definition of a poet, 66 a man endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, than are supposed to be common among mankind;" but what we now mean is something quite consistent with this. There was no emotional tremendousness, nothing of the demoniac, nothing of the Pythic, in the nature of Wordsworth.

"I surely not a man ungently made,"

are the fitting words he uses in describing himself. A calm, white-haired man, that could thrill to the beauty of a starry night, and not a swart-faced Titan like Burns, full of strength and fire, was the poet of the Excursion. With all his pathos, and all his clearness of vision, there were sorrows of humanity he never touched, recesses of dark moral experience he could not pierce nor irradiate. We feel in his poetry as if we were talked with by some mild and persuasive preacher, rather than borne down by the experienced utterance of a large-hearted man. He does not move us to the depths of our being; he only affects us gently. Now, one reason for this must evidently be, that naturally and by birth Wordsworth was deficient in some of the more formidable elements that enter into the constitution of man. Possessing in large degree the elements of intellect, sensibility, and imagination, he seems to have been wanting in the Byronic element of personal impetus or passion. Moreover, and partly in consequence of this, he appears to have passed through the battle of life all but unwounded. This of itself would account for the placid, self-possessed, and often feeble style of his poetry. In the life of every man distinguished for what is called intensity of character, there will almost certainly be found some sore biographical circumstance-some fact deeper and more momentous than all the rest-some strictly historical source of melancholy, that must be discovered and investigated, if we would comprehend his ways. Man comes into this world regardless and unformed; and although, in his gradual progress through it he necessarily acquires, by the mere use of his senses and by communication with others, a multitudinous store of impressions and convictions, yet, if there is to be anything specific and original in his life, this, it would seem, can only be produced by the operation upon him of some one overbearing accident or event, that, rousing him to new wakefulness, and evoking all that is latent in his nature, shall bind these impressions and convictions in a mass together, breathe through them the stern element of personal concern, and impart to them its seal and pressure. The experiences that most commonly perform this great function in the lives of men are those of Friendship and Love. The power of Love to rouse men to larger and more fervid views of nature has been celebrated since the beginning of time. A man that has once undergone Love's sorrow in any extreme degree, is by that fact awakened at once and for ever to the melan

Want of Lyrical Power.

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choly side of things; he becomes alive to the gloomy in nature and to the miserable in life; and by one stupendous resumption, as it were, of stars, clouds, trees, and flowers into his own pained being, like an old coinage requiring re-issue, he realizes how it is that all creation groaneth and travaileth together in spirit until now. So also, though perhaps more rarely, with the influence of exalted and lost Friendship. But Wordsworth, happily for himself, seems to have met with no such accident of revolution. Passing through the world as a pilgrim, pure-minded, and even sad with the sense of the mysterious past, and the prescience of the mysterious future, nothing occurred in his little journey to strike him down as a dead man, and agonize him into a full knowledge of the whole mystery of the present. Hence, as we believe, the want of that intensity in his poetry which we find in the writings, not only of the so-called subjective poets, such as Byron and Dante, but also of the greatest objective poets, as Goethe and Shakespeare. The ink of Wordsworth is never his own blood.

It is little more than an extension of the preceding remark, to say that Wordsworth was rather a poet or bard than (if we may be allowed such a distinction) a lyrist or minstrel. The purpose of the poet, using the term for the moment in this restricted sense, is simply to describe, narrate, or represent some portion of the objective, as it is rounded out and made significant in his own mind; the purpose of the lyrist or minstrel is to pour forth the passing emotions of his soul, and inflame other men with the fire that consumes himself. Accordingly, the faculties most special to the merely poetic exercise, as in the old Homeric epos or in modern descriptive verse, are those of intellect, sensibility, and imagination-passion or personal excitement being but a differential ingredient which may be more or less present according to circumstances, and which ought, as some think, to be absent from pure poetry altogether: whereas, in lyrical effusion, on the other hand, passion or present excitement is nearly all in all. The poetry of Keats may be taken as a specimen of pure poetry as such all his chief poems are literally compositions or creations, the results of a process by which the poet's mind having projected itself into an entirely imaginary element, as devoid as possible of all connexion with or similarity to the present, worked and moved therein slowly and fantastically at its own will and pleasure. As specimens, again, of the purely lyrical, we have all such pieces, ancient and modern, as are properly denominated psalms, odes, hymns, or songs. When, therefore, people talk, as they now incessantly do, of calmness as being essential to the poet; and when, with Wordsworth, they define the poetic art to consist in the tranquil recollection of by-gone emotion, it is clear that they can have in view only pure poetry, the end of which, as we have said, is to represent in an imaginative manner some portion

of the outward. For, of the lyrist or song-writer we would affirm precisely as we would affirm of his near kinsman, the orator, that the more of passion or personal impetus he has the better; and so far from advising him to wait for complete tranquillity, we would advise him to select as the true lyrical moment, that first moment, whenever it is, when the primary perturbation of his soul has just so far subsided that his trembling hands can sweep the strings. But along with this difference comes another. The poet, in describing his scene or narrating his story, feels himself impelled to every legitimate mode of increasing the pleasure he conveys; and the result, in one direction, is Metre. But however natural Metre may have been in its origin, it has now become to the poet rather a pre-established arrangement or available set of conditions to the rule of which, voluntarily and guided by his instinct for harmony, he adapts what he has already in other respects rendered complete, than a compulsory suggestion of the poetic act itself careful for its own accoutrement. Not so, however, with the lyrist. As cadence or musical utterance is natural in an excited state of the feelings, so in lyrical poetry ought the song or melody to be more than the words. The heart of the lyrist should be a perpetual fountain of song; and when he is to hold direct communication with the world, an inarticulate hum or murmur, rising, as it were, from the depths of his being, ought to precede and necessitate all his actual speech. Now in this lyrical capability, this love of sound or cadence for its own sake, (in which, by the bye, we have remarked that the Scotch generally excel the English,) Wordsworth is certainly inferior to many other poets. One might have inferred as much from the narrowness of his theory of verse; but the fact is rendered still more apparent by a perusal of his poetical compositions themselves. Very few poets, we think, have been more admirable masters of poetic metre: no versification that we know is more rich, various, and flexible, or more soothing to the ear than that of Wordsworth. But he is not a singer or a minstrel properly so called; the lyric madness does not seize him; verse with him is rather an exquisite variety of rhetoric, a legitimate æsthetic device, than a necessary form of utterance. We do not think that in all Wordsworth there is a single stanza after reading which and quite losing sight of the words, we are still haunted (as we constantly are in Burns, Byron, and Tennyson) by an obstinate recollection of the tune. Were we required to say in what particular portion of Wordsworth's poetry he has shown most of this true lyric spirit in which we believe him to have been on the whole deficient, we should unhesitatingly mention his Sonnets. These are among the finest and most sonorous things in our language; and it is by them, in connexion with his large poem The Excursion, or as we may now say, The Recluse, that his great reputation will be most surely perpetuated.

The Method of the Divine Government.

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ART. VII.-The Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral. By the Rev. JAMES M'COSH, A.M. 8vo., pp. 540. Edinburgh, 1850.

If this work wants the attraction of previous literary reputation in its author, the disadvantage is compensated by the surpassing interest and peculiar seasonableness of its subject. The mere title of the book, as indicating an inquiry that must needs embrace some of the deepest questions that have ever exercised the human intellect, is sure to draw the attention of those who are addicted to speculative studies. A glance at its contents will satisfy such that it is deserving of a careful perusal; and once perused it cannot fail, we should think, to leave an impression of wonder that, for the first time, the author should have become known to the public by a work of such pre-eminent merit. Nor do we fear to hazard the assertion, that he has thus by a single stride secured for himself a position in literature such as few have ever reached by a first publication, and one which he might never have attained had he put forth in separate and more limited efforts the learning and thought which he has concentrated on this.

But apart from the general interest which must ever attach to our author's subject, it will possess a special attractiveness in the eyes of many on account of its suitableness to the times. If one thing more than another signalizes the present age, it is the unprecedentedly rapid and triumphant march of physical discovery. The more abstruse investigations of mental philosophy have, in our own country at least, to a great extent fallen into neglect. Nor is it to be wondered at, that when such glorious harvests are being reaped in the fields of natural science, and their fruits are being so widely scattered throughout the popular mind, the observational faculty should have been stimulated somewhat at the expense of the reflective, and that the regions of metaphysical and ethical inquiry should have been comparatively deserted as barren and unpromising. Yet this too exclusive preference for the physical sciences has been anything but favourable to the cause of religious and moral truth. The philosophy which merely concerns itself with the investigation of the laws and properties of matter, and simply deciphers, so to speak, the characters inscribed on the book of nature, has taken precedence of that higher philosophy which, not content with deciphering these characters, seeks also to interpret their meaning, and by a careful study both of mental and physical phenomena and of their mutual adaptations, to rise to a knowledge of the attributes and

VOL. XIII. NO. XXVI.

2 K

designs of the Creator. Hence the tendency so prevalent in our day to construct and adopt such theories of the universe as either exclude a Creator altogether, by the assumed sufficiency of natural laws to account for the appearances of design, or, recognising the existence of an intelligent First Cause, assign to Him the least possible share of direct agency in the production of creation's wonders, and nothing beyond the most general superintendence of the events in creation's history. We have an example of the former, under the sanction of brilliant genius and profound scientific research, in the positive philosophy of M. Comte; and of the latter in the plausible but superficial, and by no means original speculations contained in the "Vestiges of Creation" and "The Constitution of Man." It is true there have been of late years symptoms of a reaction in favour of metaphysical studies among the higher class of minds in this country. But this reaction has unfortunately brought with it an inordinate partiality for the deductive methods of the German metaphysicians. So that if we are threatened on the one hand with the atheism of the Positive School, we are threatened on the other with the pantheism of the Transcendental. It is chiefly as a check upon the tendencies towards the former (which we regard as unquestionably the predominant tendencies in our own country) that we expect the work before us to be eminently serviceable. Those who anticipate a wide diffusion among us of the errors imported from Germany, will no doubt deem it an inadequate corrective of these, not because of any failure in the author's argument so far as it goes, but because he has not brought his argument to bear more directly upon these errors, and met the transcendental speculatists in their own field. And possibly it had been better, and might have rendered his work more extensively useful had he done so. At the same time, the inductive process by which the existence of a Creator and Moral Governor is conclusively established indirectly confutes the notion of an impersonal Deity, and that, perhaps, not less effectively than the most elaborate demonstrations of deductive logic. We are not, therefore, disposed to think that the absence of such reasonings materially detracts from the value of the book. We are persuaded that, notwithstanding, it will prove highly successful as a counteractive to the wide-spreading scepticism of our day in the various forms which it has assumed of Atheism, Pantheism, a vague and sentimental Deism, or an insidious pseudo-Christianism. When it is into errors of this kind that men are being betrayed by a too exclusive study either of the objective or the subjective in nature, that work is surely well adapted to the times, in its plan at least, which professes by a combined review of both departments, not only to prove that