gamut of sound how does he travel, from the sprinkling of earth on the coffin lid to the note of the eagle, who rises over the arch of the rainbow, singing his own wild song; from the Ave Maria of the pilgrim to the voice of the lion, coming up vast and hollow on the winds of the midnight wilderness; from the trill of the blackbird to the thunder speaking from his black orchestra to the echoing heavens; from the

"Distress gun on a leeward shore,

Repeated, heard, and heard no more,"

to the murmur of the main, for well

"The towering headlands crowned with mist,
Their feet among the billows, know

That ocean is a mighty harmonist;"

from the faintest sigh that stirs the stagnant air of the dungeon, to the "word which cannot pass away," and on which the earth and the heavens are suspended. This were, but for its appearance of having effort, a lyric fit to be placed beside Shelley's "Ode to Liberty," and Coleridge's "France." Appropriately, it has a swell of sound, and a pomp of numbers, such as he has exhibited in no other of his poems. And yet there are moods in which we would prefer his "We are Seven," or one of his little poems on Lucy, to all its laboured vehemence and crudded splendour.

We have never seen the "old man eloquent," but can well picture him to our fancy. Yonder he stands, under the shadow of the fine wood near his cottage, reading a portion of the "Recluse " to the echoes!

Ah, Bard, tremendous in sublimity,

Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood,
Wandering alone, with finely frenzied eye,
Beneath some vast, old, tempest-swinging wood,
Awhile with mute awe gazing I would brood,
Then weep aloud in a wild ecstasy."

He has a forehead broad and high, and bent under the weight of brooding thought; a few gray hairs streaming over it; an eye which, when still, seems to "see more in nature than the eyes of other men," and when roused beams forth with preternatural meaning; a face furrowed with thought; a form bent with study; a healthy glow upon his cheek, which tells of moorland walks and mountain solitude; a deep-toned voice; he excels in reading his own poetry; is temperate in his habits; serene in his disposition; has been fortunate in his circumstances and family connexions; has lived, and is likely to die, one of the happiest of men. His religion is cheerful, sanguine, habitual; and we need not say how much it has done to colour his poetry and to regulate his life.

It is much to have one's fame connected vitally with the imperishable objects of nature. It is so with Burns, who has written his name upon Coila's plains, and rivers, and woods, in characters which shall never die. It is so with Scott, who has for monument the "mountains of his native land," and the rustling of the heather of Caledonia, as a perpetual pibroch of lament over his ashes. So we believe that the memory of the great man whose character we have been depicting, is linked indissolubly with the scenery of the Lakes, and that men in far future ages, when awed in spirit by the gloom of Helvellyn-when enchanted by the paradisal prospects of the vale of Keswick-when catching the first gleam of the waters of Windermere or when taking the last look of Skiddaw, the giant of the region,shall mingle with every blessing they utter, and every prayer they breathe, the name of William Wordsworth.

ROBERT POLLOK.

OUR readers are aware that there once existed a strong prejudice against what was called religious poetry. The causes of this feeling were long to tell and wearisome to trace. Not the least of them was the authority of Dr. Johnson, who, though enamoured of the sanctimonious stupidity of Blackmore, had yet an inveterate prejudice against religious poetry per se, and was at the pains to enshrine this

folly of the wise," in some of the tersest and most ener getic sentences which ever dropped from his authoritative pen. Another cause lay, we think, in the supreme badness of the greater part of the soi-disant poetry which professed to be religious. Lumbering versions of the winged words of inspired men of God,-verses steeped in maudlin sentiment, when not touched into convulsive life by fanaticism,— hymns-how different from those of Milton or of the Catholic litany-full of sickly unction or of babyish prattle; such was, during the eighteenth century, the staple of our sacred song. If any one thinks our statement overcharged, let him put it to the test, by taking up one of our old hymnbooks, and comparing it, in its pert jingle and impudent familiarities, to the "strains which once did sweet in Zion glide," to our own rough but manly version of the Psalms, or to the later hymns of Cowper and Montgomery. It is like a twopenny trump, or a musical snuff-box beside the lyre of David, or the organ of Isaiah. And just when the splendid success of Cowper, Montgomery, &c., had wiped out this bad impression of religious poetry, and when the oracular dogma of the lexicographer was dying into echo, a new source of prejudice was opened in the uprise of a set

of pretended pious poets, or poetasters, headed by Robert Montgomery, and, with the author of the Age for tailpiece, -who, approaching the horns of the altar, not only held, but tugged with all their might,-who treated Divine things with the utmost coolness of familiarity,-rushing within the hallowed circle of Scripture truth to snatch a selfish excitement, passing their own tame thoughts across the flame of the sanctuary, if they might thus kindle them into life; and doing all in their power to render the great little, the reverend ridiculous, and the divine disgusting. These mock Miltons, though they had established a railway communication with the lower regions, and took monthly "Descents into Hell"—were quite intimate with the angel Gabriel, and conflagrated the creation as coolly as you would set up a rocket, made no very deep impression upon the public mind. Dismay and disgust, dying into laughter, were the abiding feeling with which they were regarded. And we know no better proof of Robert Pollok's essential superiority, than the fact, that his poem, amid the general nausea of such things, has retained its place; that the sins of his imitators have not been visited on his head; and that, while their tiny tapers have been all eclipsed, his solemn star shines on undimmed, reminding us, in its sombre splendour, of Mars, that dark red hermit of the heavens.

In examining Pollok's character as a poet, we are greatly helped by the compact unity of his actual achievement. When we speak of Pollok, we mean the "Course of Time." He did not, like many of greater mark, fritter down his powers in fugitive effusions. He is not remembered or forgotten as the author of literary remains, occasional essays, or posthumous fragments. He has, incontestably, written a book aspiring to completeness, of proud pretensions, hewn out of the quarry of his own soul,-begun early, prosecuted

with heroic perseverance, and cemented by his own life'sblood. Whatever we may think of the design or the execution, of the taste or the style,-honour to the man who, in this age of fragments, and factions of fragments, and first drafts, and tentative and tantalizing experiments, has written an undeniable book! Nor let us forget the age of the writer. The fact, that a youth so impressed, by one effort of his mind, many, who were not straightway deemed insane,-as to draw forth the daring of equalling him with Milton, and his work with Paradise Lost,-speaks much in its favour. Ere the majority of educated men have completed their mental training, or even formed the first vague dream of a magnum opus, his was resolved, revolved, rolled over in his mind for years, written, rewritten, published, praised, and the author himself was away! Was not this much? And whatever malignity may say or "shriek," the mere unbounded and unequalled popularity of the book does prove a little more. We, indeed, look upon the nineteenth century as a very young century in the world's history,-as but a babe in leading strings. Still we do not think so little of it, after all, as to deem that a tissue of wordy worthlessness would run like wildfire, pass through some score of editions in less than eighteen years, and take its place, if not with the Paradise Lost, with which it ought never to be named; yet certainly with the "Grave" and the "Night Thoughts." Let those who, in the face of the general estimate of a tolerably enlightened public, deny "The Course of Time" any merit, be "choked with their own bile!" There were, indeed, we admit, certain circumstances which, in some measure, explained the popularity of the poem, apart altogether from its intrinsic merit. First of all, it was a religious poem, and this at once awakened a wide and warm interest in its fa

vour.

Galled by the godless ridicule of Byron, and cha