And see the children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

We have no space to particularize the felicity of Wordsworth’s muse in dealing with the affections, or the depth and power of his pathos. Before leaving the subject of his genius, however, we cannot withhold a reference to his “Ode on the Power of Sound,” which appears to be little known even to readers of the poet, though in the thronging abundance of its ideas and images, in the exquisite variety of its music, and in the soul of imagination which animates it throughout, it yields the palm to no ode in the language.

Wordsworth is most assuredly not a popular poet in the sense in which Moore and Byron are popular; and he probably never will be so among those readers who do not distinguish between being passionate and being impassioned, and who prefer the strength of convulsion to the strength of repose; readers who will attend only to what stirs and startles the sensibility, who read poetry not for its nourishing but its inflaming qualities, and who look upon poetic fire as properly consuming the mind it animates. Wordsworth is not for them, except they go to him as a spiritual physician, in search of “balm for hurt minds.” Placed in a period of time when great passions in the heart generated monstrous paradoxes in the brain, he clung to those simple but essential elements of human nature on which true power and true elevation must rest; and, while all around him sounded the whine of sentimentality and the hiss of Satanic pride, his mission, like that of his own beautiful blue streamlet, the Duddon, was “to heal and cleanse, not madden and pollute.” His rich and radiant imagination cast its consecrating and protecting light on all those dear immunities of humanity, which others were seeking to discard for the delusions of haughty error, or the fancies of ripe sensations. Accordingly, though many other poets of the time have a fiercer or fonder charm for young and unrestrained minds, he alone grows upon and grows into the intellect, and “hangs upon the beatings of the heart,” as the soul advances in age and reflection; for there is a rich substance of spiritual thought in his poetry to meet the wants of actual life—consolations for sorrow, help for infirmity, sympathy for bereavement, a holy gleam of awful splendor to irradiate the dark fear of death; a poetry, indeed, which purifies as well as pleases, and penetrates into the vitalities of our being as wisdom no less than loveliness:

“Filling the soul with sentiments august—

The beautiful, the brave, the holy and the just.”

BRIDGET KEREVAN.

———