reached the summits, nor will they reach them, till
all that vapoury ten-mile-long mass dissolve, or be scattered, and then
you start to see them, as if therein had been but their bases, THE
MOUNTAINS, with here and there a peak illumined, reposing in the blue
serene that smiles as if all the while it had been above reach of the
storm.

The power of Egoism accompanies us into solitude; nay, is even more
life-pervading there than in the hum of men. There the stocks and stones
are more impressible than those we sometimes stumble on in human
society, and, moulded at our will, take what shape we choose to give
them; the trees follow our footsteps, though our lips be mute, and we
may have left at home our fiddle--more potent we in our actuality than
the fabled Orpheus. Be hushed, ye streams, and listen unto Christopher!
Be chained, ye clouds, and attentive unto North! And at our bidding
silent the cataract on the cliff--the thunder on the sky. The sea
beholds us on the shore--and his one huge frown transformed into a
multitudinous smile, he turns flowing affections towards us along the
golden sands--and in a fluctuating hindrance of lovely foam-wreaths
envelopes our feet!

To return to Thomson. Wordsworth labours to prove, in one of his
"postliminious prefaces," that the true spirit of "The Seasons," till
long after their publication, was neither felt nor understood. In the
conduct of his argument he does not shine. That the poem was at once
admired he is forced to admit; but then, according to him, the
admiration was false and hollow--it was regarded but with that wonder
which is the "natural product of ignorance." After having observed that,
excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchilsea, and a passage or
two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period
intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and "The
Seasons" does not contain a single new image of external nature, he
proceeds to call the once well-known verses of Dryden in the "Indian
Emperor," descriptive of the hush of night, "vague, bombastic, and
senseless," and Pope's celebrated translation of the moonlight scene in
the "Iliad," altogether "absurd,"--and then, without ever once dreaming
of any necessity of showing them to be so, or even, if he had succeeded
in doing so, of the utter illogicality of any argument drawn from their
failure to establish the point he is hammering at, he all at once says,
with the most astounding ass