Break down all grandeur, still unsatisfied
With the perverse attempt, while littleness
May yet become more little; waging thus
An impious warfare with the very life
Of our own souls! And if indeed there be
An all-pervading spirit, upon whom
Our dark foundations rest, could he design,
That this magnificent effect of power,
The earth we tread, the sky which we behold
By day, and all the pomp which night reveals,
That these-and that superior mystery,
Our vital frame, so fearfully devised,
And the dread soul within it-should exist
Only to be examined, pondered, searched,
Probed, vexed, and criticised-to be prized
No more than as a mirror that reflects

To proud Self-love her own intelligence?'

From the chemists and metaphysicians our author turns to the laughing sage of France, Voltaire. Poor gentleman, it fares no better with him, for he's a wit.' We cannot, however, agree with Mr. Wordsworth that Candide is dull. It is, if our author pleases, the production of a scoffer's pen,' or it is any thing but dull. It may not be proper in a grave, discreet, orthodox, promising young divine, who studies his opinions in the contraction or distension of his patron's brow, to allow any merit to a work like Candide; but we conceive that it would have been more manly in Mr. Wordsworth, nor do we think it would have hurt the cause he espouses, if he had blotted out the epithet, after it had peevishly escaped him. Whatsoever savours of a little, narrow, inquisitorial spirit, does not sit well on a poet and a man of genius. The prejudices of a philosopher are not natural. There is a frankness and sincerity of opinion, which is a paramount obligation in all questions of intellect, though it may not govern the decisions of the spiritual courts, who may, however, be safely left to take care of their own interests. There is a plain directness and simplicity of understanding, which is the only security against the evils of levity, on the one hand, or of hypocrisy on the other. A speculative bigot is a solecism in the intellectual world. We can assure Mr. Wordsworth, that we should not have bestowed so much serious consideration on a single voluntary perversion of language, but that our respect for his character makes us jealous of his smallest faults!

With regard to his general philippic against the contractedness and egotism of philosophical pursuits, we only object to its not being carried further. We shall not affirm with Rousseau (his authority

would perhaps have little weight with Mr. Wordsworth) — Tout homme reflechi est mechant'; but we conceive that the same reasoning which Mr. Wordsworth applies so eloquently and justly to the natural philosopher and metaphysician may be extended to the moralist, the divine, the politician, the orator, the artist, and even the poet. And why so? Because wherever an intense activity is given to any one faculty, it necessarily prevents the due and natural exercise of others. Hence all those professions or pursuits, where the mind is exclusively occupied with the ideas of things as they exist in the imagination or understanding, as they call for the exercise of intellectual activity, and not as they are connected with practical good or evil, must check the genial expansion of the moral sentiments and social affections; must lead to a cold and dry abstraction, as they are found to suspend the animal functions, and relax the bodily frame. Hence the complaint of the want of natural sensibility and constitutional warmth of attachment in those persons who have been devoted to the pursuit of any art or science, of their restless morbidity of temperament, and indifference to every thing that does not furnish an occasion for the display of their mental superiority and the gratification of their vanity. The philosophical poet himself, perhaps, owes some of his love of nature to the opportunity it affords him of analyzing his own feelings, and contemplating his own powers,-of making every object about him a whole length mirror to reflect his favourite thoughts, and of looking down on the frailties of others in undisturbed leisure, and from a more dignified height.

One of the most interesting parts of this work is that in which the author treats of the French Revolution, and of the feelings connected with it, in ingenuous minds, in its commencement and its progress. The solitary, who, by domestic calamities and disappointments, had been cut off from society, and almost from himself, gives the following account of the manner in which he was roused from his melancholy :

'From that abstraction I was roused-and how?
Even as a thoughtful shepherd by a flash

Of lightning, startled in a gloomy cave

Of these wild hills. For, lo! the dread Bastile,
With all the chambers in its horrid towers,
Fell to the ground: by violence o'erthrown
Of indignation; and with shouts that drowned
The crash it made in falling! From the wreck
A golden palace rose, or seemed to rise,

The appointed seat of equitable law

1 This word is not English.

And mild paternal sway. The potent shock
I felt; the transformation I perceived,

As marvellously seized as in that moment,
When, from the blind mist issuing, I beheld
Glory-beyond all glory ever seen,
Dazzling the soul! Meanwhile prophetic harps
In every grove were ringing, " War shall cease:
Did ye not hear that conquest is abjured?

Bring garlands, bring forth choicest flowers, to deck
The tree of liberty !"-My heart rebounded:
My melancholy voice the chorus joined.
Thus was I reconverted to the world;
Society became my glittering bride,

And airy hopes my children. From the depths
Of natural passion seemingly escaped,
My soul diffused itself in wide embrace

Of institutions and the forms of things.

-If with noise

And acclamation, crowds in open air
Expressed the tumult of their minds, my voice
And in still groves,

There mingled, heard or not.

Where wild enthusiasts tuned a pensive lay
Of thanks and expectation, in accord
With their belief, I sang Saturnian rule
Returned-a progeny of golden years
Permitted to descend, and bless mankind.

Scorn and contempt forbid me to proceed!
But history, time's slavish scribe, will tell
How rapidly the zealots of the cause
Disbanded-or in hostile ranks appeared:
Some, tired of honest service; these outdone,
Disgusted, therefore, or appalled by aims
Of fiercer zealots. So confusion reigned,

And the more faithful were compelled to exclaim,
As Brutus did to virtue, "Liberty,

I worshipped thee, and find thee but a shade !"
SUCH RECANTATION HAD FOR ME NO CHARM,
NOR WOULD I BEND TO IT.'

The subject is afterwards resumed, with the same magnanimity and philosophical firmness:

For that other loss,

The loss of confidence in social man,

By the unexpected transports of our age

Carried so high, that every thought which looked
Beyond the temporal destiny of the kind-
To many seemed superfluous; as no cause
For such exalted confidence could e'er

Exist; so, none is now for such despair.
The two extremes are equally remote

From truth and reason; do not, then, confound
One with the other, but reject them both;
And choose the middle point, whereon to build
Sound expectations. This doth he advise
Who shared at first the illusion. At this day,
When a Tartarian darkness overspreads
The groaning nations; when the impious rule,
By will or by established ordinance,

Their own dire agents, and constrain the good
To acts which they abhor; though I bewail
This triumph, yet the pity of my heart
Prevents me not from owning that the law,
By which mankind now suffers, is most just.
For by superior energies; more strict
Affiance in each other; faith more firm
In their unhallowed principles, the bad
Have fairly earned a victory o'er the weak,
The vacillating, inconsistent good.'

In the application of these memorable lines, we should, perhaps, differ a little from Mr. Wordsworth; nor can we indulge with him in the fond conclusion afterwards hinted at, that one day our triumph, the triumph of humanity and liberty, may be complete. For this purpose, we think several things necessary which are impossible. It is a consummation which cannot happen till the nature of things is changed, till the many become as united as the one, till romantic generosity shall be as common as gross selfishness, till reason shall have acquired the obstinate blindness of prejudice, till the love of power and of change shall no longer goad man on to restless action, till passion and will, hope and fear, love and hatred, and the objects proper to excite them, that is, alternate good and evil, shall no longer sway the bosoms and businesses of men. All things move, not in progress, but in a ceaseless round; our strength lies in our weakness; our virtues are built on our vices; our faculties are as limited as our being; nor can we lift man above his nature more than above the earth he treads. But though we cannot weave over again the airy, unsubstantial dream, which reason and experience have dispelled,

'What though the radiance, which was once so bright,

Be now for ever taken from our sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flower':—

yet we will never cease, nor be prevented from returning on the wings of imagination to that bright dream of our youth; that glad dawn of the day-star of liberty; that spring-time of the world, in which

the hopes and expectations of the human race seemed opening in the same gay career with our own; when France called her children to partake her equal blessings beneath her laughing skies; when the stranger was met in all her villages with dance and festive songs, in celebration of a new and golden era; and when, to the retired and contemplative student, the prospects of human happiness and glory were seen ascending like the steps of Jacob's ladder, in bright and never-ending succession. The dawn of that day was suddenly overcast; that season of hope is past; it is fled with the other dreams of our youth, which we cannot recal, but has left behind it traces, which are not to be effaced by Birth-day and Thanks-giving odes, or the chaunting of Te Deums in all the churches of Christendom. To those hopes eternal regrets are due; to those who maliciously and wilfully blasted them, in the fear that they might be accomplished, we feel no less what we owe-hatred and scorn as lasting!

No. 30.] [OCT. 2, 1814. MR. WORDSWORTH's writings exhibit all the internal power, without the external form of poetry. He has scarcely any of the pomp and decoration and scenic effect of poetry: no gorgeous palaces nor solemn temples awe the imagination; no cities rise with glistering spires and pinnacles adorned'; we meet with no knights pricked forth on airy steeds; no hair-breadth 'scapes and perilous accidents by flood or field. Either from the predominant habit of his mind not requiring the stimulus of outward impressions, or from the want of an imagination teeming with various forms, he takes the common every-day events and objects of nature, or rather seeks those that are the most simple and barren of effect; but he adds to them a weight of interest from the resources of his own mind, which makes the most insignificant things serious and even formidable. All other interests are absorbed in the deeper interest of his own thoughts, and find the same level. His mind magnifies the littleness of his subject, and raises its meanness; lends it his strength, and clothes it with borrowed grandeur. With him, a molehill, covered with wild thyme, assumes the importance of 'the great vision of the guarded mount': a puddle is filled with preternatural faces, and agitated with the fiercest storms of passion.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

The extreme simplicity which some persons have objected to in Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, is to be found only in the subject and the style the sentiments are subtle and profound. In the latter respect, his poetry is as much above the common standard or capacity, as in the other it is below it. His poems bear a distant resemblance to some