural phenomena, the materials of induction, and giving his mind duly in his vocation to the search for final causes and the working out of abstract results-he, we say, the sage thus commissioned, must, for the purposes of this his comprehensive survey, look down upon human nature from an eminence, and strive to raise himself above the influence of all vehement and disturbing passions. Even such of them as may work for good with men not absolved by the exercise of higher functions from taking a part in the practical contests of life, must be regarded as of too

temporal and secular a character to be entertained by him.

Closely connected with his repudiation of the harsher and more violent feelings of humankind, is Mr. Wordsworth's devotion to the beauty of the forms of external nature. This devotion affords to men of great excitability and a passionate sense of the beautiful, an escape from many dangers and disturbances. The appetite for the beautiful in such men must be fed, and human beauty is a diet which leads to excessive stimulation, frequent vicissitudes of feeling at all events, and in every probability, to the excitement of bitter and turbulent passions. The love and admiration of nature leads from all these; being in truth the safe outlet for every excess of sensibility. The pleasure so derived appears to be, of all human pleasures, the most exempt from correlative pain. It has no connexion of its own creating with any intemperance, sensual, sentimental, or intellectual. Moreover, he who has given away his heart to the beauty of nature rests in the

quiet consciousness that his admiration is fixed upon a perdurable object; and, redeemed from that sense of the transitory which so often mixes perturbation with pleasure, there is perhaps no feeling of the human heart which, being so intense, is at the same time so composed as that to which admiration of the external forms of nature gives birth. It is for this reason, amongst others, that it is peculiarly favourable to the contemplations of a poetical philosopher, and eminently so to one like Mr. Wordsworth, in whose scheme of thought there is no feature more prominent than the doctrine that the intellect should be nourished by the feelings, and that the state of mind which bestows a 'gift of genuine insight' is one of profound emotion as well as profound composure.

The power which lies in the beauty of nature to induce this union of the tranquil and the vivid is described, and to every disciple of Mr. Wordsworth has been as much as is possible imparted, by the celebrated Lines written in 1798, a few miles