CHAPTER II.

FIRST LOVE, THE PASSION OF NATURE.

"For nature then

To me was all in all."

TINTERN ABBEY.

"Imagine a character in which the susceptibility of the mind is very trifling, but the sensitiveness of the soul so boundless that the slightest emotion thrills through every nerve of the spiritual being, united besides with a will so powerful that it divides with the soul the entire guidance of the moral feelings."

SCHLEGEL. Limits of the Beautiful.

"He, who without the madness of the muses, approaches the gates of poesy under the persuasion that by means of art he can become an efficient poet, both himself fails of his purpose, and his poetry being that of a sane man is thrown into the shade by the poetry of such as are mad.” PLATO. Phædrus.

THUS We have very distinctly reverted to the period of the Poet's life, when in virtue of that peculiar power he brought to nature, "he felt the sentiment of Being, spread" over all things, and as it would appear the sentiment of Being without the sentiment of Personality. It must be confessed that there is nothing in these earlier verses breathing either the image, or the sentiment of

EXTERNAL BEING.

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the invisible-God. We are greeted by the same buoyant atmosphere which spreads over the works,—especially the Queen Mab,-of Shelley. Like many other Poets he derives his solace and his song from the spirit of nature. Not that we would mislead our readers in reference to his faith, we do not believe that he ever ignored the existence of the Godhead even in his mind; but it is evident that it did not reach him as a conviction imparting pleasure and delight, it was not to him the source of exuberant joy, it did not compel his spirit to pour itself forth in streams of music and emotion. He felt himself brought into contact with all things, all things gleamed out to him through a Spinozistic phantasm, and it was this which compelled him to place on all things some fitting laurel or rose-leaf of verse. Nature as yet did not present herself to him as a system, he did not behold her everywhere inter-penetrated by law.

It scarcely needs to be said that all who regard Nature as he did, bring to the observation, and to the pursuit their own minds-their mind gives the impulse, the sentiment, the pervading idea. External Being is absorbed in the sentiment of the present pleasure. In all those passionate invocations of nature, those outpourings of soul in which it claims alliance with storm, and night, with sunbeam, and moonbeam, and starbeam-with the weird whisper of the rustling wood-with the wail of winds imprisoned in the cavern, or leaping in their strength and their agony from hill to hill-with the ocean, and the riverwith the blossoming tree, and the shrinking flower— in all those daring attitudes of spirit in which it claims

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THE FIRST DREAM OF NATURE.

kindred with the solitude of the blasted heath, and the grim portals of highland rocks-when the shattered tower and the ruined church seem the impersonations of some like desolation in the soul-in the bleat of lambs, and the bark of dogs, and sounds even of creatures supposed to be meaner than these-in all those waiting moods and postures of the soul, when clouds of every shape and hue, portentous or cheerful, are messengers received gratefully by the spirit, the mind at once, a mirror and an echo gives back tones and sounds from all objects. In all these, Wordsworth's verses abound, they sink to the most pathetic softness, they rise to the most daring sublimity, they swell to the most majestic utterance; if we find him for some years worshipping as in a Pantheistic temple, it must be admitted that he bowed with a heart more universal than Byron, and with a spirit more reverent than Shelley.

And that Dream of Nature, that intoxicating poetry of the hills and the woods; how it besets the young spirit still; it is the opium and the opium dream of life, and it brings the rapture and the delight, and by and by the agony and the delirium of opium. It is true it is not easy to comprehend the idea of a personal God; but until that idea is comprehended, through what a tangled maze of dangerous enchantment the spirit treads.

Wordsworth presents to us now the picture of a spirit stricken with awe and adoration beneath the startling wonders around him and within him; 'tis mystery all! And that first dream of nature so surrounds the spirit by mystery, in every age the same, when the mind

PANTHEISM THE SOUL OF GREECE.

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emerges out of the child's dream of God into the youth's dream. As was the dream of the youthful world, so is it still of the youthful nation, the youthful mind. It was the myth of Egypt and of Greece; Nature beheld as a terrible and inexorable beauty. In England in this age how difficult it is to conceive the mind of the ancient Hellene-the Pelasgic spirit-for we have been circumfused, and interfused with a new genius and soul. But so far as our mind could resemble the mind of that early time, the mind of Wordsworth resembled the genius of the soil that produced Plato-calm, statuesque, imaginative, stern and mournful, impassive and heroic. His Verses, his Sonnets, his Prelude and Excursion, seem to us more like the utterances of an ancient Grecian, and Greece was, through all her rites and ceremonies, her literature, sculpture, and architecture, the mirror of nature. That transparent language, that polished mind, how they reflected the lights of heaven and of earth. Yet nature on all the soul of Greece sits like a dead weight, there is a mournful beauty over all her works-a mournful beauty-the soul cannot fly beyond nature. Is not this felt to be as a whole the great generalization of her mind; the spirit was not free, for it was the slave and bondmaid of an iron and inexorable Necessity. This everywhere met it, and now this everywhere meets us in her Drama, her Literature, and her Life-Pantheism! that word expresses the soul of Greece, and for the period of which we speak it expresses the soul of Wordsworth too.

Beautiful! dreadful! how it fascinates you, we say

that delightful dream-it is the summer garden of the soul; we sail through the glittering Archipelago; we touch the fair Hesperides-gorgeous heavens-radiant earth-glorious seas; what can man or angel want more? It is the moment of life's beauty-the Gods! We are the Gods-Creation behold it! Dissolution! Ah! we will not touch that dream-and the spirit-why it can shed and receive divinity from all things around it! from the silver linings of the clouds-from the golden groves and blossoms of the trees-from the perpetual choral chaunt of the hours and the birds, as they sing and chime responsive to each other-Phantasmal!—ah ! if it be so-see the leaves are rent from the trees-and the blossoms fair haired, and the beautiful flowers, they die! die? what is that? and the ice comes heavily and sails over our fair river, and the gloom blots our Pleiades from the sky, and Love too; our beautiful fair haired boy, and our Jo they have gone from us. Alas thou beautiful nature, thou hast thy terrors-thy portents-death is beautiful, but what if death be the dissolving essence, and life never find itself again.

And thus the Grecian found his only consolation, his only ministration in nature was in the identifying himself with nature. He never rose above her, In a word is not this the difference between the drama of the Greek and the drama of Shakspeare-Necessity? it runs through the whole plot upon the stage. The Greek never recognised his freedom. How was it possible? The identity between the mind of Wordsworth and the mind of the ancient Pelasgian will realise to you the