"Beneath that branching roof
Self-poised and scoop'd into ten thousand cells
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
Lingering—and wandering on as loth to die"?
Read the first of these sonnets with the last—and then once more the strains that come between—and you will be made to feel how various and how vast beneath the sky are the regions set apart by the soul for prayer and worship; and that all places become consecrated—the high and the humble—the mean and the magnificent—in which Faith and Piety have sought to hold communion with Heaven.
But they who duly worship God in temples made with hands, meet every hour of their lives "Devotional Excitements" as they walk among His works; and in the later poetry of Wordsworth these abound—age having solemnised the whole frame of his being, that was always alive to religious emotions—but more than ever now, as around his paths in the evening of life longer fall the mysterious shadows. More fervid lines have seldom flowed from his spirit in its devoutest mood, than some awakened by the sounds and sights of a happy day in May—to him—though no church-bell was heard—a Sabbath. His occasional poems are often felt by us to be linked together by the finest affinities, which perhaps are but affinities between the feelings they inspire. Thus we turn from those lines to some on a subject seemingly very different, from a feeling of such fine affinities—which haply are but those subsisting between all things and thoughts that are pure and good. We hear in them how the Poet, as he gazes on a Family that holds not the Christian Faith, embraces them in the folds of Christian Love—and how religion as well as nature sanctifies the tenderness that is yearning at his heart towards them—"a Jewish Family"—who, though outcasts by Heaven's decree, are not by Heaven, still merciful to man, left forlorn on earth.
How exquisite the stanzas composed in one of the Catholic Chapels in Switzerland,—
"Doom'd as we are our native dust
To wet with many a bitter shower,
It ill befits us to disdain
The Altar, to deride the Fane,
Where patient sufferers bend, in trust
To win a happier hour.
I love, where spreads the village lawn,
Upon some knee-worn Cell to gaze;
Hail to the firm unmoving Cross,
Aloft, where pines their branches toss!
And to the Chapel far withdrawn,
That lurks by lonely ways!
Where'er we roam—along the brink
Of Rhine—or by the sweeping Po,
Through Alpine vale, or champaign wide,
Whate'er we look on, at our side
Be Charity—to bid us think
And feel, if we would know."
How sweetly are interspersed among them some of humbler mood, most touching in their simple pathos—such as a Hymn for the boatmen as they approach the Rapids—Lines on hearing the song of the harvest damsels floating homeward on the lake of Brientz—the Italian Itinerant and the Swiss Goat-herd—and the Three Cottage Girls, representatives of Italian, of Helvetian, and of Scottish beauty, brought together, as if by magic, into one picture, each breathing in her natural grace the peculiar spirit and distinctive character of her country's charms! Such gentle visions disappear, and we sit by the side of the Poet as he gazes from his boat floating on the Lake of Lugano, on the Church of San Salvador, which was almost destroyed by lightning a few years ago, while the altar and the image of the patron saint were untouched, and devoutly listen while he exclaims,—
"Cliffs, fountains, rivers, seasons, times,
Let all remind the soul of heaven;
Our slack devotion needs them all;
And faith, so oft of sense the thrall,
While she, by aid of Nature, climbs,
May hope to be forgiven."
We do not hesitate to pronounce "Eclipse of the Sun, 1820," one of the finest lyrical effusions of combined thought, passion, sentiment, and imagery, within the whole compass of poetry. If the beautiful be indeed essentially different from the sublime, we here feel that they may be made to coalesce so as to be in their united agencies one divine power. We called it lyrical, chiefly because of its transitions. Though not an ode, it is ode-like in its invocations; and it might be set and sung to music if Handel were yet alive, and St Cecilia to come down for an hour from heaven. How solemn the opening strain! and from the momentary vision of Science on her speculative Tower, how gently glides Imagination down, to take her place by the Poet's side, in his bark afloat beneath Italian skies—suddenly bedimmed, lake, land, and all, with a something between day and night. In a moment we are conscious of Eclipse. Our slight surprise is lost in the sense of a strange beauty—solemn not sad—settling on the face of nature and the abodes of men. In a single stanza filled with beautiful names of the beautiful, we have a vision of the Lake, with all its noblest banks, and bays, and bowers, and mountains—when in an instant we are wafted away from a scene that might well have satisfied our imagination and our heart—if high emotions were not uncontrollable and omnipotent—wafted away by Fancy with the speed of Fire—lakes, groves, cliffs, mountains, all forgotten—and alight amid an aerial host of figures, human and divine, on a spire that seeks the sky. How still those imaged sanctities and purities, all white as snows of Apennine, stand in the heavenly region, circle above circle, and crowned as with a zone of stars! They are imbued with life. In their animation the figures of angels and saints, insensate stones no more, seem to feel the Eclipse that shadows them, and look awful in the portentous light. In his inspiration he transcends the grandeur even of that moment's vision—and beholds in the visages of that aerial host those of the sons of heaven darkening with celestial sorrow at the Fall of Man—when