With startling summons; not for his delight
The vernal cuckoo shouted; not for him

Murmured the laboring bee. When stormy winds
Were working the broad bosom of the lake
Into a thousand thousand sparkling waves,
Rocking the trees, or driving cloud on cloud
Along the sharp edge of yon lofty crags,
The agitated scene before his eye

Was silent as a picture.

There is something exquisitely soothing in the passages which go on to show happiness discovering other avenues to the heart, and at last, even over the deaf man's grave a beauty is cast by one of those matchless touches, which grace the muse of Wordsworth:

-"Yon tall pine tree, whose composing sound
Was wasted on the good man's living ear,
Hath now its own peculiar sanctity;

And at the touch of every wandering breeze
Murmurs, not idly, o'er his peaceful grave.”
Excursion, b. vii.

The description of the blind man, "enlightened" by his other senses, and by the spiritual illumination within, is moralized in even a higher strain, rising into an imagination of the Christian's victory over the grave, and closing with one of Wordsworth's favorite tributes to the congenial mind of Milton:

"proof abounds

Upon the earth, that faculties which seem
Extinguished, do not, therefore, cease to be.
And to the mind among her powers of sense
This transfer is permitted,-not alone
That the bereft their recompense may win;
But for remoter purposes of love
And charity; nor last nor least for this,
That to the imagination may be given

A type and shadow of an awful truth;
How, likewise, under sufferance divine,
Darkness is banished from the realms of death,
By man's imperishable spirit, quelled.
Unto the men who see not as we see
Futurity was thought, in ancient times,
To be laid open, and they prophesied.

And know we not that from the blind have flowed
The highest, holiest raptures of the lyre;

And wisdom married to immortal verse ?"—

Excursion, b. vii.

We have been anxious to prove that Wordsworth's contemplations of nature involve no dependence of the mind upon accidents of the outward world, and so to vindicate his poetic faith from suspicion of any pantheistic tendencies to an absolute nature-worship, disparaging man's immortal endowment, and excluding a distinct recognition of the Supreme Being. The danger of the heart, in this respect, has not been overlooked by him:

Trembling, I look upon the secret springs

Of that licentious craving in the mind
To act the God among external things,
To bind, on apt suggestion, or unbind;
And marvel not that antique Faith inclined
To crowd the world with metamorphosis,
Vouchsafed in pity or in wrath assigned;
Such insolent temptations wouldst thou miss,

Avoid these sights; nor brood o'er Fable's dark abyss!"

Processions.

The kindly influences of nature are shown by Wordsworth, not only in scenes of extraordinary splendor and sublimity, inspiring lofty raptures, but, as he exults:

"Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

From that favorite of the elder poets- the Daisy-he draws instruction copiously:

"A hundred times, by rock or bower,

Ere thus I have lain couched an hour,
Have I derived from thy sweet power
Some apprehensions;

Some steady love; some brief delight;
Some memory that had taken flight;
Some chime of fancy wrong or right;
Or stray invention.

If stately passions in me burn,

And one chance look to Thee should turn,

I drink out of an humbler urn

A lowlier pleasure;

The homely sympathy that heeds

The common life, our nature breeds;
A wisdom fitted to the needs

Of hearts at leisure."

More than this, to nature is ascribed a power of softening the feelings hardened by a reckless sensuality-of reclaiming from vicious habit the heart of such a being as "Peter Bell." By such agency

"is Peter taught to feel

That man's heart is a holy thing;
And nature, through a world of death,
Breathes into him a second breath,

More searching than the breath of spring."

It is Wordsworth's aim to show not only the influences of nature on our moral being, but the reciprocal action of our feelings, by the agency of imagination, on the outward world, which the senses are said to "half perceive and half create." The mere personification of any of the forms of nature is but a rude poetic process, but the higher purpose is to endow them with attributes of sentient and intellectual being, and by such interchange, to create a moral sympathy between the heart of man and all that meets his senses. It is one of the principles of Wordsworth's poetry to develop this harmony of the sensuous and the spiritual, by giving not only life to breathless nature, but impulses and feelings kindred to those in the human breast. It is the philosophical moral of the poem of " Hart-leap Well," that the face of nature puts on an expression correspondent with any impressive incident she has witnessed. It is there beautifully illustrated, but we must content ourselves with an instance in a fragment of the lines" written during an evening walk, after a stormy day, on the expected death of Mr. Fox:"

"Loud is the Vale! the Voice is up

With which she speaks when storms are gone,

A mighty unison of streams!

Of all her Voices, One!

The poet's communion with nature is not confined to its inanimate forms-it is comprehensive of sympathies with the beings below the scale of humanity. An eloquent exhortation to the cultivation of an affectionate knowledge of the inferior kinds, as members of "the mighty commonwealth of things,-up from the creeping plant to sovereign Man," is one of the sublime

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passages of the fourth book of the Excursion. The sympathy descending to the mute creation is also especially shown in the "White Doe of Rylstone" and the "Hart-leap Well." The stanzas-"September, 1819," finely illustrate Wordsworth's spirit, expressing not only the communion of the human heart with other forms of being to which life and sense are given — but that both receive an impulse from "the outward shows of sky and earth❞—and that all, the lifeless masses - the unthinking birds and the human spirit, are looked on by the eye of their common God:

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"The sylvan slopes with corn-clad fields.
Are hung, as if with golden shields,
Bright trophies of the sun!

Like a fair sister of the sky,

Unruffled doth the blue lake lie,

The mountains looking on.

And, sooth to say, yon vocal grove,
Albeit uninspired by love,
By love untaught to ring,
May well afford to mortal ear
An impulse more profoundly dear
Than music of the Spring.

For that from turbulence and heat
Proceeds, from some uneasy seat
In nature's struggling frame,
Some region of impatient life:
And jealousy, and quivering strife,
Therein a portion claim.

This, this is holy; while I hear
These vespers of another year,
This hymn of thanks and praise,
My spirit seems to mount above
The anxieties of human love,
And earth's precarious days.

But list!-though winter storms be nigh,
Unchecked is that soft harmony:

There lives Who can provide

For all his creatures; and in Him,

Even like the radiant Seraphim,

These choristers confide."

In the piece on "Gold and Silver Fishes in a Vase," the con

summate pictorial power of the language is not the chief beauty: -the vase becomes a "type of a sunny human breast,” and its inmates, with forms so unessential, are instinct with meanings of their own, not uninstructive to the passions of thinking man. Who, remembering these lines, can ever look on such creatures without a deeper and better emotion than blank admiration? "How beautiful!-Yet none knows why This ever-graceful change, Renewed, renewed incessantlyWithin your quiet range.

Is it that ye with conscious skill

For mutual pleasure glide;

And sometimes, not without your will,
Are dwarfed, or magnified?

Whate'er your forms express,
Whate'er ye seem, whate'er ye are
All leads to gentleness."

At the very time that his fancy is thus luxuriating, Wordsworth's faithfulness to truth is still apparent, for while he is adding by his imagery brightness to their "golden flash and silver gleam,' there are signs of a deeper emotion in his heart, because the rays come from a "glassy prison." Bright and beautiful as the creatures are to the poet's eye, he is true to nature, which he feels is violated, and in the sequel, "Liberty," when they are removed "to the fresh waters of a living well,"

"On whose smooth breast, with dimples light and small
The fly may settle, or the blossom fall,"

his heart beats with a freer motion. The little beings are invested with man's dread of slavery-a childlike fearfulness in their unnatural durance and the human passion for freedom is made an endowment of all sentient life:

"Who can divine what impulses from God
Reach the caged lark, within a town abode,
From his poor inch or two of daisied sod?
O, yield him back his privilege!

No sea

Swells like the bosom of a man set free;
A wilderness is rich with liberty.

Roll on, ye spouting whales, who die or keep
Your independence in the fathomless Deep!
Spread, tiny nautilus, the living sail;

Dive, at thy choice, or brave the freshening gale!