school; for in summer he "tended cattle on the hill".

"That stood

Sole building on a mountain's dreary edge."

And the influence of such education and occupation among such natural objects, Wordsworth expounds in some as fine poetry as ever issued from the cells of phi losophic thought.

"So the foundations of his mind were laid."

The boy had small need of books

"For many a tale

Traditionary, round the mountains hung,
And many a legend, peopling the dark woods,
Nourish'd Imagination in her growth,
And gave the mind that apprehensive power
By which she is made quick to recognise
The moral properties and scope of things."

But in the Manse there were books-and he read

"Whate'er the minister's old shelf supplied,
The life and death of martyrs, who sustain❜d,
With will inflexible, those fearful pangs,
Triumphantly display'd in records left
Of persecution and the Covenant."

Can you not believe that by the time he was as old as you were when you used to ride to the races on a pony, by the side of your sire the Squire, this boy was your equal in knowledge, though you had a private tutorall to yourself, and were then a promising lad, as indeed you are now after the lapse of a quarter of a century? True, as yet he had small Latin, and no Greek;" but the elements of these languages may be learned-trust us

by slow degrees-by the mind rejoicing in the consciousness of its growing faculties during leisure hours from other studies—as they were by the Athol adolescent. A Scholar-in your sense of the word-he might not be called, even when he had reached his seventeenth year, though probably he would have puzzled you in Livy and Virgil; nor of English poetry had he read much-the less the better for such a mind-at that age, and in that condition-for

"Accumulated feelings press'd his heart

With still increasing weight; he was o'erpower'd
By nature, by the turbulence subdued

Of his own mind, by mystery and hope,
And the first virgin passion of a soul
Communing with the glorious Universe."

But he had read Poetry-ay, the same Poetry that Wordsworth's self read at the same age-and

66

Among the hills

He gazed upon that mighty Orb of Sun,

The divine Milton."

Thus endowed, and thus instructed,

"By Nature, that did never yet betray

The heart that loved her,"

the youth was "greater than he knew;" yet that there was something great in, as well as about him, he felt"Thus daily thirsting in that lonesome life,"

for some diviner communication than had yet been vouchsafed to him by the Giver and Inspirer of his restless Being.

“In dreams, in study, and in ardent thought,
Thus was he rear'd; much wanting to assist
The growth of intellect, yet gaining more,

And every moral feeling of his soul

Strengthen'd and braced, by breathing in content
The keen, the wholesome air of poverty,

And drinking from the well of homely life.”

But he is in his eighteenth year, and

"Is summon'd to select the course

Of humble industry that promised best

To yield him no unworthy maintenance."

For a season he taught a village school, which many a fine, high, and noble spirit has done and is doing; but he was impatient of the hills he loved, and

"That stern yet kindly spirit, who constrains
The Savoyard to quit his native rocks,
The free-born Swiss to leave his narrow vales,
(Spirit attach'd to regions mountainous

Like their own steadfast clouds,) did now impel
His restless mind to look abroad with hope."

It had become his duty to choose a profession-a trade -a calling. He was not a gentleman, mind ye, and had probably never so much as heard a rumour of the existence of a silver fork: he had been born with a wooden spoon in his mouth-and had lived, partly from choice and partly from necessity, on a vegetable diet. He had not ten pounds in the world he could call his own; but he could borrow fifty, for his father's son was to be trusted to that amount by any family that chanced to have it among the Athol hills-therefore he resolved on "a hard service," which

"Gain'd merited respect in simpler times;

When squire, and priest, and they who round them dwelt

In rustic sequestration, all dependent

Upon the PEDLAR'S toil, supplied their wants,

Or pleased their fancies with the ware he brought.

VOL. II.

B

Would Alfred have ceased to be Alfred had he lived twenty years in the hut where he spoiled the bannocks? Would Gustavus have ceased to be Gustavus had he been doomed to dree an ignoble life in the obscurest nook in Dalecarlia? Were princes and peers in our day degraded by working, in their expatriation, with head or hand for bread? Are the Polish patriots de

graded by working at eighteenpence a-day, without victuals, on embankments of railroads? "At the risk of giving a shock to the prejudices of artificial society, I have ever been ready to pay homage to the aristocracy of nature, under a conviction that vigorous humanheartedness is the constituent principle of true taste." These are Wordsworth's own words, and deserve letters of gold. He has given many a shock to the prejudices of artificial society; and in ten thousand cases, where the heart of such society was happily sound at the core, notwithstanding the rotten kitchen-stuff with which it was encrusted, the shocks have killed the prejudices; and men and women, encouraged to consult their own breasts, have heard responses there to the truths uttered in music by the high-souled Bard, assuring them of an existence there of capacities of pure delight, of which they had had either but a faint suspicion, or, because "of the world's dread laugh," feared to indulge, and nearly let die.

Mr Wordsworth quotes from Heron's Scotland an interesting passage, illustrative of the life led in our country at that time by that class of persons from whom he has chosen one-not, mind you, imaginary, though

for purposes of imagination-adding that "his own personal knowledge emboldened him to draw the portrait." In that passage Heron says, "As they wander, each alone, through thinly inhabited districts, they form habits of reflection and of sublime contemplation," and that, with all their qualifications, no wonder they should contribute much to polish the roughness and soften the rusticity of our peasantry. In North America," says he, " travelling merchants from the settlements have done and continue to do much more towards civilizing the Indian natives than all the missionaries, Papist or Protestant, who have ever been sent among them ;" and, speaking again of Scotland, he says, "it is not more than twenty or thirty years, since a young man going from any part of Scotland to England for the purpose to carry the pack, was considered as going to lead the life, and acquire the fortune of a gentleman. When, after twenty years' absence in that honourable line of employment, he returned with his acquisitions to his native country, he was regarded as a gentleman to all intents and purposes." We have ourselves known gentlemen who had carried the pack

-one of them a man of great talents and acquirements-who lived in his old age in the highest circles of society. Nobody troubled their head about his birth and parentage-for he was then very rich; but you could not sit ten minutes in his company without feeling that he was "one of God Almighty's gentlemen," belonging to the "aristocracy of Nature."

You have heard, we hope, of Alexander Wilson, the