d, in its full scope
and spirit, but by those who feel the sublimity of these four lines in
his "Ode to Duty,"--

"Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong."

Is thy life disturbed by guilty or sinful passions? Have they gained a
mastery of thee--and art thou indeed their slave? Then the poetry of
Wordsworth must be to thee

"As is a picture to a blind man's eye;"

or if thine eyes yet see the light in which it is enveloped, and thy
heart yet feels the beauty it reveals, in spite of the clouds that
overhang and the storms that trouble them, that beauty will be
unbearable, till regret become remorse, and remorse penitence, and
penitence restore thee to those intuitions of the truth that illumine
his sacred pages, and thou knowest and feelest once more that

"The primal duties shine aloft--like stars,"

that life's best pleasures grow like flowers all around and beneath thy
feet.

Nor are we not privileged to cherish a better feeling than pride in the
belief, or rather knowledge, that WE have helped to diffuse Wordsworth's
poetry not only over this Island, but the furthest dependencies of the
British empire, and throughout the United States of America. Many
thousands have owed to us their emancipation from the prejudices against
it, under which they had wilfully remained ignorant of it during many
years; and we have instructed as many more, whose hearts were free, how
to look on it with those eyes of love which alone can discover the
Beautiful. Communications have been made to us from across the Atlantic,
and from the heart of India--from the Occident and the Orient--thanking
us for having vindicated and extended the fame of the best of our
living bards, till the name of Wordsworth has become a household word on
the banks of the Mississippi and the Ganges. It would have been so had
we never lived, _but not so soon_; and many a noble nature has
worshipped his genius, as displayed in our pages, not in fragments but
in perfect poems, accompanied with our comments, who had no means in
those distant regions of possessing his volumes, whereas Maga flies on
wings to the uttermost parts of the earth.

As for our own dear Scotland--for whose sake, with all her faults, the
light of day is sweet to our eyes--twenty years ago there were not
twenty copies--we qu