Their quiet being and, unless I now
Confound my present feelings with the past,
Even then, when from the bower I turned away
Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings,
I felt a sense of pain when I beheld
The silent trees and the intruding sky.

Then, dearest maiden! move along these shades
In gentleness of heart; with the gentle hand
Touch-for there is a spirit in the woods.

Wordsworth, it has been said, "appealed to the universal spirit, and strove to sound sweeter strings, and deeper depths, than others had essayed to do; and sought to make poetry a melodious anthem of human life, with all its hopes, dreads, and passions." The apparent simplicity of his style is informed with an inner and subtle meaning, which pervades all he writes; and this characteristic is especially true of his Lines on Tintern Abbey, and his Ode to Immortality. Few poets were more ardent lovers of nature; he tells us as much in the following stanza :—

One impulse from a vernal wood may teach
you more of
Of moral evil and of good, than all the sages can.

man,

Many of his pastoral pieces are, consequently, fresh as the morning; as Coleridge has said, "they have the dew upon them." When once asked where his library was, he pointed to the woods and streams, saying, "These are my books." So fond was he of wandering over hill and dale, by fountain or fresh shade, that De Quincey estimates his entire perambulations at about one hundred and eighty thousand miles. His calm and beautiful life, so sequestered from the noise and tumult of the town, and so replete with eloquent and sagacious teaching to the world, was extended to eighty years.

The following beautiful tribute to Woman's Worth was originally addressed to his wife, three years after marriage:

She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely apparition, sent

To be a moment's ornament;
Her eyes as stars of twilight fair,—
Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful dawn:
A dancing shape, an image gay,
To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

I saw her, upon nearer view,
A spirit, yet a woman too!

Her household motions light and free,
And steps of virgin liberty:

A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet :
A creature not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food,-

For transient sorrows, simple wiles,

Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.
And now I see, with eye serene,
The very pulse of the machine :

A being breathing thoughtful breath-
A traveller 'twixt life and death:
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill,—

A perfect woman, nobly planned

To warm, to comfort, and command,—
And yet a spirit still and bright,

With something of an angel light!

His fine poem on Tintern Abbey, he tells us, was composed after crossing the Wye, and during a ramble of four or five days with his sister. Not a line of it was uttered, and not any part of it

written down, till he reached Bristol. This is the choice passage from the poem; where he tells us, that to this practice he owed

A gift

Of

aspect most sublime: that blessed mood
In which the burden of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world

Is lightened that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood,
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While, with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We seek into the life of things.

Few poems of Wordsworth have been more often cited than his grand Ode on Immortality, here is a passage from it :—

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight, to me did seem Apparelled in celestial light-the glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now, as it hath been of yore;

Turn wheresoe'er I may, by night or day,

The things which I have seen, I now can see no more.

The rainbow comes and goes, and lovely is the rose;

The moon doth with delight look round her when the heavens are

bare;

Waters on a stormy night are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth; but yet I know, where'er I go, That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows; he sees it in his joy. The youth, who daily farther from the East

Must travel, still is Nature's priest,

And by the Vision splendid is on his way attended:

At length the man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

Another of the admired poems of Wordsworth is that addressed to the Daffodils :

I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils,

Beside a lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the Milky-way, They stretched, in never-ending line, along the margin of a bay ; Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they outdid the sparkling waves

in glee :

A poet could not but be gay in such a jocund company.

I gazed, and gazed, but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft when on my couch I lie, in vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

The well-known tale of Peter Bell was founded upon an anecdote the poet read in a newspaper, of an ass being found hanging his head over a canal in a wretched posture. Upon examination, a dead body was found in the water, which proved to be that of its master.

His poem of The Brothers arose out of the fact related to him, at Ennerdale, that a shepherd had fallen asleep upon the top of the rock called "the Pillar," and perished, as here described, his staff being left midway on the rock. It was of this poem that Southey, writing to Coleridge, said, "God bless Wordsworth for that poem !" And Coleridge also confessed that he "never read that model of English pastoral with an unclouded eye."

In glancing over the illuminated pages of this great poet, we can scarcely fail to be charmed with the roseate tints and aromatic odours with which he delights to deck his themes. Professor Wilson said, he would rather have been the author of that sweet pastoral lyric To Lucy, than of an innumerable swarm of what the vulgar taste has called clever songs:

She dwelt among the untrodden ways beside the springs of Dove,

A maid whom there were none to praise, and very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye!

Fair as a star, when only one is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know when Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave,-and oh! the difference to me!

We cull two or three more little brilliants ;-here they are :—

Sympathy with Nature :—

My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky: