Oxford lectures on poetry: "Ut animos ad sanctiora erigeret ; ""to raise our minds to holier things."

Perhaps I cannot better sum up the whole matter than by adopting, if I may, the words of a correspondent. He observes, 1st, That while Wordsworth spiritualizes the outward world more than any other poet. has done, his feeling for it is essentially manly. Nature, he always insists, gives gladness to the glad, comfort and support to the sorrowful. 2d, There is the wondrous depth of his feeling for the domestic affections, and more especially for the constancy of them. 3d, He must be considered a leader in that greatest movement of modern times care for our humbler brethren; his part being, not to help them in their sufferings, but to make us reverence them for what they are, what they have in common with us, or in greater measure than ourselves. These are the tendencies breathed from every line he wrote. He took the commonest sights of earth, and the homeliest household affections, and made you feel that these, which men commonly take to be the lowest things, are indeed the highest.

If he seldom ventures within the inner sanctuary, he everywhere leads to its outer court, lifting our thoughts into a region "neighboring to heaven, and that no foreign land.” If he was not universal in the sense in which Shakespeare was, and Goethe aimed to be, it was because he was smitten with too deep an enthusiasm for those truths by which he was possessed. His eye was too intense, too prophetic to admit of his looking at life dramatically. In fact, no poet of modern times has had in him so much of the prophet. In the world of nature, to be a revealer of things hidden, the sanctifier of things common, the interpreter of new and unsuspected relations, the opener of another sense in

men; in the moral world, to be the teacher of truths hitherto neglected or unobserved, the awakener of men's hearts to the solemnities that encompass them, deepening our reverence for the essential soul, apart from accident and circumstance, making us feel more truly, more tenderly, more profoundly, lifting the thoughts upward through the shows of time to that which is permanent and eternal, and bringing down on the transitory things of eye and ear some shadow of the eternal, till we

"Feel through all this fleshly dress

Bright shoots of everlastingness'

this is the office which he will not cease to fulfill, as long as the English language lasts. What earth's faroff lonely mountains do for the plains and the cities, that Wordsworth has done and will do for literature, and through literature for society; sending down great rivers of higher truth, fresh purifying winds of feeling, to those who least dream from what quarter they come. The more thoughtful of each generation will draw nearer and observe him more closely, will ascend his imaginative heights, and sit under the shadow of his profound meditations, and, in proportion as they do so, will become more noble and pure in heart.

COLERIDGE.

MORE than enough has perhaps been said in disparagement of the eighteenth century. It is not therefore to speak more evil of that much abused time, but merely to note an obvious fact, if I say that its main tendency was towards the outward and the finite. Just freed from the last ties of feudalism, escaped too from long religious conflicts which had resulted in war and revolution, the feelings of the British people took a new direction; the nation's energies were wholly turned to the pacific working out of its material and industrial resources. Let us leave those deep, interminable questions, which, as experience has shown, lead only to confusion, and let us stick to plain, obvious facts, which cannot mislead, and which yield such comfortable results. This was the genius and temper of the generation that followed the Revolution of 1688. Nor was there wanting a man to give definite shape and expression to this tendency of the national mind. Locke, a shrewd and practical man, who knew the world, furnished his countrymen with a way of thinking singularly in keeping with their then temper; a philosophy which, discarding abstruse ideas, fashioned thought mainly out of the senses; an ethical system founded on the selfish instincts of pleasure and pain; and a political theory which, instead of the theocratic dreams of the Puritans or the divine right of High

Churchmen, or the historic traditions of feudalism, grounded government on the more prosaic but not less unreal phantasy of an original contract. This whole philosophy, however inconsistent with what is noblest in British history, was so congenial a growth of the British soil, that no other has ever struck so deep a root, or spread so wide, and with such endearing influence. This way of thinking, introduced by Locke for the purpose of moderating the pretensions of human thought, came to be believed in by his followers as its highest achievement. The half century after Locke was no doubt full of mental activity in certain directions. It saw Physical Science attain its highest triumph in the Newtonian discoveries; History studied after a certain manner by votaries more numerous than ever before; and the new science of Political Economy created. But while these fields were thronged with busy inquirers, and though Natural Theology was much argued and discussed, yet from the spiritual side of all questions, from the deep things of the soul, from men's living relations to the eternal world, educated thought seemed to turn instinctively away. The guilds of the learned, as by tacit consent, either eschewed these subjects altogether, or, if they were constrained to enter on them, they had laid down for themselves certain conventional limits, beyond which they did not venture. On the other side of these lay mystery, enthusiasm, fanaticism spectres abhorred of the wise and prudent. It is a striking proof of how entirely the mechanical philosophy had saturated the age, that Wesley, the leader of the great spiritual counter-movement of last century, the preacher of divine realities to a generation fast bound in sense, yet in the opening of his sermon on Faith indorses the sensational theory, and declares that to man in his

natural condition sense is the only inlet of knowledge.

The same spirit which pervaded the philosophy and theology of that era is apparent not less in its poetry and literature. Limitation of range, with a certain perfectness of form, contentment with the surface view of things, absence of high imagination, repression of the deeper feelings, man looked at mainly on his conventional side, careful descriptions of manners, but no open vision, these are the prevailing characteristics. Doubtless the higher truth was not even then left without some witnesses. Butler and Berkeley in speculation, Burns and Cowper in poetry, Burke in political philosophy, these were either the criers in the wilderness against the idols of their times, or the prophets of the new truth that was being born. Men's thoughts cannot deal earnestly with many things at once; and each age has its own work assigned it; and the work of the eighteenth century was mainly one of utilitarian understanding, of criticising and questioning things hitherto believed, of active but narrow intelligence divorced from imagination, from deep feeling, from reverence, from spiritual insight. And when this one-sided work was done, the result was isolation, individualism, self-will; the universal in thought lost. sight of, the universal in ethics denied; everywhere, in speculation as in practice, the private will dominant, the Universal Will forgotten. To exult over the ignorant past, to glory in the wonderful present, to have got rid of all prejudices, to have no strong beliefs except in material progress, to be tolerant of all tendencies but fanaticism, this was its highest boast. And though this self-complacent wisdom received some rude shocks in the crash of revolution with which the last century closed, and though the soul and spirit that are