Now through the hall melodious music stole,

Whose death by Phoebus mourned ensured him deathless

And self-prepared the splendid banquet stands,
Self-poured the nectar sparkles in the bowl,
The lute and viol touched by unseen hands

Amid the soft voices of the choral bands;
O'er the full board a brighter lustre beams
Than Persia's monarch at his feast commands:
For sweet refreshment all inviting seems

To taste celestial food, and pure ambrosial streams.
But when meek eve hung out her dewy star,
And gently veiled with gradual hand the sky,
Lo! the bright folding-doors retiring far,
Display to Psyche's captivated eye

All that voluptuous ease could e'er supply
To soothe the spirits in serene repose:
Beneath the velvet's purple canopy
Divinely formed a downy couch arose,
While alabaster lamps a milky light disclose.
Once more she hears the hymeneal strain;
Far other voices now attune the lay;
The swelling sounds approach, a while remain,
And then retiring faint dissolved away:
The expiring lamps emit a feebler ray,
And soon in fragrant death extinguished lie:
Then virgin terrors Psyche's soul dismay,

[fame.

When through the obscuring gloom she nought can spy, But softly rustling sounds declare some Being nigh.

Oh, you for whom I write ! whose hearts can melt At the soft thrilling voice whose power you prove, You know what charm, unutterably felt,

Attends the unexpected voice of love :

Above the lyre, the lute's soft notes above,
With sweet enchantment to the soul it steals,

And bears it to Elysium's happy grove;
You best can tell the rapture Psyche feels
When love's ambrosial lips the vows of Hymen seals.

Psyche awakes in the morning, but finds her Čupid gone. She wanders sad and lonely through the gorgeous hall; dreamlike melodies and violet-scents the while arising. But these she heeds not; nor is the voice of her attendant maids of any avail in soothing the troubled anguish of her soul.

Night dims the world with gloom, then looks upon it with her million stars. The feast is spread, the lyre resounds, the soft light of the alabaster lamps expires, and Psyche is again in the embraces of love.

Dawns the opal-morning then; and he is gone. Thus day breaks and fades as usual. Psyche is now seized with a longing desire to behold her parents: after much persuasion, she obtains his consent to visit them. The balmy, myrtle-perfumed zephyrs bear her to the paternal palace. She relates her wondrous story, which moves the envy of her sisters, who plan her destruction. They endeavour to fill her mind with suspicions of her lord; and urge her on to assassinate him while sleeping. Her soul becomes the prey of the two conflicting passions; but she yields at last to the dreadful alternative. They hide in her vest a poignard, and Psyche departs, floated by gentle gales to the beautiful isle.

Soft, slumbrous melody, rich and balmy as a southern eve, steals on the air, hymning her welcome. The stars come out one by one, and night again covers the earth. Cupid whispers more tenderly his affection, and almost wins back her heart to its former purity. He falls into dreamy-sleep golden and purple-lighted; while she is agitated as to her resolve. Sighs breathe sadness through the marble halls, and the lamp glimmers doubtfully while she lifts it to gaze on her lover. It was her first sight:

"all imperceptible to human touch, his wings display.celestial essence light;" she is riveted by the beauty of his form, and drops the lamp. Thunders moan and crash. She falls into a swoon; and when she recovers, the palace and the luxuriant gardens are gone, and she finds herself in a cheerless desert and beneath a sky heavy with rain.

Psyche prays: she is desired to appease the wrath of Venus by seeking her shrine in lowly penitence. The sun bursts gloriously out, and reveals a splendid temple shaded by a grove of palms. She approaches and ascends the steps, but is rudely repulsed by the priest : she perseveres, and finally receives the oracle:-To raise an altar on that spot where perfect happiness is found, and on it to "place an urn filled from immortal beauty's sacred spring." She listens to her doom, and ventures no reply; but seeks the forest-grove to hide her grief. Cupid sends her food and a dove, which leads her on the way till, wearied, she falls down in quiet repose.

When she awakes a knight offers his protection; and they proceed together. Various are their dangers and temptations, but they triumph over all, and reach the silvery bowers of joy and happiness. The knight raises the altar, and she places thereon the urn of beauty. Psyche looks upwards, and with "her fond eye her promised love demands:"

Scarce on the altar had she placed the urn, When, lo! in whispers to the ravished ears

Speaks the soft voice of love! "Turn, turn, Psyche,

And see at last released from every fear,

Thy spouse, thy faithful knight, thy lover here!"
From his celestial brow the helmet fell,
In joy's full glow, unveiled his charms appear,
Beaming delight and love unspeakable,
While in one rapturous glance their mingling souls they tell.
Two tapers thus with pure converging rays,
In momentary flash their beams unite,
Shedding but one inseparable blaze
Of blended radiance and effulgence bright,
Self-lost in mutual intermingling light:
Thus in her lover's circling arms embraced,
The fainting Psyche's soul, by sudden flight,
With his its subtler essence interlaced;

Oh, bliss too vast for thought! by words how poorly traced!

Venus descends in gracious smiles, embraces her son, and receives his bride. Immortal bloom and blest inheritance are bestowed on Psyche. The tuneful hymn arises, million voiced; the Graces and Hours scatter ambrosial flowers; and love is crowned with everlasting joy.

WORDSWORTH.

WORDSWORTH's poems are remarkable for their clear spirituality: this is their characteristic. Perhaps we may get a better idea of their tone and manner from the material universe. They are not like nature, when the sun first glimmers in the orient, and when there is a fresh awakening of birds and perfumes and a coolness and a sweetness cast around everything: they are not like the time when the king of day glows splendour in the zenith, and when the whole creation welters in golden glory

when every tarn is lighted up, and every forest looks greener verdure, when stillness reigns on moor and mountain: they are not

like the dim evening stealing over the universe of God, and giving bewitching softness to every object and sound: no, they remind us of none of these. They have no such features, there is no rich colouring, no orange, blue, and crimson. But there is what is higher and better and more ethereal. They are like night when the stars come out, and shake the heavens with silvery beauty. You have often looked up, Reader, on those spiritual-glancing worlds, and you have felt them breathe a lofty, nay, a sublime spirituality, pure, clear, bright, and holy; a spirituality unsullied, a spirituality hallowed and blessed, piercing into the darkest recesses of the soul, and taking the spirit captive with their untainted and unblemished meaning. This is Wordsworth's poetry: the silver stars beaming down upon thee as "an eye from the depth of immensity," are indicative of this man. Not early dawn, so dewy and so sweet to the heart, not noon-day with all its magnificence of light, not evening with its tints of loveliness, are illustrative of these poems, but the still silent stars of night pouring down their subtle significance into thine inner shrine.

We think this high spirituality may be discerned in almost every poem. There are indeed some one or two passages which are more deeply tinted with the golden colouring than with this silvery beauty; but the leading idea one has when laying down his works, after a thorough perusal, is that they are instinct with spirituality; pure as, and not dissimilar to, that of the

stars.

After all that had gone before in the preceding century, the affectation, conceit, bombast, glitter, and show, we needed something simple and beautiful; we needed the soul once more, and not the mere adorned body. And Cowper in his pure English strains, and Coleridge in his dreaminess, and Southey, and Wilson, and other, memorable ones, in their fine and lofty measures, did much to exalt the mind once more to its legitimate sovereignty. They were all different men, sang different hymns, awoke different thoughts; but all they wrote tended to one great object, even this, of bringing back the spirit to its ancient realm. And perhaps, after Cowper, Wordsworth's muse has had the greatest influence in achieving the victory; its pierceing spirituality and its pure and exquisite language have more or less powerfully worked a change in the minds of our present writers. Besides this, there is another and perhaps greater good which his poems have produced; indeed it has already been strikingly remarked by one fine spirit of the New World: and that is, the doctrine he has taught or again brought back, of looking into the spirit, and not the literality of a thing. How this pervades all ranks now; and yet it was our poet who first began the movement: until his time the letter was all-so long as that was obeyed, no matter how fared the other. But Wordsworth, like the beautiful and pure-glancing stars of night, pierced deeper the significance of man's heart, and spoke again in giant tones of the workings of the soul.

Indeed this would naturally proceed from his lofty spirituality; it was the necessary consequent, the sequence immediately following.

And hence we cannot conceive anything better as a prelude to hearing the mighty hymn of nature, than to listen awhile to the fine spiritual language of our poet. "In the 'sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused,' in the feeling that, behind the forms, hues, and sounds of the material universe, there is something more than meets the external senses, something which defies analysis, undefined and ineffable, which must be felt and perceived by the soul,-in this intense spiritualism, mingled with the mildest and sweetest humanity, we see the influence and acknowledge the power of Wordsworth". No other of the poets of the ancient or modern world; no other vates of times long gone by or during the present era, ever saw so much in creation: no one ever heard such deep tones of inward meaning. To them nature was beautiful and gorgeous; but they heard not the inner sounds, saw not the inner visions. At times indeed they caught some consciousness of all this; but it was not a dweller with them, it was not their attendant spirit.

Now Wordsworth never loses sight of this inward consciousness; he cannot gaze upon a single flower, cannot look upwards on a single star, without seeing something deeper than other men: take this fine passage on a seashell, and observe how strikingly this opinion is borne out:

1 have seen

A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth lipped shell;
To which in silence hushed, his very soul
Listened intensely; and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy; for murmurings from within
Were heard sonorous cadences! whereby,
To his belief, the monitor expressed
Mysterious union with its native sea.
Even such a shell the universe itself
Is to the ear of faith; and there are times,
I doubt not, when to you it doth impart
Authentic tidings of invisible things;
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power;
And central peace, subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation.

And again in his noble lines on Tintern Abbey, written if we remember rightly in 1798, this consciousness of some all-pervading spiritual essence is very perceptible:

For 1 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.

Like the deep-glancing, spiritual breathing significance of the stars is this; high and lofty, pure and holy; looking so brightly down upon the upturned eye, and entering so powerfully into every corner of the heart. cendental region of poetry, rather a listener than a seer. He hears unearthly tones, rather than sees unearthly shapes: the vagueness and indistinctness of the

"In this transWordsworth is

impression which the most beautiful and sublime passages of his works leave upon the mind, is similar to that which is conveyed by the most exquisite music." And thus it is with the two quotations we have made; a certain undefined meaning is left on the mind; but we feel it to be a meaning vast as the universe itself, and as grand as the throne of God.

Indeed subtle music, when most spiritual and intensely piercing, is not unlike star-light; both produce a vague feeling of infinity and a certain emotion of untainted purity. We seem as it were to cease from existence; to lose our own being. We are rather listeners than speakers. The universe moves round us, and we float amid the stillness or the melody. Every part of the body becomes a sense of hearing, and there is an undefined and limitless feeling of lofty and highest spirituality. Just so is it with these poems: the heart is as strangely moved, and the influence is not less powerful.

As a consequence to all this, there is no other

book so well fitted to purify the passions. A polluted heart cannot breathe in this intense spiritual atmosphere; it is a region into which none can enter, who loves not with the holiest affection. Humanity becomes elevated in his pages, and in "the exquisite delicacy of his perceptions of the heart's immunities. There is no grade of life or being, which does not rise in our estimation and love, after it has been consecrated by his feelings. The beauty, dignity, and worth of human nature are more powerfully impressed upon our minds, after being taught the greatness and tenderness of which it is capable, in the exercise of the most common attributes." And thus does the soul, longing after perfect love and striving to obtain the most hallowed purity, feel that one man has been given to earth in this nineteenth century, who may lead it onwards, and bear it upwards into those realms where spiritual beauty and inviolate affection grow beneath the influence of the Highest and the Best.