with other matters as luminous and emphatic.  The hostess at length breaks off the harangue, by proposing that they should all make a little excursion on the lake,—­and they embark accordingly; and, after navigating for some time along its shores, and drinking tea on a little island, land at last on a remote promontory, from which they see the sun go down,—­and listen to a solemn and pious, but rather long prayer from the Vicar.  They then walk back to the parsonage door, where the author and his friend propose to spend the evening;—­but the Solitary prefers walking back in the moonshine to his own valley, after promising to take another ramble with them—­

  If time, with free consent, be yours to give,
  And season favours.

—­And here the publication somewhat abruptly closes.

Our abstract of the story has been so extremely concise, that it is more than usually necessary for us to lay some specimens of the work itself before our readers.  Its grand staple, as we have already said, consists of a kind of mystical morality:  and the chief characteristics of the style are, that it is prolix and very frequently unintelligible:  and though we are very sensible that no great gratification is to be expected from the exhibition of those qualities, yet it is necessary to give our readers a taste of them, both to justify the sentence we have passed, and to satisfy them that it was really beyond our power to present them with any abstract or intelligible account of those long conversations which we have had so much occasion to notice in our brief sketch of its contents.

* * * * *

There is no beauty, we think, it must be admitted, in such passages; and so little either of interest or curiosity in the incidents they disclose, that we can scarcely conceive that any man to whom they had actually occurred, should take the trouble to recount them to his wife and children by his idle fireside—­but, that man or child should think them worth writing down in blank verse, and printing in magnificent quarto, we should certainly have supposed altogether impossible, had it not been for the ample proofs which Mr. Wordsworth has afforded to the contrary.

Sometimes their silliness is enhanced by a paltry attempt at effect and emphasis:—­as in the following account of that very touching and extraordinary occurrence of a lamb bleating among the mountains.  The poet would actually persuade us that he thought the mountains themselves were bleating;—­and that nothing could be so grand or impressive.  “List!” cries the old Pedlar, suddenly breaking off in the middle of one of his daintiest ravings—­

            —­“List!—­I heard,
  From yon huge breast of rock, a solemn bleat;
  Sent forth as if it were the Mountain’s voice! 
  As if the visible Mountain made the cry! 
  Again!”—­The effect upon the soul was such
  As he expressed; for, from the Mountain’s heart
  The solemn bleat appeared to come; there was
  No other—­and the region all around
  Stood silent, empty of all shape of life. 
 —­It was a lamb—­left somewhere to itself!