As made entire of beams of angels' eyes. NATURE. Nor is the hour of lonely walk forgot, By hand of art, where nature sowed, herself, And reaped her crops; whose garments were the clouds; Whose minstrels, brooks; whose lamps, the moon and stars; Whose organ-choir, the voice of many waters; Whose banquets, morning-dews; whose heroes, storms; Whose ceiling, heaven's unfathomable blue; Prospect immense spread out on all sides round, "THE SEA GAVE UP THE DEAD." Rev. xx. 13. Great Ocean, too, that morning, thou the call That rolled the wild, profound, eternal bass, And unburlesqued by mortal's puny skill; Loud uttering satire, day and night, on each Of man. Unfallen, religious, holy Sea! Thou bowd'st thy glorious head to none, feard'st none, Heard'st none, to none did'st honour, but to God Thy Maker, only worthy to receive Thy great obeisance. Undiscovered Sea! And came again, to tell the wonders there. Beyond the arm of help, unheard, unseen, Sank friend and foe, with all their wealth and war; Infinitude, eternity; and thought And wondered still, and grasped, and grasped, and grasped Again; beyond her reach, exerting all The soul to take thy great idea in, To comprehend incomprehensible; And wondered more, and felt their littleness. Self-purifying unpolluted Sea! Lover unchangeable, thy faithful breast For ever heaving to the lovely moon, In saintly white, walked nightly in the heavens, Gave gracious audience; nor was wooed in vain. From angel chariots sentineled on high, Reposed, and listened, and saw thy living change, Of men, half sped, sank harmlessly, and all Was changed, and the rough captain while he mouthed Or steering from the port with many a cheer; WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, April 7th, 1770. He was the second son of John Wordsworth, attorney, and law agent to Sir James Lowther, created Earl of Lonsdale. His mother was a Miss Cookson, of Penrith: she died before he was eight years old. Having been instructed in the rudiments of learning at Cockermouth, by the Rev. Mr. Gilbanks, Wordsworth, was sent to school at Hawkeshead, near the Lake of Esthwaite. The claims of his father, who died in 1783, on the estate of Lord Lonsdale, were disallowed by that nobleman, and Wordsworth was indebted for his university education to his uncles, Richard Wordsworth and Christopher Crackenthorpe, by whom he was sent, in 1787, to St. John's College, Cambridge. His early training had not been favourable to precision in either mathematical or classical learning, and he took his bachelor's degree without distinction, in January, 1791. Immediately before and after this event, he spent some considerable time on the continent. He relinquished the design which his family had cherished for him, of taking orders in the church; and adopted poetry as the work and vocation of his life, a choice which a modest bequest of £900, opportunely left him by a friend, made possible to a man of the great "Lake" poet's simple tastes and habits. In 1814, the patronage of the Lowther family procured him the easy and lucrative situation of Distributor of Stamps; an office which interfered comparatively little with the disposal of his time. Resigning this appointment in favour of his son in 1842, he was rewarded by the Government with a pension of £300 per annum, and the following year succeeded his deceased friend Southey as Poet Laureate. Almost the only events of his life, passed to so great an extent in seclusion, are the poems which illustrated it. Wordsworth died in his eighty-first year, April 23rd, 1850. Wordsworth's first work was "The Evening Walk, and Descriptive Sketches," published in 1793. In 1798, jointly with Coleridge, he produced a collection of "Lyrical Ballads," intended experimentally to show that simplicity of theme and expression could be made popularly effective in poetry. His great work is "The Excursion," a portion of a longer philosophical poem which was to receive the title of "The Recluse," and to contain views of “man, nature, and society," and to have for "its principal object the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement." To the mind of Wordsworth, living en rapport with nature, nothing was trivial or insignificant; yet at the same time the singular egoism of his practice showed that he regarded no contemporary literary productions, except his own, as worthy of his attention. His collected poems are classified by himself as- (1) Poems referring to Childhood; (2) Poems founded on the Affections; (3) Poems of the Fancy; (4) Poems of the Imagination; (5) Sonnets, Inscriptions, etc.—all forming, as it were the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses " of the grand temple to be erected in the "Recluse." The ode quoted is a gorgeous, though not unblemished, presentation of one of the grandest of the Platonic conceptions. 66 |