WORDSWORTH A PANTHEIST. 37 difference between the mind of Wordsworth and Shakspeare. How mournful it is that eminent critics try our Gothic drama by the rules laid down for the poets of Athens-Time! Space! these are the Unities which must not, according to Warton and other critics, be outraged. Although since then the whole mind and genius of the globe has had brought to it, as to us new conditions. The moral of the Grecian drama is Necessity. Necessity is the great lesson we derive from Panthea, the spirit of nature-the spirit of Greece. The genius of Shakspeare's drama, in contradistinction to the mind of the Grecian, is Moral Freedom. We are now contemplating a period of the history of our poet, when this sentiment of moral freedom but very slightly impressed him, he was held in a pleasing bondage, he was contented to breathe an atmosphere beyond which he could not pass. His faith was of too lofty a kind to sink to the cold nonchalance of Pope; but his mind hurried away into long and glittering abstractions, to speculations tinted with roseate colourings, and Nature was the centre of every beautiful and radiant dream. He turned aside the boughs of trees, and descended into the depths of caverns, and passed over difficult heights, and through subterranean chambers to find the fairy gnome, the intimations of whose presence perpetually met him; and when he penetrated to her court, Nature was the fairy, she was the Titania, the Ariel whom he had followed so ardently and long. Joyous unrest,-the cloud had not dimmed the star, the autumn had not touched the tree, the frost had not laid 38 WORDSWORTH AND MILTON. a finger on the river; now and then perhaps the shadowy folds of some darker drapery might rustle behind the foliage of the wood, a shadow of a shroud sometimes clothed the hill; but yet like the partial frown on the face of a beloved beauty, it only intoxicated our Poet the more. The spirit of his homage to nature at this time is not less than enchantment, and Nature, Nature is his everlasting solace and song. You have often heard Wordsworth mentioned by the side of Milton; but what in a word is the grand distinction between the two? is it not this that Milton, high over all his learning and his scholarship, over all his taste and through all his genius, heard the awful words of the Hebrew ritual sounding and surging The Lord our God is one Lord," while Wordsworth through all his musings and his haunts, in the midst of all his readings and his delights, was perpetually followed by a beautiful Panthea. We could imagine him perpetually engaged in his earlier years in the utterance of the sublime prayer with which Socrates closes his discourse to Phædrus: "Oh beloved Pan, and all ye other Gods of this place, grant me to become beautiful in the inner man, and that whatever outward things I have, may be at peace with those within." Milton was essentially Hebrew, and Wordsworth essentially Greek. How sublime were both, we feel and well know. The mind of Wordsworth had no angles, it was smoothed and polished with exquisite grace and finish, the mind of Milton was rugged and unhewn, as the stones with which Elijah reared the altar on Mount WORDSWORTH AND MILTON. 39 Carmel. Both Milton and Wordsworth carried perpetually the sense of their own consciousness,-in the consciousness of Wordsworth we only behold the eclectic sympathy of Plato, but in Milton the savage grandeur of the prophet to whom "the word of the Lord came in a dream" in the caves of Horeb. Wordsworth would never believe in divine commissions, and supernatural communications; we have no hint of the word lying like a burning coal on the heart, waiting for utterance, and impatient and consumed until it be spoken; but in Milton we have frequent intimations of the spirit that in its unrest, believed in the possibility of being raised up to execute the Heaven-sent command. Like the Greeks of old, Wordsworth does not appear to have had any very clear idea that the world contained any absolute evil;-as is the modern faith, so we could conceive his to be, that evil was a necessity of our being, scarcely to be deplored. But Milton on the contrary held the objective character of all evil; with him it was the thing "the Lord hateth," and he fought against it like his own Abdiel, or Ithuriel. Wordsworth did not seek to elevate his ideas above the world around him when he sought to enter spiritual regions. Spiritual! the world was all spiritual-all holy-all beautiful-the floor of the temple lay everywhere-the lamp was in the eye, in the soul to illuminate every spot with the charm of beauty. Milton found in the most lovely or glorious things around him the likenesses of "things not seen;" to him the legend was real that by and by, the trampling footsteps of the thunder would crush the 40 WORDSWORTH AND MILTON. whole of this lower creation, and that out of it only then would spring the forms of eternal beauty and power, the true, the ancient Eros. In a word, Wordsworth is our modern Plato, and Milton our English Isaiah. It is from this side of his character and genius that the influence exercised by Wordsworth over the mind of his age has been to many persons diseasing and mischievous. Milton and Dante materialised too muchWordsworth abstracted and spiritualised too much, especially in his early philosophy; and it becomes the duty of those who guide young minds to the pages of Wordsworth, and linger with admiration over their eloquence, to caution readers against that dangerous and seductive sentiment of mere being-that dancing auroral light so flaming over the literary firmament of the age, that the most absurd and sensuous poems are hailed with delight, simply because they re-act against the unreal and intangible dreams of men of the merely subjective school. No man can be said to belong to any place of high art who cannot give to the eye what he desires to give to the mind-Poem, or Sermon, or Oration, let us see it, that we may judge of it. This is the test you may apply to all Pantheistic ideas, they are not susceptible of shape-this is the test you may apply to all the unhealthy megrims of mystics-paint their conceptions-be sure the thing is unreal that you cannot in some way or other realise; hence great poetry abounds in great images, from the chamber of the soul of the poet are thrown out the vast forms which answer OBLIGATIONS CONFESSED TO NATURE. 41 to his vast perceptions, for it is not merely necessary that the poet should have impulses, emotions, and passions, he must also have a presence and a shape rising perpetually before him, and compelling his pen to a delighted sketching of the beautiful, the beloved, or the terror-inspiring form. We must not be understood as implying that Wordsworth was merely and only a subjective Pantheist even at this early stage of his history; he was never only that; -we speak rather of doctrines deduced from this early stage of his history and writings, and repeat that many in our day are content to take his childhood, as their old age; we need scarcely say, that in a great measure our poet passed through this dreary and monotonously beautiful stage of moral history, and rose into a higher faith; yet even then we find him speaking thus: "If this be error, and another faith Those human sentiments that make this earth The gift is your's; if in these times of fear, |