that life's best pleasures grow like flowers all around and beneath thy feet.
Nor are we not privileged to cherish a better feeling than pride in the belief, or rather knowledge, that We have helped to diffuse Wordsworth's poetry not only over this Island, but the furthest dependencies of the British empire, and throughout the United States of America. Many thousands have owed to us their emancipation from the prejudices against it, under which they had wilfully remained ignorant of it during many years; and we have instructed as many more, whose hearts were free, how to look on it with those eyes of love which alone can discover the Beautiful. Communications have been made to us from across the Atlantic, and from the heart of India—from the Occident and the Orient—thanking us for having vindicated and extended the fame of the best of our living bards, till the name of Wordsworth has become a household word on the banks of the Mississippi and the Ganges. It would have been so had we never lived, but not so soon; and many a noble nature has worshipped his genius, as displayed in our pages, not in fragments but in perfect poems, accompanied with our comments, who had no means in those distant regions of possessing his volumes, whereas Maga flies on wings to the uttermost parts of the earth.
As for our own dear Scotland—for whose sake, with all her faults, the light of day is sweet to our eyes—twenty years ago there were not twenty copies—we question if there were ten—of the "Lyrical Ballads" in all the land of the mountain and the flood. Now Wordsworth is studied all Scotland over—and Scotland is proud and happy to know, from his Memorials of the Tours he has made through her brown heaths and shaggy woods, that the Bard's heart overflows with kindness towards her children—that his songs have celebrated the simple and heroic character of her olden times, nor left unhonoured the virtues that yet survive in her national character. All her generous youth regard him now as a great Poet; and we have been more affected than we should choose to confess, by the grateful acknowledgment of many a gifted spirit, that to us it was owing that they had opened their eyes and their hearts to the ineffable beauty of that poetry in which they had, under our instructions, found not a vain visionary delight, but a strength and succour and consolation, breathed as from a shrine in the silence and solitude of nature, in which stood their father's hut, sanctifying their humble birthplace with pious thoughts that made the very weekdays to them like Sabbaths—nor on the evening of the Sabbath might they not blamelessly be blended with those breathed from the Bible, enlarging their souls to religion by those meditative moods which such pure poetry inspires, and by those habits of reflection which its study forms, when pursued under the influence of thoughtful peace.
Why, if it were not for that everlasting—we beg pardon—immortal Wordsworth—the Lakes, and all that belong to them, would be our own—jure divino—for we are the heir-apparent to the
"Sole King of rocky Cumberland."
But Wordsworth never will—never can die; and so we are in danger of being cheated out of our due dominion. We cannot think this fatherly treatment of such a son—and yet in our loftiest moods of filial reverence we have heard ourselves exclaiming, while
"The Cataract of Lodore
Peal'd to our orisons,"
O King! live for ever!
Therefore, with the fear of "The Excursion" before our eyes, we took to prose—to numerous prose—ay, though we say it that should not say it, to prose as numerous as any verse—and showed such scenes
"As savage Rosa dash'd, or learned Poussin drew."