As made entire of beams of angels' eyes.
Gay, guileless, sportive, lovely, little things!
Playing around the den of sorrow, clad
In smiles, believing in their fairy hopes,
And thinking man and woman true! all joy,
Happy all day, and happy all the night!

NATURE.

Nor is the hour of lonely walk forgot,
In the wide desert, where the view was large.
Pleasant were many scenes, but most to me
The solitude of vast extent, untouched

By hand of art, where nature sowed, herself,

And reaped her crops; whose garments were the clouds; Whose minstrels, brooks; whose lamps, the moon and

stars;

Whose organ-choir, the voice of many waters;

Whose banquets, morning-dews; whose heroes, storms;
Whose warriors, mighty winds; whose lovers, flowers;
Whose orators, the thunderbolts of God;
Whose palaces, the everlasting hills;

Whose ceiling, heaven's unfathomable blue;
And from whose rocky turrets, battled high,

Prospect immense spread out on all sides round,
Lost now between the welkin and the main,
Now walled with hills that slept above the storm.

"THE SEA GAVE UP THE DEAD."

Rev. xx. 13.

Great Ocean, too, that morning, thou the call
Of restitution heard'st, and reverently
To the last trumpet's voice in silence listened.
Great Ocean! strongest of creation's sons,
Unconquerable, unreposed, untired,

That rolled the wild, profound, eternal bass,
In nature's anthem, and made music, such
As pleased the ear of God! original,
Unmarred, unfaded work of Deity,

And unburlesqued by mortal's puny skill;
From age to age enduring and unchanged,
Majestical, inimitable, vast;

Loud uttering satire, day and night, on each
Succeeding race, and little pompous work

Of man. Unfallen, religious, holy Sea!

Thou bowd'st thy glorious head to none, feard'st none, Heard'st none, to none did'st honour, but to God

Thy Maker, only worthy to receive

Thy great obeisance. Undiscovered Sea!
Into thy dark, unknown, mysterious caves,
And secret haunts, unfathomably deep,
Beneath all visible retired none went

And came again, to tell the wonders there.
Tremendous sea! what time thou lifted'st up
Thy waves on high, and with thy winds and storms
Strange pastime took, and shook thy mighty sides
Indignantly the pride of navies fell;

Beyond the arm of help, unheard, unseen,

Sank friend and foe, with all their wealth and war;
And on thy shores men of a thousand tribes,
Polite and barbarous, trembling stood, amazed,
Confounded, terrified, and thought vast thoughts
Of ruin, boundlessness, omnipotence,

Infinitude, eternity; and thought

And wondered still, and grasped, and grasped, and grasped

Again; beyond her reach, exerting all

The soul to take thy great idea in,

To comprehend incomprehensible;

And wondered more, and felt their littleness.

Self-purifying unpolluted Sea!

Lover unchangeable, thy faithful breast

For ever heaving to the lovely moon,
That like a shy and holy virgin, robed

In saintly white, walked nightly in the heavens,
And to thy everlasting serenade

Gave gracious audience; nor was wooed in vain.
That morning thou, that slumbered not before,
Nor slept, great Ocean! laid thy waves to rest,
And hushed thy mighty minstrelsy; no breath
Thy deep composure stirred, no fin, no oar;
Like beauty newly dead, so calm, so still,
So lovely, thou, beneath the light that fell

From angel chariots sentineled on high,

Reposed, and listened, and saw thy living change,
Thy dead arise. Charybdis listened and Scylla;
And savage Euxine on the Thracian beach
Lay motionless; and every battle-ship
Stood still, and every ship of merchandise,
And all that sailed, of every name, stood still.
Even as the ship of war, full fledged and swift-
Like some fierce bird of prey, bore on her foe,
Opposing with as fell intent, the wind-
Fell withered from her wings that idly hung:
The stormy bullet by the cannon thrown
Uncivilly against the heavenly face

Of men, half sped, sank harmlessly, and all
Her loud, uncircumcised, tempestuous crew-
How ill prepared to meet their God!-were changed,
Unchangeable; the pilot at the helm

Was changed, and the rough captain while he mouthed
The huge enormous oath. The fisherman,
That in his boat expectant watched his lines,
Or mended on the shore his net, and sang,
Happy in thoughtlessness, some careless air,
Heard time depart, and felt the sudden change.
In solitary deep, far out from land,

Or steering from the port with many a cheer;
Or, while returning from long voyage, fraught
With lusty wealth, rejoicing to have escaped
The dangerous main, and plagues of foreign climes,
The merchant quaffed his native air, refreshed;
And saw his native hills in the sun's light
Serenely rise; and thought of meetings glad,
And many days of ease and honour spent
Among his friends-unwarnéd man! even then
The knell of time broke on his reverie,
And in the twinkling of an eye his hopes,
All earthly, perished all. As sudden rose,
From out their watery beds, the ocean's dead,
Renewed, and on the unstirring billows stood,
From pole to pole, thick covering all the sea-
Of every nation blent and every age.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, April 7th, 1770. He was the second son of John Wordsworth, attorney, and law agent to Sir James Lowther, created Earl of Lonsdale. His mother was a Miss Cookson, of Penrith: she died before he was eight years old. Having been instructed in the rudiments of learning at Cockermouth, by the Rev. Mr. Gilbanks, Wordsworth, was sent to school at Hawkeshead, near the Lake of Esthwaite. The claims of his father, who died in 1783, on the estate of Lord Lonsdale, were disallowed by that nobleman, and Wordsworth was indebted for his university education to his uncles, Richard Wordsworth and Christopher Crackenthorpe, by whom he was sent, in 1787, to St. John's College, Cambridge. His early training had not been favourable to precision in either mathematical or classical learning, and he took his bachelor's degree without distinction, in January, 1791. Immediately before and after this event, he spent some considerable time on the continent. He relinquished the design which his family had cherished for him, of taking orders in the church; and adopted poetry as the work and vocation of his life, a choice which a modest bequest of £900, opportunely left him by a friend, made possible to a man of the great "Lake" poet's simple tastes and habits. In 1814, the patronage of the Lowther family procured him the easy and lucrative

situation of Distributor of Stamps; an office which interfered comparatively little with the disposal of his time. Resigning this appointment in favour of his son in 1842, he was rewarded by the Government with a pension of £300 per annum, and the following year succeeded his deceased friend Southey as Poet Laureate. Almost the only events of his life, passed to so great an extent in seclusion, are the poems which illustrated it. Wordsworth died in his eighty-first year, April 23rd, 1850.

Wordsworth's first work was "The Evening Walk, and Descriptive Sketches," published in 1793. In 1798, jointly with Coleridge, he produced a collection of "Lyrical Ballads," intended experimentally to show that simplicity of theme and expression could be made popularly effective in poetry. His great work is "The Excursion," a portion of a longer philosophical poem which was to receive the title of "The Recluse," and to contain views of “man, nature, and society," and to have for "its principal object the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement."

To the mind of Wordsworth, living en rapport with nature, nothing was trivial or insignificant; yet at the same time the singular egoism of his practice showed that he regarded no contemporary literary productions, except his own, as worthy of his attention. His collected poems are classified by himself as- (1) Poems referring to Childhood; (2) Poems founded on the Affections; (3) Poems of the Fancy; (4) Poems of the Imagination; (5) Sonnets, Inscriptions, etc.—all forming, as it were the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses " of the grand temple to be erected in the "Recluse." The ode quoted is a gorgeous, though not unblemished, presentation of one of the grandest of the Platonic conceptions.

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