marked him out from among men. What the characters of Byron are to Byron himself the characters of Wordsworth are to Wordsworth. They are the facets of a single precious gem. Leaving The Excursion with reluctance, I pass to that fine eclogue The Brothers, as the transition is easy to the central character in this poem from the Pastor of The Excursion. One would think the two characters were identical. There is the same acquaintance with the inner life of the peasantry, the same benevolence of disposition, the same activity for good. The homely priest of Ennerdale is another of Wordsworth's conceptions of what the country parson ought to be-another normal clergyman after Wordsworth's favourite pattern. Leonard, again, and Walter Ewbank, and James-why, they are all (if I may be pardoned the use of a beautiful colloquial expression) "as good as gold;" like the Wanderer, the Solitary, and the Pastor, whatever may be their errors, they are men of high principle and unsullied morals; "model men," in fact, far more than average specimens of the human race, with its wondrous complexity of good and ill. A few more examples will be sufficient to illustrate the theory from which I started, and which I shall presently state in a more concise form. Matthew, the Leech-Gatherer, Ruth, and Michael-I shall touch upon these with as much brevity as my purpose admits. Matthew is a village schoolmaster, a grey-haired man of seventy-two; blithe and merry as a child, but evincing from time to time amidst the freshness of boyish hilarity the soberer tints of age. His is such a character as Sydney Smith's; intellectually playful; serene as a summer morning; pure in heart and strong in spirit; his brightness seldom dimmed by a passing cloud. On a beautiful April morning, as he rambles by the brooks with his friend, a sigh of pain breaks from his lips; he was thinking, amid his mirth, of the little daughter he buried thirty years before. At another time, as he lies conversing with the Poet by the brink of a gurgling rill, he suddenly breaks off from his merry mood with a lament for the days that are no more. But the purity of his life sustains him, and he never settles into a confirmed and habitual despondency. From his mouth comes the immortal exhortation, ever to be valued by those who have silently communed with nature "One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. The Leech-Gatherer is an old man, bent double with sickness and with years, who pursues his humble calling with uncomplaining patience, pacing through the weary moors continually, wandering about alone and silently. Although crushed by a long life of suffering and privation, he is courteous and grave in his demeanour, pious and hopeful, cheerful and kindly in the midst of his pain. The Poet is wandering alone, in a fit of deep gloom, reflecting on the hard destinies of so many gifted men and coupling their fate with his own, when he meets this old man in the moorlands, stirring the muddy waters of the pool with his staff. His fortitude and independence are a practical rebuke to the despondency of the poet, and he cries "I could have laughed myself to scorn to find 'God,' said I, 'be my help and stay secure; I'll think of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor. She is Ruth is a pure-minded and innocent girl, who has been wooed and won by a rustic Othello. abandoned by her spouse, and goes mad in conséquence; but she retains her innocence and purity to the last. Old Michael is a character of the same high moral type as the others which I have cited. Frugal, honest, and hard-working, he tends his sheep upon the mountains, and all his soul is centered in an only son. He is obliged to part with his firstborn, and they make a covenant together, with the solemn simplicity of the old patriarchal times, the son laying the corner-stone of a sheepfold, to be finished by the father ere his return. The stripling promises to keep ever fresh in his mind the memory of his forefathers' pure lives, and as a token of his pledge he lays the first stone in its resting-place. At the sight the old man's grief breaks from him; he presses his son to his heart, and kisses him, and weeps. But the youth soon loses himself in evil courses in the dissolute city, and at last is obliged to seek a hiding-place from the law beyond the seas. Old Michael's heart is broken; but his purity sustains him. For seven years he works at the building of his sheepfold, and leaves it unfinished when he dies. Reviewing the representative characters of Wordsworth's poems at a glance, we cannot fail to perceive that there is one characteristic common to them all. The Wanderer, the Solitary, the Pastor, Matthew, the Leech-Gatherer, Michael, Susan, Louisa, Leonard, almost all of them have one peculiarity in common. They are all persons of pure and unblemished morality. More or less in this they resemble Wordsworth himself. This fact may be accounted for by Wordsworth's eminent want of the dramatic faculty, as well as by the peculiar life he led, from choice, circumstance, and temperament. His tragedy of The Borderers is an unqualified failure as a drama; the personages have nothing individual about them; the plot is remarkable neither for probability nor ingenuity. And yet he incubated this production for nearly five times the period prescribed by Horace. With regard to his selection of character, in general, it has been well said, "that he has exhibited only one limited, The however lofty, region of life, and has made it his aim far less to represent what lies around him by self-transference into all its feelings, than to choose therefrom what suits his spirit of ethical meditation, and so compel mankind, out alike of their toilsome daily paths and pleasant nightly dreams, into his own severe and stately school of thought. present movements of human life, nay, its varied and spontaneous joys, to him are little, save so far as they afford a text for a mind in which fixed will, and stern speculation, and a heart austere and measured even in its pity, are far more obvious powers than fancy, emotion, or keen and versatile sympathy. He discourses indeed with divine wisdom of life and nature, and all their sweet and various impulses; but the impression of his own great calm judicial soul is always far too mighty for any all-powerful feeling of the objects he presents to us."... His friends were not more numerous or less select than his books, nor were they less thoroughly known and appreciated. They were a few great upright men, and a few intellectual women, and they were all in all to him. He lived in the great world of his own mind. . . . And so his characters are moulded after an ideal pattern of his own, and upon the majority of them the shadow of his own great intellect is projected. How much of Coleridge exists in the Wanderer it would be a nice research to discover. How much |