pressed not less in the exquisite description of the little group, than in the pathetic remembrance of a mother's love:

"From Little down to Least, in due degree,
Around the Pastor, each in new-wrought vest,
Each with a vernal posy at his breast,
We stood, a trembling, earnest company!
With low soft murmur, like a distant bee,
Some spake, by thought-perplexing fears betrayed:
And some a bold unerring answer made :
How fluttered then thy anxious heart for me,
Beloved Mother! Thou whose happy hand
Had bound the flowers I wore, with faithful tie;
Sweet flowers! at whose inaudible command
Her countenance, phantom-like, doth re-appear:
O lost too early for the frequent tear,

And ill requited by the heartfelt sigh!"

To what, it may be asked, does this reverence for childhood tend—what is the impulse and the motive of the poet in carrying the heart back into the shadowy region of its early consciousness? The principle to which he appeals is universal in mankind, but it is not to be explained by superficial reasons. A deeper truth is needed to expound the elements of the human soul, and it is given when he moralizes the glowing description of the two Boys, in the latter books of the Excursion:

"we live by hope

And by desire; we see by the glad light
And breathe the sweet air of futurity;

And so we live, or else we have no life.

To-morrow-nay, perchance this very hour,
(For every moment has its own to-morrow!)

Those blooming Boys, whose hearts are almost sick
With present triumph, will be sure to find

A field before them freshened with the dew

Of other expectations; - in which course

Their happy year spins round. The youth obeys
A like glad impulse; and so moves the man,
'Mid all his apprehensions, cares, and fears,-
Or so he ought to move. Ah! why in age
Do we revert so fondly to the walks

Of Childhood · but that there the Soul discerns
The dear memorial footsteps unimpaired
Of her own native vigor; thence can hear
Reverberations; and a choral song
Commingling with the incense that ascends

Undaunted, toward the imperishable heavens,
From her own lonely altar?"

When imagination thus lights up these sublime visions of childhood and infancy, what wisdom, what moral strength are we to gather or are they to pass away as profitless as dreams? The answer is this: - the lesson that teaches how holy a thing, even with all its frailty, the heart is, before worldly passions throng to take possession of it, is in itself persuasive to aspirations after a renewed innocence and simple feelings. The consciousness or the recollection of a better nature, call it which you may, and dim and shadowy though it be, is precious, because God in mercy has not divorced the soul of man from hope and the joy inspired by the mere sense of the good and the pure and the beautiful. That sense is strengthened by these imaginative revelations of infancy, reflecting promises of a redeemed nature, which in themselves are often feebly apprehended; and thus, to apply to this subservience of imagination to revelation one of Wordsworth's beautiful images, we may behold the

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uncertain heaven received

Into the bosom of the steady lake."

Not only assurances of a better nature are gained; these imaginative" recollections of early childhood" expand into "intimations of immortality" in the lofty ode closing the miscellaneous poems. The imagination fashions the memory of" delight and liberty, the simple creed of childhood," into the idea of a pre-existent state a mode of symbolizing the eternal and the idealand by a mighty grasp the past and the future are brought together as fragments of eternity, and from the memory of our inmost being in early life, there springs up an intimation of our immortality:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home;

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the East
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,

The homely Nurse does all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,

And that imperial palace whence he came."

We know of no mightier effort of poetic genius, than the immortal endowment of the poet's spirit thus struggling with its earthly freight—"custom, time, and domineering faculties of sense,' and we feel that the power is victorious, when he exultingly tells

us,

"The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction:

-for those first affections

Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherisk, and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never:

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor Man ror Bov,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish er destrovi

Hence in a season of calm weather,

Tree inland far we be

Our Souls are sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us bither,

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the Children sport upon the shore.

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."

These strains belong to the very highest order of imagination.

They may, to some, appear dighty, wild, and extravagant-to

others, mystic and cloudy. This will vary according to the intellectual and imaginative endowments of different readers. A matter-of-fact philosophy, not conversant with man's inner being, may demand what is the spot of reality from which the poet's imagination has soured so high. A dogmatic fanaticism may arraign the heart of childhood beholding there, not as with the poet's eye, "glimpses of glory," but only spots of sin — the feebleness of our fallen nature and symptoms of incipient depravity. The poet's creed, divested of its radiance, is this that recollections of early childhood awaken in the mind conceptions of a state of being purer and better than what belongs to our after-years that those conceptions wrought upon by the imagination become endowed with attributes not limitable by time or space that thus the soul acquires a sense of something within itself that is more than earthly—a consciousness of communings with eternity—and in this spiritual mood it passes over the limits at once of physical birth and death, and is borne forward from its youngest memory into an existence beyond the grave. In the image of childhood the heart recognizes its own imperishable nature, and in the innocence of those days it discovers faintly shadowed forth promises of the soul redeemed and happy. "In that little Goshen the heart of childhood,"says Charles Lamb, "there will be light, when the grown world flounders about in the darkness of sense and materiality." Wordsworth's devotion to the beauty of early life is the same trait of genius which produced Shakspeare's sweet pictures of childhood Jeremy Taylor's-and Southey's affectionate playfulness with his "good little women and men." But the question may occur, what authority has Wordsworth for thus regarding childhood as emblematic of a happy hereafter? How dare he so deeply reverence any era of man's life? How dare he in any form of humanity-corrupt, and wretched, and down-trodden as it is in the feebleness of infancy or the flutterings of childhood - trace intimations of immortality - foretokenings and assurances of heaven? This shall be fully met - but by no other vindication than an allusion to that narrative which tells us that Jesus bade his busy disciples suffer the little children to come unto him and proclaiming that "of such is the kingdom of God," "took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them." Now, to turn the questioning back, who will impute to Wordsworth a heresy, in thus, as it were in obedience to the Saviour's teaching, announcing that childhood is a consecrated thing for man to medi

tate on? We have before spoken of all poetry of a high order partaking of a sacred character in a more comprehensive sense than that to which as a metrical expression of doctrine, the term is usually appropriated. Poetry becomes auxiliar to Divine truth, with which it acts in harmony without identifying itself with the same forms of its lessons. For fear of misapprehension, it may be well to illustrate this by the present instance. The Saviour announces in one short sentence that "of such (the little children) is the kingdom of heaven:" then it is a fit theme for uninspired wisdom to disclose what is the nature of the little child. Thus, when Wordsworth sends his spirit to explore the heart of childhood and bring to light the beauty of its innocence, the impulse of his chastened poetic instinct, is in accordance with the teachings of childlike simplicity which distinguish Christianity, and the deepest of his musings is consecrated to the truth of revelation.

This subject has been dwelt on, to illustrate the sublime tone of Wordsworth's poetry when treating even the simplest forms of humanity. From the emotions of childhood, another law of our moral being is evolved in the lines with which the poet meets his reader on his first page:

"My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky :

So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety."

It is one of the sorrows of humanity that we are feeble in carrying forward into life the freshness of our early days, and that our self-consciousness loses its continuity. "Men exist," remarks Coleridge, "in fragments." The elements of the heart are wasted when the sympathy between different periods of existence is broken. No recollection of youthful innocence rises up to plead with the sophistications of manhood-impulses are received only from what is outward and accidental—and, when animal decay comes on, the heart which has never recognised its inner modes of feeling, is found to be desolate. How affectionately does Charles Lamb-"the man Elia" —regard his other self" the child Elia, in the back ground," as "a guardian giving the rule to his unpractised steps, and regulating the