From hill to hill it seems to pass, I hear thee babbling to the vale, Thrice welcome, darling of the spring! Even yet thou art to me No bird; but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery: The same whom in my schoolboy days I listened to; that cry Which made me look a thousand ways To seek thee did I often rove Through woods and on the green; And I can listen to thee yet, That golden time again. O blessed bird! the earth we pace An unsubstantial faëry place, That is fit home for thee! Surely to listen to these verses is, in effect, to be transported to the poet's rest-place on the - early summer grass, surrounded by every genial and inspiring sight and sound; and then to be borne back to our own dawning childhood, when nature was a dreamlike presence, because we unreflectingly enjoyed it, not less dreamlike now, when memory yields us but the shadow of that shade. The sensations appealed to by the poem are of a delicate and transient kind, of which many readers are hardly susceptible; but surely all may so far appreciate the sentiment as to hear of its cordial reception without signs of impatience or contempt. For its admirers we would willingly cull other and still sweeter posies, from this part of our poet's cultured and dew-fed garden; but the limits of our space forbid. We can only indicate a few of the most pleasing. She was a phantom of delight! is a genuine and happy sketch; and one of kindred excellence is that commencing, Three years she grew in sun and shower. A few masterly strokes (of each it may be said) from the pencil of our artist-author, and, lo! how fine a creature stands before us! how suitable a back-ground waits upon the picture! Louisa is a creation of similar beauty; and the ballad of Ellen Irwin, or the Braes of Kirtle, though belonging to another class of compositions, is characterised by the same simplicity and freedom. To many of our author's minor poems we cannot extend the same admiration, for reasons which we may hereafter specify. It is sufficient to remark, in passing, that, though written like those mentioned, with a literal truthfulness to nature, they fail to produce the same pleasurable feeling, either from the meanness of their subject, or the unconquerable vulgarity of their associations. And be it here remarked, that such a fault rests entirely at the author's door. Nature is ever lovely; and it is almost an act of impiety to charge upon her the unsightly failure of our depicting powers. The true artist is no mechanical copyist: he shows the spiritual faculty within him, rather by the selection and disposition of important features, than by the laboured detail which vulgar painters bestow at random on those of least significance. The result he aims at is the communication of thoughts, whatever medium or subject he may employ; and if those thoughts be trivial or familiar, he knows well that the mind will be offended at the artistic elaboration of common-place ideas. What should we think of a painted conversation, and that of the most trifling kind? Yet such is the absurdity too often met with in verses laying claim to the name of poetry; and of this unpleasing description are too many of our author's earlier pieces. Iterations of natural phenomena they may be, but expressions of the spirit of nature they certainly are not. But the genius of Wordsworth is more true to itself, when exercised in more advanced species of composition. It is his besetting temptation, when dealing with familiar life, to mistake the literal and vulgar for those homely but universal truths which the æsthetic character of art admits in the humblest poetry, as it associates them with the highest. He is, therefore, least successful in that department of song on which his first claims to originality were founded. His lyrical ballads give him no title to a posthumous renown: many of them, indeed, that sustain their place in his collected works, are felt to be only so much carrion, borne upwards between the wings of his later and more heaven-ward genius. Writers of less pretension and desert are here superior to our author. Gay's charming ballad of William and Susan, for example, is worth many such as Alice Fell and The Sailor's Mother. The latter two are fragmentary incidents, rather than pictures in brief; and have no more claim to admiration in their present state than would an isolated tree of Turner's, or a peasant singled out from one of his consummate landscapes. Occurring in important compositions, where their excellence of truth would be auxiliary and incidental, they would have proved effective in a double manner, as at once testifying the affluence of the author's mind, and contributing in their place and measure to the unity and completeness of his work. But, in their isolation, these pieces seem to demand an admiration and regard which they do not intrinsically merit; and there is a contrast, painfully obvious, between the deliberate purpose of their production and its inadequate results. Nor will their brevity sufficiently explain or excuse the fault. The ballad of William and Susan is equally brief; but at the same time its features are characteristic, not trivial; indicating, in few lines, the strength and mastery of a fullgrown passion, and that passion swelling in a |