great poet has a higher aim, of course, than that of merely obtaining admiration for his poetic power and skill. Wordsworth's aim was to elevate the thoughts of his readers, to enrich and purify their hearts, but he sought to excel as a poet in order that he might do this the more effectually. I believe that Isaiah and Ezekiel sought to excel as poets, all the more that their poetry was the vehicle of divine truth, of truth awakened in their souls by inspiration.

VI.

Comparative Merits of the Earlier and Later Poems of WordsworthBurns.

TO AUBREY DE VERE, Esq.

1846.-Your scheme of a critique on Wordsworth would be very noble and comprehensive, if adequately executed. The difficulty would be to avoid obscurity and vagueness. I agree to all your characteristics, so far as I understand them, except those of the later poetry, of which I take a wholly different view from that expressed in your prospectus. You have brought me to see more beauty in them than I once did; but when you say they have more latent imagination, are more mellow, exhibit "faculties more perfectly equipoised," you seem to me to have framed a theory apart from the facts. They have more fancy, but surely not more imagination, latent or patent. They can hardly be mellower, for they have not the same body; their substance is thinner; and some of the author's poetic faculties are, to my mind, not there to be equipoised. What! are any of the later poems, in the blending and equipoise of faculties, beyond "Tintern Abbey," "The Leech-gatherer," "The Brothers," "Ruth"? Did the instrument become mellower than in "Three Years She Grew," "The Highland Girl," "The White Doe"? Surely there is far more real strength in the "Sonnets to Liberty," "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," "Platonic Ode," "Rob Roy's Grave,"

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than in anything the author has produced during the last twenty years.

That is a good distinction of meditative and contemplative.

Your characteristics of Burns are excellent. I agree to them all heartily. I am glad you are not too genteel to like Burns.

VII.

Critique on "Laodamia "-Want of Truth and Delicacy in the Sentiments attributed to the Wife in that Poem—No Moral Lesson of any Value to be drawn from such a Misrepresentation-Superior Beauty and Fidelity of a Portrait taken from the Life-Leading Idea of Shelley's "Sensitive Plant.'

REASON FOR NOT PLACING "LAODAMIA IN THE FIRST RANK OF WORDSWORTHIAN POETRY.

Laodamia is, in my opinion, as a whole, neither powerfully conceived nor perfectly executed. I venture to say that there is both a coarseness and a puerility in the design and the sentiments. I see a want of feeling, of delicacy, and of truthfulness, in the representation of Laodamia herself. The speech put into her mouth is as low in tone as it is pompous and inflated in manner. Would even a Pagan poet, would Homer have ascribed such an address to Andromache or Penelope? Would he have made any virtuous matron and deeply-loving wife address her lord returned from the dead so in the style of a Medea or a Phodra? Surely in Ovid's "Epistle of Laodamia to Protesilaus," there is nothing so unmatronly and unwifely, bold and unfeminine. Not only does the poet make Laodamia speak thus-he clenches the imputation by a commentary. He ascribes to her passions unworthy of a pure abode, raptures such as Erebus disdains-implies that her feelings belong to mere sense, the lowest part of our nature. By what right does he impute to the spouse of Protesilaus such grossness of character, and how can he do

so without representing her as quite unworthy of that deep sympathy and compassion which yet he seems to claim for her? "O judge her gently who so deeply loved." Deep love is utterly incompatible with such passions and raptures as Erebus can have any pretence to disdain. Even where they existed, they would be consumed, burnt up as a scroll, in the strong, steady fire of conjugal affection. After all, what is the moral of this much-pretending, lofty-sounding poem? What is it that the poet means to condemn and to warn against? To judge by his words, we must suppose him to be declaiming against subjugation to the senses, because these things earth is ever destroying and Erebus disdaining. Now, if Laodamia really longed to be re-united with her husband only for the sake of his "roseate lips" and blooming cheeks, she would deserve censure and contempt too, but the true reason of her sorrow and reluctance to part with him is this, that she is chained to the sphere of outward and visible things, while he is gone, Heaven knows whither, and that, except through a sensuous medium, she can have no communion with him, none of which she can be conscious, not the highest and most spiritual. Love can have no other fruition than that of union. The fervent apostle longs to be dissolved and to be with Christ. The poet's machinery, too, is extremely ill-adapted for bringing out any deep or fine thoughts on such a subject. His heaven itself is a heaven of sense, Elysian fields, with purling brooks and lilied banks, "purpureal gleams," and all that we have here on a brighter and larger scale, where the pride of the eye, by far the strongest and most seductive of all the senses, is to be oceanically gratified. But is submission to the will of God, and a patient waiting to be made happy in His way, true faith and trust in the Author of our being, that He who gave us our hearts and the objects of them, can and will give us the feelings and the fruitions best adapted to our eternal well-being, if we rely upon Him

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with an energy of self-abandonment and patience, what the -poet meant to inculcate? I can only say that if this be the case, nothing can be more circuitous and misleading than the way which he takes to arrive at his point; all along, if he aims that way he shoots another.

In this poem Mr. Wordsworth wilfully divested himself of every tender and delicate feeling in the contemplation of the wife and the woman, for the sake of a few grand declamatory stanzas, which he knew not else how to make occasion for. Of course a poor woman is glad to see the external form of her husband after a long and perilous absence, right glad, too, to see him with a ruddy cheek, thankful under such circumstances to receive ever so dislocating a squeeze-a thing to the mere sense unluxurious, nay, painful, but comfortable to the heart within, as making assurance doubly sure that there he is, the good man himself, no vision or spectre like to vanish away, but a being, confined like herself within the bounds of space, and likely for many a day to be perceptible within that portion of space which is their common home; proof also, or at least a strong sign, that whether or no he be as glad to rejoin her as she is to have him back, at all events he is more glad than words can express.

Why did Mr. Wordsworth write in this hard, forced, falsetto style of Laodamia? Was this a sketch taken from very nature? Was it drawn by the light of the sun in heaven, or by real moonlight in all its purity and freshness? No; but by the beams of a purple-tinted lamp in his study, a lamp gaudily-coloured, but dimmed with particles of smoke and fumes of the candle. Compare with this the thoughts and feelings embodied in that exquisite sketch, "She was a Phantom of Delight," the fine and delicate interweaving of the outward and sensuous with the things of the heart and higher mind in that poem. Can we not see in a moment that the poet had been gazing on the deep

and manifold countenance of Nature herself, of Truth and Reality, when he threw forth those verses; that he had been · seeing, not inventing? Yet is it not far more finely imaginative than the other? Would any but a great poet have so seen the face of Nature, or so pourtrayed it? Mrs. Wordsworth lies, in essence, at the bottom of that poem. How angry would the bard be to have her connected in any way with the other, and its broad, coarse abstractions! So long as sense is divorced from our higher being, it is, indeed, a low thing; but may it not be redeemed, and by becoming the minister and exponent of the other, be purified and exalted? I have ever thought those doctrines that seek to sever the sensuous from our humanity, instead of retaining and merging it in the sentimental, the intellectual, and the spiritual, "a vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself and falls on the other side."

I have received more consolation from Mr. Wordsworth's poetry than from any sermons or works of devotion at different times of my life, but I must have more truth and freshness than there is in Laodamia to be either highly gratified or consoled. I would not have poetry always dwell in the common world, but still it must always have truth at the bottom. I admire, for instance, and see great truth in Shelley's "Sensitive Plant." It is wild, but there is nothing unreal or forced about it. I look upon it as a sort of apologue, intended, or at least fitted, to exhibit the

relations of the perceptive and imaginative mind, as modified by the heart, with external nature.