books, do not understand them, the great despise, the fashionable may ridicule them:  but the author has created himself an interest in the heart of the retired and lonely student of nature, which can never die.  Persons of this class will still continue to feel what he has felt:  he has expressed what they might in vain wish to express, except with glistening eye and faultering tongue!  There is a lofty philosophic tone, a thoughtful humanity, infused into his pastoral vein.  Remote from the passions and events of the great world, he has communicated interest and dignity to the primal movements of the heart of man, and ingrafted his own conscious reflections on the casual thoughts of hinds and shepherds.  Nursed amidst the grandeur of mountain scenery, he has stooped to have a nearer view of the daisy under his feet, or plucked a branch of white-thorn from the spray:  but in describing it, his mind seems imbued with the majesty and solemnity of the objects around him—­the tall rock lifts its head in the erectness of his spirit; the cataract roars in the sound of his verse; and in its dim and mysterious meaning, the mists seem to gather in the hollows of Helvellyn, and the forked Skiddaw hovers in the distance.  There is little mention of mountainous scenery in Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry; but by internal evidence one might be almost sure that it was written in a mountainous country, from its bareness, its simplicity, its loftiness and its depth!

His later philosophic productions have a somewhat different character.  They are a departure from, a dereliction of his first principles.  They are classical and courtly.  They are polished in style, without being gaudy; dignified in subject, without affectation.  They seem to have been composed not in a cottage at Grasmere, but among the half-inspired groves and stately recollections of Cole-Orton.  We might allude in particular, for examples of what we mean, to the lines on a Picture by Claude Lorraine, and to the exquisite poem, entitled Laodamia.  The last of these breathes the pure spirit of the finest fragments of antiquity—­the sweetness, the gravity, the strength, the beauty and the langour of death—­

  “Calm contemplation and majestic pains.”

Its glossy brilliancy arises from the perfection of the finishing, like that of careful sculpture, not from gaudy colouring—­the texture of the thoughts has the smoothness and solidity of marble.  It is a poem that might be read aloud in Elysium, and the spirits of departed heroes and sages would gather round to listen to it!  Mr. Wordsworth’s philosophic poetry, with a less glowing aspect and less tumult in the veins than Lord Byron’s on similar occasions, bends a calmer and keener eye on mortality; the impression, if less vivid, is more pleasing and permanent; and we confess it (perhaps it is a want of taste and proper feeling) that there are lines and poems of our author’s, that we think of ten times for once that we recur to any of Lord Byron’s.