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seem to the outward eye-mere machines moving about in customary occupations-productive labourers of food and wearing apparel-slaves from morn to night at task-work set them by the Wealth of Nations. They are the Children of God. The soul never sleeps-not even when its wearied body is heard snoring by people living in the next street. All the souls now in this world are for ever awake; and this life, believe us, though in moral sadness it has often been rightly called so, is no dream. In a dream we have no will of our own, no power over ourselves; ourselves are not felt to be ourselves; our familiar friends seem strangers from some far off country; the dead are alive, yet we wonder not; the laws of the physical world are suspended, or changed, or confused by our phantasy; Intellect, Imagination, the Moral Sense, Affection, Passion, are not possessed by us in the same way we possess them out of that mystery: were Life a Dream, or like a Dream, it would never lead to Heaven.

Again, then, we say to you, look into life and watch the growth of the soul. In a world where the ear cannot listen without hearing the clank of chains, the soul may yet be free as if it already inhabited the skies. For its Maker gave it LIBERTY OF CHOICE OF GOOD OR OF EVIL-and if it has chosen the good it is a King. All its faculties are then fed on their appropriate food provided for them in nature. The soul then knows where the necessaries and the luxuries of its life grow, and how they may be gathered-in a still sunny region inaccessible to blight-" no mildewed ear blasting his wholesome brother."

And thou shalt summer high in bliss upon the Hills of God."

Go read the EXCURSION then-venerate the PEDLAR-pity the SOLITARY -respect the PRIEST, and love the POET.

So charmed have we been with the sound of our own voice-of all sounds on earth the sweetest surely to our ears-and, therefore, we so dearly love the monologue, and from the dialogue turn averse, impatient of him ycleped the interlocutor, who,

like a shallow brook, will keep prattling and bubbling on between the still deep pools of our discourse, which nature feeds with frequent waterfalls; -so charmed have we been with the sound of our own voice, that, scarcely conscious the while of more than a gentle ascent along the sloping sward of a rural Sabbath day's journey, we perceive now that we must have achieved a Highland league - five miles-of rough up-hill work, and are standing tiptoe on the mountain-top. True that his altitude is not very great-somewhere, we should suppose, between two and three thousand -far higher than the Pentlandssomewhat higher than the Ochils-a middle-sized Grampian. Great painters and poets know that power lies not in mere measureable bulk. las, it is true, is a giant, and he has need to be so, supporting the globe. So is Andes; but his strength has never been put to proof, as he carries but clouds. The Cordilleras - but we must not be personal-so suffice it to say, that soul, not size, equally in mountains and in men, is and inspires the true sublime. Mont Blanc might be as big again; but what then, if without his glaciers?

At

These mountains are neither immense nor enormous-nor are there any such in the British Isles. Look for a few of the highest on Riddell's ingenious Scale-in Scotland, Ben-nevis, Helvellyn in England, in Ireland the Reeks; and, in print, they are mere molehills to Chimborazo. But in na ture they are the hills of the Eagle. And think ye not that an Eagle is as familiar with the sky as a Condor? That Vulture-for Vulture he is flics league-high-the Golden Eagle is satisfied to poise himself but a mile above the loch, which, judged by the rapidity of its long river's flow, may be a thousand feet or more above the level of the sea. From that height methinks the Bird-Royal, with the golden eye, can see the rising and the setting sun, and his march on the meridian, without a telescope. If ever he fly by night-and we think we have seen a shadow passing the stars that was on the wing of life-he must be

a rare astronomer.

"High from the summit of a craggy cliff Hung o'er the deep, such as amazing frown On utmost Kilda's shore, whose lonely race

Resign the setting sun to Indian worlds,
The Royal Eagle rears his vigorous young,
Strong-pounced, and burning with paternal fire.
Now fit to raise a kingdom of their own
He drives them from his fort, the towering seat
For ages of his empire; which in peace
Unstained he holds, while many a league to sea
He wings his course, and preys in distant isles."

Would to Heaven we had written these lines and the following! Which are the nobler, Thomson's or Campbell's?

"Not such

Was this proud bird; he clove the adverse storm,
And cuffed it with his wings. He stopped his flight
As easily as the Arab reins his steed,

And stood at pleasure 'neath Heaven's zenith, like
A lamp suspended from its azure dome.
Whilst underneath him the world's mountains lay
Like molehills, and her streams like lucid threads.
Then downward, faster than a falling star,
He neared the earth, until his shape distinct
Was blackly shadowed on the sunny ground!
And deeper terror hushed the wilderness,
To hear his nearer whoop. Then, up again
He soared and wheeled. There was an air of scorn
In all his movements,-whether he threw round

His crested head to look behind him, or

Lay vertical and sportively displayed
The inside whiteness of his wing declined,
In gyres and undulations full of grace,
An object beautifying Heaven itself.

"He-reckless who was victor, and above
The hearing of their guns-saw fleets engaged
In flaming combat. It was nought to him

What carnage, Moor or Christian, strewed their decks,
But if his intellect had matched his wings,
Methinks he would have scorned man's vaunted power
To plough the deep; his pinions bore him down
To Algiers the warlike, or the coral groves
That blush beneath the green of Bona's waves;
And traversed in an hour a wider space
Than yonder gallant ship, with all her sails
Wooing the winds, can cross from morn till eve.
His bright eyes were his compass, earth his chart,
His talons anchored on the stormiest cliff,
And on the very light-house rock he perched
When winds churned white the waves."

We, too, are an Eagle, and therefore proud of you our Scottish mountains, as you are of Us. Stretch yourself up to your full height as we now do to ours-and let Andes, giant of the Western Star," but dare to look at us and we will tear the "meteor standard to the winds unfurled," from his cloudy hands. There you stand-and were you to rear your summits much higher into heaven you would alarm the hidden

stars.

Yet we have seen you higher-but it was in storm. In calm like this, you do well to look beautiful-your solemn

altitude suits the sunny season, and the peaceful sky. But when the thunder at mid-day would hide your heads in a night of cloud, you thrust them through the blackness, and show them to the glens, crowned with fire.

Then are they a sea of mountains! No-they are mountains in a sea. And what a sea! Waves of water, when at the prodigious, are never higher than the foretop of a man-of

war.

Waves of vapour-they alone are ever seen flying mountains highbut they dash, they howl not-and in their silent ascension, all held toge

ther by the same spirit, but perpetually changing its beautiful array, where order seems ever and anon to come in among disorder, there is a grandeur that settles down in the soul of youthful poet roaming in delirium among the mountain glooms, and "pacifies the fever of his heart."

Call not now these vapours waves; for motion, movement there is none among the ledges, and ridges, and roads, and avenues, and galleries, and groves, and houses, and churches, and castles, and fairy palaces-all framed of mist. Far up among and above that wondrous region through which you hear voices of waterfalls deepening the silence, behold hundreds of mountain-tops - blue, purple, violet -for the sun is shining straight on some and aslant on others-and on those not at all; nor can the shepherd at your side, though he has lived there all his life, till after long pondering, tell you the names of those most familiar to him; for they seem to have all interchanged sites and altitudes, and "Black Ben-hun, the Eagle-Breeder" himself looks so serenely in his rainbow, that you might almost mistake him for Ben Louey, or the Hill of Hinds.

Have you not seen sunsets in which the mountains were embedded in masses of clouds all burning and blazing-yes, blazing-with unimaginable mixtures of all the colours that ever were born-intensifying into a glory that absolutely became insupportable to the soul as insufferable to the eyes -and that left the eyes for hours after you had retreated from the supernatural scene, even when shut, all filled with floating films of cross-lights, cutting the sky-imagery into gorgeous fragments, and were not the mountains of such sunsets, whether they were of land or of cloud, sufficiently vast for your utmost capacities and

powers of delight and joy, longing to commune with the Region thou feltst to be in very truth Heaven-nor could the spirit, entranced in admiration, conceive at that moment any Heaven beyond-while the senses themselves seemed to have had given them a revelation that, as it was created, could be felt but by your own immortal soul?

Let us not be afraid-we are in no danger of getting metaphysical-that disease is either sudden or lingering death to the sense of the mighty in nature. It elevates the soul to be in the body near the sky-at once on earth and in Heaven. In the body? Yeswe feel at once fettered and free. In Time we wear our fetters, and heavy though they be, and painfully rivetted on, seldom do we welcome Death coming to strike them off-but groan at sight of the executioner. In eternity we believe that all is spiritualand in that belief, which doubt sometimes shakes but to prove its foundation lies rooted far down below all earthquakes, endurable is the sound of dust to dust. Poets speak of the spirit, while yet in the flesh, blending, mingling, being absorbed in the great forms of the outward universe, and they speak as if such absorption were celestial and divine. But is not this a material creed? Let it be described, as it is by Wordsworth, as one of the many moods of Imagination in which there is no blame; not, as it is by Byron, as the utmost height to which she can aspire. Let Imagination beware how she seeks to glorify the objects of the senses, and having glorified them, to elevate them into a kindred being with our own, exalting them that we may claim with them that kindred being, as if we belonged to them and not they to us, forgetting that they are made to perish, we to live for ever!

"Is it not better, then, to be alone,
And love Earth only for its earthly sake,
By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone,
Or the pure bosom of its nursing lake,
Which feeds it as a mother who doth make
A fair but froward infant her own care,
Kissing its cries away as these awake ;—
Is it not better thus our lives to wear,

Than join the crushing crowd, doom'd to inflict or bear?

"I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture: I can see

Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,

Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.

"And thus I am absorb'd, and this is life;
I look upon the peopled desert past,
As on a place of agony and strife,
Where, for some sin, to sorrow I was cast,
To act and suffer, but remount at last
With a fresh pinion; which I feel to spring,
Though young, yet waxing vigorous, as the blast
Which it would cope with, on delighted wing,

Spurning the clay-cold bonds which round our being cling.

"And when, at length, the mind shall be all free
From what it hates in this degraded form,

Reft of its carnal life, save what shall be
Existent happier in the fly and worm,—
When elements to elements conform,

And dust is as it should be, shall I not

Feel all I see, less dazzling, but more warm?

The bodiless thought? the Spirit of each spot?

Of which, even now, I share at times the immortal lot?

"Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?

Is not the love of these deep in my heart

With a pure passion? should I not contemn
All objects, if compared with these? and stem

A tide of suffering rather than forego

Such feelings for the hard and worldly phlegm
Of those whose eyes are only turn'd below,

Gazing upon the ground, with thoughts which dare not glow?"

Has not the tongue of fame proclaimed these, and others such as these, to be glorious verses flowing from the fount of inspiration? Yet satisfied have they not our soul here breathing undisturbedly on the moun. tain-top. The first stanza, methinks, is of little worth.

What says it? That 'tis better to "love earth only for its earthly sake," "than join the crushing crowd, doom'd to inflict or bear." Is that a revelation from a great poet's heart? A stale truism unadorned with one grace of speech. "Is it not better, then, to be alone ". "Is it not better thus our lives to wear." "Repetitions wearisome of sense" are these "most tolerable and not to be endured." The image of the lake as a nursing mother, and of the Rhone as a froward infant, is irreconcilable with nature, dead or alive-and is neither more nor less than absolute nonsense. Then how feeble through out the expression! "A mother who doth make a fair but froward infant her own care!!" "Kissing its cries

away as these awake ! ! !" Poor exwet-nurse school of prose. Then how pletives, not permissible even in the childish for his lordship, in the very stanza in which, with affected passion, which is always inconsistent, he exclaims,

"Is it not better, then, to be alone,
And love Earth only for its earthly sake?"

How childish in his lordship to illus-
love, by such maudlin drivel about
trate the sincerity and depth of that
another love, which he was desirous to
show he despised, or regarded with dis-
gust?

The second stanza is a mere hubbub of words. He says

"I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling' Bah! If you become a portion of that around you, you become a portion of the high mountains-and thus incorporated with them, how can they be to you a feeling? "But the hum of human cities torture" is here imperti

nent-except to prove that as that hum is outward to you, so are those high mountains, and therefore the "feeling" as much caused by them as the torture" by the human cities. But you would make simpletons believe that you were "portion of that around you"-of the very cause of the effect-that you are at once a cause and an effect-in good truth, prating, like Polonius, "how this effect defective comes by cause." You say, "I can see nothing to loathe in nature!" and that the very moment you have been telling us that, through intensity of love, you have "become portion of that around you." Imagine a lover in his mistress's arms in a paroxysm of passion, gaspingly reaching at last this climax of bliss-expressive speech, "I can sce nothing to loathe in thee!"

"Save to be a link reluctant in a fleshly chain" loses more and more of the little meaning it seems to have at first the longer you look at it. "Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee," is worse than nonsense-it is folly; for are not they to whom it is here said to flee " tures"-the sky, the peak, the sea, and the stars? "Mingle, and not in vain," concludes the big-mouthed bluster with an infant's cry.

crea

In the next stanza the poet begins with repeating himself

"And thus I am absorbed, and this is life."

The immediate effect of this absorp tion is the vivid remembrance of all his past human life! Had he been absorbed, there would have been everlasting oblivion of that troubled dream. But to be absorbed is one thing, and to say you are is another; and worse still, he speaks in poor repetition of “remounting at last with a fresh pinion," "and a delighted wing," an image by no means new, and destructive of the thought of absorption.

In the third stanza there is nothing about either absorption or wings, but after some ugly raving, we are presented with that very intelligible line,

"When elements to elements conform," in which conformation the poet asks, "Shall I not

Feel all I see less dazzling but more warm?

We shall not presume to say how that may be but on the first blush of

VOL. XLIV, NO, CCLXXV.

the matter we do not see why the spirit's perception and emotion, "when elements to elements conform," should be "less dazzling but more warm" than during its mortal life.

"The bodiless thought, the spirit of each spot,"

is a poor line-very; and the Alexandrine "goes not forth conquering and to conquer."

In the fourth stanza he returns to the pet fancy that he and his soul are a part of the mountains, waves, and skies, and they of him and his soul.

"Elements to elements conform."

If so, what more would he have? "Is not the love of these deep in my heart

With a pure passion?"

"If

is surely an unnecessary questionill-worded-after all the preceding talk about blending, and mingling, and absorption, and so forth. compared with these " is dull, heavy, and formal; "rather than forego such feelings' even more so; and to forego such feelings "for the hard and worldly phlegm" of people

"Gazing upon the ground with thoughts which dare not glow,"

would, indeed, argue shameful timidity in the heart of a man-mountain.

The truth is, and we will speak it, that Byron, with all his abuse of Wordsworth, knew that he was a great poet, and felt that in all the poetry in which he speaks of nature

"He was attired With sudden brightness, like a man inspired;"

that he touched the forms of inani

mate nature with Promethean fire, not stolen from, but bestowed by Heaven, and that 'twas among the rights, privileges, and duties of his vocation

"To create a soul

Under the ribs of death."

Some people have said that Wordsworth is or was a Pantheist, and lines from his "River Wye" have been quoted, supposed by them to shadow forth this creed. Such people should not read poetry at all, but occupy themselves in overlooking their accounts. Byron-we speak of him as a poet was a Theist, or a Pantheist,

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