e,"
"beautiful exceedingly;" and sent the "Auncient Mariner" on the wildest
of all voyagings, and brought him back with the ghastliest of all crews,
and the strangest of all curses that ever haunted crime?

Of all Poets that ever lived Wordsworth has been at once the most
truthful and the most idealising; external nature from him has received
a soul, and becomes our teacher; while he has so filled our minds with
images from her, that every mood finds some fine affinities there, and
thus we all hang for sustenance and delight on the bosom of our mighty
Mother. We believe that there are many who have an eye for Nature, and
even a sense of the beautiful, without any very profound feeling; and to
them Wordsworth's finest descriptive passages seem often languid or
diffuse, and not to present to their eyes any distinct picture. Perhaps
sometimes this objection may be just; but to paint to the eye is easier
than to the imagination--and Wordsworth, taking it for granted that
people can now see and hear, desires to make them feel and understand;
of his pupil it must not be said,

"A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose is to him,
And it is nothing more;"

the poet gives the something more till we start at the disclosure as at
a lovely apparition--yet an apparition of beauty not foreign to the
flower, but exhaling from its petals, which till that moment seemed to
us but an ordinary bunch of leaves. In these lines is a humbler example
of how recondite may be the spirit of beauty in any most familiar thing
belonging to the kingdom of nature; one higher far--but of the same
kind--is couched in two immortal verses--

"To me the humblest flower that blows, can give
Thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears."

In what would the poet differ from the worthy man of prose, if his
imagination possessed not a beautifying and transmuting power over the
objects of the inanimate world? Nay, even the naked truth itself is seen
clearly but by poetic eyes; and were a sumph all at once to become a
poet, he would all at once be stark-staring mad. Yonder ass licking his
lips at a thistle, sees but water for him to drink in Windermere a-glow
with the golden lights of setting suns. The ostler or the boots at
Lowood-inn takes a somewhat higher flight, and for a moment, pausing
with curry-comb or blacking-brush in his suspended hand, calls on Sally
Chambermaid for gracious sake to look at Pull-wyke. The waiter, wh