and most approved cadence, and raises the whole composition upon the stilts of poetic diction-his present horror. He represents himself as wandering

"His wizard course where hoary Derwent takes

Through crags, and forest glooms, and opening lakes;"

and depicts scenes,

"Where, all unshaded, blazing forests throw
Rich golden verdure on the waves below;"

and where, moreover,

"Soft bosoms breathe around contagious sighs,
And amorous music on the water dies."

These poems indeed show talent, and contain some beautiful lines, as, for example,

"In thoughtless gaiety I coursed the plain,
And hope itself was all I knew of pain."

And in a comparison of life to a sun-dial, he even finely says,

"We know but from its shade the present hour ;”

but the greater part of these productions is written in a style of vicious ornament, and most commonplace diction. We find "angelic moods," "ruthless ministers," and "ægis orbs." I shall be told, perhaps, that Wordsworth was a very young man when he wrote thus, and that his present style is the adoption of his maturer judgment. It is the very circumstance of his having adopted a style, which makes me say that he has no style of his own. The early productions of our greatest poets (as far as they are preserved to us) differ only in degree, not in kind, from their after works. Il Penseroso has Milton's stamp upon it, and in Comus (as Dr. Johnson observes) may plainly be discerned the dawn of " Paradise Lost." Pope's "Pastorals" have the same cadence and method of expression which his maturer works exhibit. Shakspeare's early poems and sonnets are marked by his peculiar turn of

language, and possess a singularly dramatic character. These great masters never sat down to adopt a fixed style of composition. It was their minds which made their language, afterwards indeed pruned by experience, and ripened by the summer of their intellect; but the fruit had a sharp and native flavour long "before the mellowing year." That which was said by Wordsworth relative to the connexion between youth and age, may be truly affirmed of their style-" the child is father of the man." But between the Wordsworth of the "Descriptive Sketches," and the Wordsworth of the "Lyrical Ballads," there exists no link of union. At one leap, he passed from the extreme of melodious ornament to the extreme of harsh simplicity; and by the rapidity of the transition proved that he possessed no native originality of expression. His early poems were imitations of Pope and Darwin; his succeeding compositions were imitations of "Percy's Relics of Ancient English Poetry;" in his sonnets he has imitated Milton; in his inscriptions, Akenside. If we admit, for the sake of argument, that his song possesses any native note, where shall we discover it, if not in his earliest warblings? We must turn from the instructed cadences of the bulfinch to the first trill which came fresh from the teaching of nature. If, then, Wordsworth's first style was his truest, his subsequent manner could not possibly have been natural to him; and, if not natural, how could it fulfil the conditions of his own theory, how could it make good his pretensions to convey simple thoughts in natural language? What can be native but that which flows from nature? Our poet too visibly displays the ropes, wheels, and pulleys, whereby he sets his machinery in motion, when he says that he has taken "as much pains to avoid poetic diction, as others ordinarily take to produce it;" or when he talks of "processes of creation, or composition, governed by certain fixed laws." Perhaps (and I can easily believe it) he found it difficult to write so il! It is rather

singular that Wordsworth's later poems have sided round to the opinion of the world, and that they approach nearer in style to his early productions. They are less startling, less incongruous,-more ornate, more latinized than those

in his middle manner. sonnet with,

He goes so far as to commence a

"Change me, ye gods, into some breathing rose,
The love-sick stripling fancifully cries;"

and he has (as he once phrased it) stooped to accommodate himself to public opinion so much as to omit several stanzas, and even whole poems, which had excited more animadversion than others. By this temporizing conduct, he has even offended his worshippers, many of whom have regretted, in my hearing, the absence of the Wordsworthian peculiarities from his later strains, and the consequent decline of his genius. If his genius consisted in these peculiarities, what sort of a genius must it have been? The truth is, that the spring of Wordsworth's poetical conduct has ever been the love of popularity—ay, let his admirers start, and the poet be ever so voluble, I repeat, of popularity. And a very rational incentive it is: it only becomes ridiculous when loudly disavowed. Wordsworth sought popularity, in his first publication, by accommodating his style to the then prevailing taste. This gained him nothing. He was overlooked amongst the multitude of conformists. He then bore boldly up against general opinion, raised up a host of haters, and consequently another host of defenders, and chafed himself into notice, even as an uprooted tree, while it floats down the stream, raises no disturbance in the water, but when it stops short against the bank, throws up a dash of foam and sparkles. At present, since the human mind must ever be uneasy, while even one Mordecai sits in the gate, his object is to conciliate his literary enemies, yet still to retain his literary friends—an object, I fear, unattainable. Thus, I repeat, governed by any impulse rather than that of his own mind, Wordsworth has no settled style, no native peculiarity of expression. A line quoted from Shakspeare hath the image and superscription on it. Milton's autograph is not more decided than the poetry it conveys; but read to any one, not acquainted with Wordsworth's writings, his early poemis— his Betty Foy, his Laodamia, one of his sonnets, and a passage from the Excursion-would the auditor conjecture

that they were written by one and the same person? You may urge that this variety of style shows great versatility of talent. Possibly so, but versatility itself is a proof of lightness rather than of strength: an intellectual gladiator I will not be an intellectual athlete. Wordsworth has frittered away his undoubtedly great powers by trying many styles and "experiments" in literature.

The last reason which I shall assign for my denying Wordsworth's supremacy is the extreme inequality of his writings. By inequality, I do not mean the defects incident to all human composition, or the judicious neglect by which certain parts of a poem are left less laboured than others-I mean an inequality almost peculiar to Wordsworth, and greatly resulting from the tendency, which I before noticed, of his mind, to view all things, great and small, on a level of equal importance. From this disproportionate mode of observing objects, arises an extreme minuteness in depicting them:

and on this account it is that we read Wordsworth's most beautiful passages in fear and trembling, for we can never be certain that the next stroke of his pen may not hurl us at once from the eminence to which we had risen. From the affecting story of a mourner, we are snatched to

"Gooseberry trees that shot in long lank slips,
Or currants hanging from the leafless stems,
In scanty strings ;"-Excursion.

from the solemn contemplation of a funeral, to

"A work in the French tongue, a novel of Voltaire;"

We read such touching lines as the following:

"Beside yon spring I stood,

And eyed its waters till we seemed to feel
One sadness they and I. For them a bond
Of brotherhood is broken: time has been,
When, every day, the touch of human hand

Excursion.

Dislodged the natural sleep that binds them up
In mortal stillness, and they minister'd
To human comfort;"

and immediately we are hurried away to

"The useless fragment of a wooden bowl,

Green with the moss of years-a pensive sight!"

Thus, by going one step too far, Wordsworth loses all the ground which he had previously gained. He so nakedly exhibits objects over which the decent veil should be drawn; he brings into such unhappy prominence the minor parts of a picture, that he leaves nothing to the imagination, which, if allowed more play, would suggest to itself, in its own beautiful light, those very adjuncts to the scene, which, when put into words, only offend its delicate perceptions. The lonely spring had no need of the wooden bowl to make its loneliness be felt. The "fragment" was in every way "useless." This is what Delille calls "peindre les ongles." I have always regretted that one of Wordsword's most beautiful small poems should exhibit, in two places, this faulty mode of description.

"I met Louisa in the shade,

And, having seen that lovely maid,
Why should I fear to say

That she is ruddy, fleet, and strong,
And down the rocks can leap along
Like rivulets in May?"

Here we see a beautiful image marred by unlucky associations. This is still more the case in the following stanza:

"She loves her fire, her cottage-home;
Yet o'er the moorland will she roam

In weather rough and bleak;
And when against the wind she strains,
Oh might I kiss the mountain rains,

That sparkle on her cheek!"

Here, one of the most fresh and animated pictures in the whole compass of English poetry is blurred by one