is beautifully called, an infant, and will for ever be a child. He sees in infancy the "perpetual Messiah sent into men's arms to woo them back to Paradise." "Bard or hero cannot look down upon the word or gesture of a child—it is as great as they. Himself, we are told, one of the most innocent and ingenuous of human beings, he finds in the extension of this child-like disposition the hope of humanity; and thus he prophesies," All men shall yet be lovers, and then shall every calamity be dissolved in the universal sunshine." As a writer, his mannerism lies in the exceeding unexpectedness of his transitions; in his strange, swift, and sudden yokings of the most distant and unrelated ideas; in brevity and abruptness of sentence; in the shreds of mysticism which are left deliberately on the web of his thought; and in the introduction, by almost ludicrous contrast, of the veriest vulgarisms of American civic phraseology and kitchen talk amid the flights of idealism.

His style falls often, as if dying away to the sound of music into sweet modulations; sometimes into a certain rounded and rolling grandeur of termination, as in the close of the "Method of Nature," where, speaking of the soul, he says, "Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn. These are not for her who putteth on her coronation robes, and goeth out through universal love to universal power." But his style is in general careless and neglected, as ever yet was the attire of prophets, and earnest men, and poets, rocking to and fro before the hand of the unseen power which swayed them. His "Nature" is the most finished of his works; his "Orations" the most sonorous and stately; his "Essays" the most practical and comprehensive. Among the latter we prefer "Compensation," "Spiritual Laws," and "Love." In the first two, like the shadow of Nemesis, he traverses the entire circle of human

life, and traces the austere and awful laws of sure and swift retribution, which preside over it all-vice its own punishment-the world full of judgment days-" punishment a fruit which grows unsuspected, and ripens unseen amid the pleasure which concealed it "-expounds the "stern ethics which sparkle on the chisel edge ;"-and draws the sage, and within certain limits, and with many exceptions, the true inference, that justice is done now. In "Love" there burns the Greek fire of a genuine Platonist; and you are reminded in its melting diction and ethereal spirit of the fine fragment by Shelley, which bears the same title. He sees in it the radiance of the soul-the flowering of virtue-the fine madness of the mind seeking for one who had originally, and in some antenatal state, belonged to itself, and tries to draw from it his favourite deduction, that the soul is one. In "Prudence," again, he shows himself admirably free from the cant of genius dwells not on its immunities, but on its solemn obligations-proclaims, that for its pitiable and lamented sore, bleeding from age to age, the one simple plaster of prudence had ever been sufficient; and declares, that, for his own part, no golden mist of transcendentalism shall blind his eyes to the stern laws of nature and of life. Slowly are those essays of his making their way into public favour among us. This is owing partly to their style, partly to some extravagancies of statement, which have been eagerly caught at by persons as incapable of imbibing their real spirit as of breathing with ease the difficult air of Chimborazo, and partly to the fact, that he has put his most peculiar and staggering lucubrations in the foreground of the volume. What a choke-pear to beginners, for instance, is "History," the drift of which is to prove that there never has been, and never can be, any such thing! Yet here and there we find a lonely spirit cherishing their strange and fitful utterances,

and rolling their musical cadences, "like a sweet morsel," in joyous secrecy. And many whose course of reading has been such, that they find nothing absolutely new in him, admit that he has given to certain old changeless truths a new and noble terminology, and contend that he is the only practical transcendentalist that has yet existed. And at times you find a secluded thinker who recognizes in Emerson his own "rejected thoughts, which come back upon him with a certain alienated majesty." And thus is his genius, like a delicate pencil ray, insinuating its gentle way into the midst of us. He has been compared to Carlyle, but has less pictorial power, and not a particle of his savage mirth. Here and there a shooting phrase, a glancing metaphor, the startling abruptness of a sentiment, remind you of something in the Scotsman; but the thought is more condensed into aphoristic mould; the style has few of the gigantic oddities and impertinencies which so stimulate and provoke you in Carlyle; and now and then the eye gets a quieter and farther gleam of insight-and altogether you see a stiller, more entire, more equable spirit. Our final and fearless verdict on Emerson is, that no mind in the present generation lies more abandoned to the spirit-breath of Eternal Nature. None admits through it more transparently, as through the soft veil of a summer tree, the broken particles (a sun shivered into fragments of glory!) of

"The light that never was on sea or shore,

The consecration and the poet's dream."

Note. A second series of Essays has recently issued from Emerson's pen, which, instead of showing in him spiritual progress, denote the very reverse, and have mortified all his British friends. He seems staring himself blind at the sun of absolute truth.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

"He was," says some one of Rousseau, "a lonely manhis life a long soliloquy." And the same words may be applied to the "sole king of Rocky Cumberland," the lord of Rydal Mount, the sultan of Skiddaw, the warlock of Windermere, William Wordsworth. He has indeed mingled much with men, but reluctantly; and even while amidst them, his spirit has preserved its severe seclusion. He has strode frequently into society, but with an impatient and hasty step. It is this lofty insulation which marks out Wordsworth from the eminent of his era. While they have been tremulously alive to every breath of public praise or blame, and never so much so as when pretending to despise the one and defy the other, he has maintained the tenor of his way, indifferent to both. While his name was the signal for every species of insult-while one Review was an incessant battery against his poetical character, and another, powerful on all other topics, returned it only a feeble reply on this-while stupidity itself had learned to laugh and sneer at him-while the very children of the nursery were taught to consider his rhymes as too puerile even for them, he remained unmoved; and leaving poor Coleridge to burst into tears, the majestic brow of Wordsworth only acknowledged by a transient frown the existence of his assailants. And now that his name is a household word, and that his works have found their way to the heart of the nation, we believe that he has never once been betrayed into an expression of undue complacencythat he feels himself precisely the man he was before—that he moves in his elevated sphere as "native and endued"

unto its element; and that the acclamations as well as the abuse of the public have failed to draw him forth from the sublime solitudes of his own spirit.

And we do think that this manly self-appreciation is one of the principal marks of true greatness. We find it in Dante, daring, in his gloomy banishment, to make himself immortal, by writing the "Inferno." We find it in Milton, "in darkness, and with dangers compassed round," rolling out nevertheless the deep bass notes of his great poem as from some mighty organ, seated in his own breast. We find it in Burns, confessing that, at the plough, he had formed the very idea of his poems to which the public afterwards set its seal. We find it not in Byron, who, while professing scorn for the finest contemporary specimens of his species, nay, for his species in the abstract, was yet notoriously at the mercy of the meanest creature that could handle a quill, to spurt venom against the crest of the noble Childe. But we do find it in Wordsworth, and still more in Scott, the one sustaining a load of detraction, and the other a burden of popularity, with a calm, smiling, and imperturbable dignity. The author of the "Excursion" has indeed been called an egotist; but while there is one species of egotism which stamps the weak victim of a despicable vanity, there is another which adheres to a very exalted order of minds, and is the needful defence of those who have stout burdens to bear, and severe sufferings to undergo. The Apostle Paul, in this grand sense, was an egotist when he said, "I have fought a good fight, I have kept the faith." Dante was an egotist. Luther was an egotist. Milton was an egotist; and in this sense Wordsworth is an egotist too.

But what, it may be asked, is his burden and his mission? It is seen now not to have been the composition of peddler poems-the sacrifice of great powers to petty purposes―