abbath sunshine left.

The following image of the bursting forth of a mountain-spring, seems to
us also to be conceived with great elegance and beauty.

And a few steps may bring us to the spot,
Where haply crown'd with flowrets and green herbs;
The Mountain Infant to the Sun comes forth
Like human life from darkness.--

The ameliorating effects of song and music on the minds which most
delight in them, are likewise very poetically expressed.

--And when the stream
Which overflowed the soul was passed away,
A consciousness remained that it had left,
Deposited upon the silent shore
Of Memory, images and precious thoughts,
That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed.

Nor is any thing more elegant than the representation of the graceful
tranquillity occasionally put on by one of the author's favourites; who,
though gay and airy, in general--

Was graceful, when it pleased him, smooth and still
As the mute Swan that floats adown the stream,
Or on the waters of th' unruffled lake
Anchored her placid beauty. Not a leaf
That flutters on the bough more light than he,
And not a flower that droops in the green shade,
More winningly reserved.--

Nor are there wanting morsels of a sterner and more majestic beauty; as
when, assuming the weightier diction of Cowper, he says, in language
which the hearts of all readers of modern history must have responded--

--Earth is sick,
And Heaven is weary of the hollow words
Which States and Kingdoms utter when they speak
Of Truth and Justice.

These examples, we perceive, are not very well chosen--but we have not
leisure to improve the selection; and, such as they are, they may serve
to give the reader a notion of the sort of merit which we meant to
illustrate by their citation.--When we look back to them, indeed, and to
the other passages which we have now extracted, we feel half inclined to
rescind the severe sentence which we passed on the work at the
beginning:--But when we look into the work itself, we perceive that it
cannot be rescinded. Nobody can be more disposed to do justice to the
great powers of Mr. Wordsworth than we are; and, from the first time
that he came before us, down to the present moment, we have uniformly
testified in their favour, and assigned indeed our high sense of their
value as the chief ground of the bitterness with which we resented their
perversion. That perversion, however, is now far mor