not with fashion, nor requires an academy to protect its purity. The passages in Chaucer most affecting, and addressing themselves most directly to the sympathies, are as intelligible to us, as they would have been to the company at the Tabard. Truth takes no account of centuries. How men undervalue the power of Simplicity! but it is the real key to the heart. There is a stanza in Logan's Ballad, which always brings the tears to my eyes; its melancholy is so intense and indescribable.

His mother from the window looked,

With all the longing of a mother;

Hand in hand his sisters walked

The green-wood path to meet their brother.
They sought him East, they sought him West,
They sought him all the forest thoro';
They only saw the cloud of night,

They only heard the roar of Yarrow*!

I reckon it among my chief temporal blessings to have been born and bred in a mountainous country, and to have had my intellectual infancy, were, nourished at the breast of Nature. A passion thus early awakened, grew with my growth, and strengthened with my years:

as it

The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,

*Those who have heard Mr. Wordsworth recite these lines in his own peculiar and musical manner, will recollect the effect they produced.

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms were then to me
An appetite, a feeling, and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.

I can still remember the delight of my heart, when I first looked into the nest of the golden-wren, deep in the twilight foliage of the Elder-tree; or watched upon the hazel-copse the green-linnet drinking in the sunshine and sweetness of a Summer day, while

The flutter of his wings

Upon his back and body flings
Shadows and sunny glimmerings,

That cover him all over.

We all laugh at pursuing a shadow; although the lives of the multitude are devoted to the chase; but it is a delightful thing to follow one's own shadow along a green lane, when the sun, through the overarching boughs, chequers the path; and the leaves, while the light breath of air plays among them, dance on the ground as upon a river; and you hear, meanwhile, only the stirring of a linnet in the hedge, or the struggling of a bee in the warm grass. Oh, it is in such walks as these that Nature leads her children up to God; for poetry is only the eloquence and enthusiasm of religion. Even the familiar face of a wild daisy, or a drop of dew on

a road-side flower, have, in my heart, ofttimes awoke thoughts more tender than tears could

express.

1

O, nursed at happy distance from the cares
Of a too anxious world, mild Pastoral Muse!
That to the sparkling crown Urania wears,
And to her sister Clio's laurel wreath,

Preferr'st a garland culled from purple heath,
Or blooming thicket moist with morning dews;
Was such bright spectacle vouchsafed to me?
And was it granted to the simple ear
Of thy contented Votary,

Such melody to hear!

Him rather suits it, side by side with thee,
Wrapped in a fit of pleasing indolence,

While thy tired lute hangs on the hawthorn-tree,
To lie and listen, till o'er drowsed sense
Sinks, hardly conscious of the influence,
To the soft murmur of the vagrant bee.

Beautiful, indeed!

SMYTHE.

WORDSWORTH.

Such feelings find no response in the bosoms of worldly men; Johnson would have preferred Mr. Thrale's coach with the windows up, to the loveliest pastoral vale in Westmorland. I think of Beattie's beautiful stanza, and wonder how such a despiser of Nature "can hope to be forgiven."

Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Catch glimpses that would make me less forlorn ;
See Proteus rising from the sea,

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn!

How few know what it is to behold God in his works; to feel that He is all in all; that his Presence imparts a glory to the flower; a beauty to the atmosphere; that a paradise still lives for the Poet: To every form of being is assigned An active principle, howe'er removed From sense and observation, it subsists In all things, in all natures, in the stars Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds, In flower and tree, and every pebbly stone That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks, The moving waters, and the invisible air. Whate'er exists hath properties that spread Beyond itself communicating good, A simple blessing, or with evil mixed: Spirit that knows no insulated spot, No chasm, no solitude, from link to link It circulates, the soul of all the worlds.

SMYTHE.

You have here embodied, perhaps unconsciously, one of the most thoughtful passages in the Novum Organum. All tangible bodies, says Bacon, contain a spirit, covered over, enveloped with the

grosser body. There is no known body in the upper parts of the earth, without its spirit, whether it be generated by the attenuating and concocting power of the celestial warmth, or otherwise; for the pores of tangible bodies are not a vacuum; but either contain air, or the peculiar spirit of the substance; and this not a vis, an energy, a soul, or a fiction, but a real, subtile, and invisible body, circumscribed by place and dimension.

WORDSWORTH.

The Greeks had a beautiful superstition, that if a rainbow rested upon a tree, it immediately became fragrant; in like manner, by the over-shadowing light of a poetic fancy, would I waken perfume even in the bramble. For, wherefore should poetry be limited to themes of stately and regal argument, or be thought incapable of striking its root, or flourishing, except in earth gathered from Italy and Greece! Rather let us endeavour to rear it beside the cottage door, that it may hang its golden fruit -not more pure to the eye than to the taste-into every cottage window. Every sequestered hamlet, every lovely homestead, has its tale of,

Natural sorrow, joy, or pain,

That has been, and may be again.

Such subjects, full as they are of wisdom and pathos, will not be selected by the numerous band who strive only to startle the world, not to instruct