religious, sickly sentimentalism to the minds of romantic young ladies. One of his biographers—not a lady, but a gentleman—who writes under the pseudonym of January Searle, in speaking of "The Prelude," fancies, by an astounding feat of imagination, that in the perusal of that poem he "is walking up the dim avenues of eternity with the young soul of the poet." We are neither among the idolaters or the infidels. We can only repeat our assertion, that he has written the best and worst poetry in the language, and sincerely regret that the author of particular passages in "The Excursion," of the "Lines to Lucy," and the Platonic Ode, and other perfect poems, should offend by puerilities, puzzle by obscurities, annoy by the frequent recurrence of what we must call vulgarities of thought and language; and never permit us to be out of hearing of the twang of the monotonous chord of egotism.
To say that his mind was essentially and profoundly original, and that he has written perfectly what is grand and sublime, as well as what is simple and pathetic, is to place him, as he deserves to be placed, in the highest rank of poets; but he is not, therefore, without faults; but the secret of his success, and therefore the moral of his life, is, that he discovered the gift within him which it was at once his duty and his victory to stir up. Had he sought to lash the vices of his age as a satirist, he might have sunk into a mediocre imitator of Dryden or Pope. For dramatic composition he was even more unfit—and still less can we picture Wordsworth, a self-exile from his native land, living in Venetian palaces, caressed by Venetian beauties; gallopping over plains and swimming rivers; reeling, soul-tortured, on the heights of the Jungfrau; endowed with the strong love and stronger hate of a Corsair or Giaour; battling for the liberties of Greece, and dying young, great, and glorious. We must rather regard his tranquil existence as an interesting psychological study;
