TINTERN ABBEY QUOTED.

"For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity;

Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime,
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

And yet one other passage on the Consolations of Nature,

"Knowing that nature never did betray

The heart that lov'd her; 'tis her privilege
Through all the years of this our life to lead
From joy to joy, for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life

Shall e'er prevail against us or disturb

Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings."

But it will not do-it will not do-we reach a point and stage in our moral history from which even the rush of eloquent music in the Tintern Abbey only dizzies the brain and dazzles the vision like the mag

NATURE-RATIO MERSA ET CONFUSA.

53

nificent star dust, the gorgeous and hazy nebulous chaos of an unformed system. The beautiful Panthea we find transforms herself into a horrible Sphynx with cold stony eyes, and rends in pieces her idolatrous children. A grinding, an inexorable destiny and fatalism seems to glare upon us through the rustling folds and robes of nature. Among the gorgeous blossoms and spicy gums of aromatic trees in the fiery but voluptuous South, lurks the fanged Cobra and Boa, and there we are not safe, while miasma and pestilence steam up from the plain and the garden, and the heavens become livid with the tempest and the storm; and in the North the sleets of winter overtake the fair heavens of the autumn, and the east winds chill the cheeks of our fainting darlings; very poor consolation indeed is that which is found in the benevolence of all compensating nature-the goddess-ship of nature-very poor is the comfort to be found in the boasted wisdom of Natural Theology; for our part we had much rather believe with the great Cudworth, that "nature is drunk. Nature," said he, "is ratio mersa et confusa. Reason immerged and plunged into matter, and as it were fuddled in it and confounded with it." Nature is master neither of art nor wisdom, most true, nature is a great poem, but not as her portrait has usually been sketched; nature is not more divine than man, for both nature and man are broken temples; ruins of a glory so sublime and infinite that nothing can hide the ancient grandeur or bury the marks of the divine original beneath the encumbering ruins. Nature like man is fallen, and can never

54

THE NEWLY AWAKENED SOUL.

inspire love for her perfections; there is cruelty and implacability in nature; nature has "betrayed the heart that loved her;" there is evil in nature, and there are defects, and negations in nature; it is not on the present scheme of things the eye can quietly and lovingly rest; it is the future-the end; the present cannot be the object of God's preserving power; nature only becomes lovely when seen through the glass of faith, and that faith, the faith in Christ.

But those who take this period of Wordsworth's history as the portrait of his whole life, do as wrongly as those who judge Schiller's whole being by the Robbers, or Goethe's by the Sorrows of Werter. Rocks are dewless, as hard hearts are tearless. It was the gifted and wonderful sensibility within him that reflected the impressions of all natural objects; the passion was in his own soul-he stands before us like a young Greek in an infant world; nature to him appeared as one great soul-he called on all things; rocks, and stars, and waters, as one to whom the Apostrophe and Prosopopaia was not merely a vain, rhetorical and artistic cry, but an invocation to be heard and answered. The universe was a theatre of boundless wonder, if afterwards he did attain to the questionable advice of the old Roman,

"Nil admirari, prope res est una,

Solaque, quæ possit facere et servare beatum."

He was far enough from it yet; he had a being as

* Horace.

PHEDRUS AND SOCRATES.

55

keenly alive to natural impressions as Burns, but he heard voices rolling through all things which never fell on the Scottish poet's ear. He was carried beyond himself; inspired with divine phrenzy. It was a turbulent joy—it was a palpitation of heart, like that the young Egyptian felt before the veiled figure of Sais-it was not happy-no passion is happy. But we have only to notice that he stands here on the threshold of the temple charmed and entranced with nature as a mighty and beautiful being. It is the joy and poetry of a present passion; he has not yet attained the power

If

"To class the cabinet

Of his sensations."

you would see what he was at this period as compared with what he became, carry your mind back to the beautiful scene on the banks of the Illissus, where beneath the shade of the plane tree, and agnus castus, amidst the gleaming marble images of Grecian Nymphs, and the shrill sounds from the grasshoppers overhead, Socrates and Phædrus sat conversing the whole of that long summer's day. Our poet now realises in history that madness of which the Grecian sage discourses to his young companion. Phædrus and Socrates-Tintern Abbey and the Excursion-Passion and Science; look at them side by side and they illustrate each other, and we know he learned to say afterwards,

"By grace divine,

Not otherwise oh nature we are thine."

56

EBENEZER ELLIOTT -A POET OF NATURE.

Or reader of Wordsworth, do you know EBENEZER ELLIOTT; he may well serve us in what he was not, as an illustration of what Wordsworth was. In the Prelude the poet tells us he is

"Not used to make,

A present joy the subject of a song."

But that is precisely what Elliott does; he is not an Esthetic poet, or but so in a slight degree; poetry with him is not an art but an impulse; with him the love of nature always was, and ever remained a passion; once Wordsworth tells us

But

"The sounding cataract

Haunted him like a passion."

"That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures."

But nature never ceased to be all this with Elliott; he has never met with a thousandth part of the popularity he deserves, although he has been honored with the love and the lofty word of some of the most eminent critics of our day, among whom we may mention Thomas Carlyle, and Robert Southey; indeed Elliott had much in common especially with those two eminent men; perhaps he stands especially in the same relation to Wordsworth as a poct, in which Carlyle stands as a prose writer; he hurls and thunders his words along like tempests; or he sobs them forth with tearful and pitying tenderness; he cannot hold back his emotion; he is