o has
cultivated his taste from conversation with Lakers, learns their
phraseology, and declares the sunset to be exceedingly handsome. The
Laker, who sometimes has a soul, feels it rise within him as the rim of
the orb disappears in the glow of softened fire. The artist compliments
Nature, by likening her evening glories to a picture of Claud
Lorraine--while the poet feels the sense sublime

"Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

Compare any one page, or any twenty pages, with the character given of
Wordsworth's poetry in the obsolete criticism that sought to send it to
oblivion. The poet now sits on his throne in the blue serene--and no
voice from below dares deny his supremacy in his own calm dominions. And
was it of him, whom devout imagination, dreaming of ages to come, now
sees, placed in his immortality between Milton and Spenser, that the
whole land once rang with ridicule, while her wise men wiped their eyes
"of tears that sacred _pity_ had engendered," and then relieved their
hearts by joining in the laughter "of the universal British nation?" All
the ineffable absurdities of the bard are now embodied in Seven
Volumes--the sense of the ridiculous still survives among us--our men of
wit and power are not all dead--we have yet our satirists, great and
small--editors in thousands, and contributors in tens of thousands--yet
not a whisper is heard to breathe detraction from the genius of the
high-priest of nature; while the voice of the awakened and enlightened
land declares it to be divine--using towards him not the language merely
of admiration but of reverence--of love and gratitude due to the
benefactor of humanity, who has purified its passions by loftiest
thoughts and noblest sentiments, stilling their turbulence by the same
processes that magnify their power, and showing how the soul, in ebb and
flow, and when its tide is at full, may be at once as strong and as
serene as the sea.

There are few pictures painted by him merely for the pleasure of the
eye, or even the imagination, though all the pictures he ever painted
are beautiful to both; they have all a moral meaning--many a meaning
more than moral--and his poetry can be comprehende