But this sad and common fate of poets, was not to visit Wordsworth. The devotion he had vowed to nature was to remain hallowed, happy, and unbroken to the end. His lot was to be the very ideal of the poetic lot. He was to live amid his native mountains, guarantied against care and poverty; at liberty to roam at will amid beauty and solitude; to work out his deepest thoughts in stately verse, and in his old age to receive there the reverence of his countrymen. He had the interest of the Lowther family. By that he was appointed distributor of stamps for the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland; in his case a mere sinecure, for the business of the office is easily executed by one or more experienced clerks. Since then, two out of his three children have married well. His son, a clergyman, to a daughter of Mr. Curwen, formerly M.P., and his daughter, to Mr. Quillinan. His second son has succeeded him in his stamp-distributorship. He has succeeded Southey in the laureateship, and has had, superadded, a pension of three or four hundred a-year. Perhaps none of the purely poetic tribe have labored less for fortune, and few have been more fortunate. The early experience of himself and his poetic cotemporaries is very instructive to all who seek to realize a reputation; it is, to have faith, to persevere, and believe nature and not critics. Never was a fiercer onslaught made than by the Edinburgh Review, on the whole race of poets who then arose. With the same fatality which has since led that journal to declare that no steamer would be able to cross the Atlantic, and that Grey, the author of the railway system, was a madman, and ought to be put into Bedlam, it denounced the whole class of young poets, who were destined to revive real poetry in the land, as it afterward did Lord Byron, as drivelers, and fools. Scotland, having stoned to death its own Burns, made a determined attempt to annihilate all the rising poetry of England. It commenced the review of Wordsworth's Excursion with the ludicrous words,—"This will never do!" and declared that there was not a line of poetry, or scarcely of common sense, in it, "from the hour that the driveler squatted himself down in the sun, to the end of his preaching." Let every youthful aspirant remember this history; and that if criticism could prevail over genius, we should not at this moment have one great established poet on our list of fame.

Wordsworth's poetical philosophy is now thought to be too well known to need much explanation. He has indeed expounded it himself in almost every page.

Yet, after all the brilliant and profound criticism which has been expended upon it, by almost every review in these kingdoms, and by every writer on poetry and poets, the simple truth remains to be told. The fact lay too much on the surface for very deep and metaphysical divers to perceive. It was too obvious to be seen by those who profess to see farther into a millstone than any body else. And what, then, is the fundamental philosophy of Wordsworth?

It is, what he, perhaps, would himself start to hear, simply a poetic Quakerism. The Quaker's religious faith is in immediate inspiration. He believes that if he "centers down," as he calls it, into his own mind, and puts to rest all his natural faculties and thoughts, he will receive the impulses and intimations of the Divine Spirit. He is not to seek, to strive, to inquire, but to be passive, and receive. This is precisely the great doctrine of Wordsworth, as it regards poetry. He believes the Divine Spirit which fills the universe, to have so molded all the forms of visible nature, as to make them to us perpetual monitors and instructors:—

Thus, in Expostulation and Reply, this doctrine is most distinctly pronounced:—

The same doctrine is inculcated in the very next poem, The Tables Turned. Here the poet calls his friend from his books, as full of toil and trouble, adding:—

Now, if George Fox had written poetry, that is exactly what he would have written. So completely does it embody the grand Quaker doctrine, that Clarkson, in his Portraiture of Quakerism, has quoted it, without however perceiving that the grand and complete fabric of Wordsworth's poetry is built on this foundation; that this dogma of quitting men, books, and theories, and sitting down quietly to receive the unerring intimations and influences of the spirit of the universe, is identical in Fox and Wordsworth; is the very same in the poetry of the one as in the religion of the other. The two reformers acquired their faith by the same process, and in the same manner. They went out into solitude, into night, and into woods, to seek the oracle of truth. Fox retired to a hollow oak, as he tells us, and with prayers and tears sought after the truth, and came at length to see that it lay not in schools, colleges, and pulpits, but in the teaching in a passive spirit of the great Father of Spirits. Wordsworth retired to the

And he tells us that to this practice he owed

This is perfect Quakerism; the grand demand of which is, that you shall put down "this meddling intellect, which misshapes the beauteous forms of things;" shall lay at rest the actions and motions of your own minds, and subdue the impatience of the body, till, as Wordsworth has most clearly stated it,

It was this very doctrine of the non-necessity of human interference between us and all knowledge, of the all-sufficiency of this invisible and "great teacher," as Wordsworth calls him, which led George Fox and the Quakers to abandon all forms of worship, to strip divine service of all music, singing, formal prayers, written sermons, and to sit down in a perfectly passive state of silence, to gather some of

into

Whoever sees a Friends' meeting, sees a body of men and women sitting in the full and abstract practice of this very doctrine, by which Wordsworth, in the very words of George Fox, says we come to

"See into the life of things."

"Come out," says Fox, "from all your vain learning and philosophy, from your schools and colleges, from all your teachings and preachings of human instruction, from all your will-worship and your man-made ministers, and sit down in the presence of Him who made all things, and lives through all things; who made the ear, the eye, and the heart of man, and lives in and through them, and can and will inform them. Put down every high and airy imagination, every carnal willing and doing; cease to strive in your own strength, and learn to depend on the teaching and strength of the Holy Spirit that filleth heaven and earth; and the light given to enlighten every man that cometh into the world will soon shine in upon you, and the truth in all its fullness will be made known to you far beyond the teaching of all bishops, archbishops, professors, or other swelling men, puffed with the vain wind of human learning. Come out from among them; be not of them; leave the dead to bury the dead. He that sits at the king's table needeth not the dry crumbs and the waste offal of hireling servitors; he that hath the sun itself shining on his head, needeth no lesser, much less artificial lights."

In this state he regards man as restored to the original privilege of his nature, and admitted to communion with the spirit of the Creator, and into contact with all knowledge. "He sees into the life of things." So duly did Fox consider that he saw into the life of things, that he believed that the knowledge of the quality of all plants, minerals, and physical substances was imparted to him, and that had he not had a still higher vocation assigned him, as a discerner and comforter of spirits, he could have practiced most successfully as a physician. He believed and taught, and Barclay, his great disciple, in his famous Apology, teaches the same thing, that in this state of communion with the Spirit of all knowledge, a man needs no interpreter of the Scriptures; that without any knowledge of the original languages, he can instinctively tell where they are erroneously rendered, and what is the true meaning. He has penetrated to the fountain of truth, and not only of truth, but, to use Wordsworth's words again, of "the deep power of joy." He is raised above all earthly evil and anxiety, and breathes in the invisible presence, the pure air of heaven. He is in a kind restored to the unity of his nature, of power, intelligence, and felicity. How exactly is this the language of our poet!

But this great Quaker doctrine is not the casual doctrine of one or two casual or isolated poems; it is the foundation and fabric of the whole. It is the great theme everywhere pursued. Of his principal and noblest production, The Excursion, it is the brain, the very backbone, the vitals, and the moving sinews. Take away that, and you take all. Take that, and you reduce the poet to a level with a hundred others. His hero, the wanderer, is a shepherd boy grown into a pedler, or pack-merchant, who has been educated and baptized into this sublime knowledge of God speaking through nature. In his sixth year he tended cattle on the hills.

"He had received a precious gift," the poet tells us, that gift of spiritual perception which the poet himself tells he also has received.

There "was wanting yet the pure delight of love" in his inspiration, but that came also, and—

That is one of the finest pieces of Quakerism that ever was written; there is nothing in George Fox himself more perfect. It is a description of that state to which every true Quaker aspires; which he believes attainable without the mediation of any priest, or the presence of any church; which Fox and the early Friends so often describe as having been accorded to them in the midst of their public meetings, or in the solitude of the closet, or the journey. It is that state of exaltation, the very flower and glorious moment of a religious life, which is the privilege of him who draws near to and walks with God. That

when

"Thought is not; in enjoyment it expires."

It is an eloquent exposition of the genuine worship to which, according to the Friends, every sincere seeker may and will be admitted, when

But to show how completely Wordsworth's system is a system of poetical Quakerism, I should be obliged to take his Excursion, and collate the whole with passages from the writings of the early Friends, Fox, Penn, Barclay, Pennington, and others. The Excursion is a very bible of Quakerism. Every page abounds with it. It is, in fact, wholly and fervently permeated by the soul of Quaker theology. The Friends teach that the great guide of life is "the light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world;" hence they were originally termed "children of light," till the nickname of Quakers superseded it. They declare this light to be "the infallible guide" of all men who will follow it. What says Wordsworth?

The whole of the fourth Book, from which this extract is made, is no other than a luminous and vivid exposition of pure Quakerism. The Wanderer is its apostle. He shows how in all ages and countries men have been influenced by this voice of God in nature; and, not comprehending it fully, have mixed it up with the forms and phenomena of nature itself, and shaped religions out of it. Hence the Chaldean faith; hence the Grecian mythology.

So say the Friends; and to such a pitch do they carry their belief in their "universal and saving light," that they contend, that to the most savage nations, "having not law, it becomes a law," and that through it the spirit, if not the history of the Savior is revealed and made operative, and that thus the voice of salvation is preached in the heart where never outward gospel has been heard. The Friends contend that science and mere human wisdom most commonly tend to darken and weigh down this divine principle, to cloud this eternal luster in the soul. So says the eloquent Wanderer, the preacher of the Quakerism of poetry. He asks, Shall our great discoverers obtain less from sense and reason than these obtained?

This divine principle, which can thus outsoar and put to shame the vanity and conceit of science, can also baffle and repulse all the sophistries of metaphysics.

There, too, Wordsworth and the Friends are entirely agreed, and yet further. This faculty exists in and operates for all; and whoever trusts in it shall, like the Friends, pursue their way careless of all the changes of fashions or opinions.

He illustrates the operation of this inward and primeval faculty by the simile of the child listening to a shell, and hearing, as it were, the murmurs of its native sea. Such a shell, he says, is

and in this you have a sanctuary to retire to at will, where you will become victorious over every delusive power and principle. The Friends consider this the glory of our mortal state, and Wordsworth says,—

But the poet and the Friends agree that there is a power seated in the human soul, superior to the understanding, superior to the reasoning faculty, the sure test of truth, to which every man may confidently appeal in all cases, for it is the voice of God himself. With the poet and the Friends the result of this divine philosophy is the same;—the most perfect patience, the most holy confidence in the ever present divinity; connected with no forms, no creeds, no particular conditions of men; not confined by, not approachable only in, temples and churches, but free as his own winds, boundless as his own seas, universal as his own sunshine over all his varied lands and people; whispering peace in the lonely forest, courage on the seas, adoration on the mountain tops, hope under the burning tropics and the blistering lash of the savage white man, joy in the dungeon, and glory on the death-bed.

Perhaps this perfected spirit, this divine patience, this God-pervaded soul of man, gentle, loving, yet stronger than death or evil, never were more beautifully expressed than by the repentant and dying Quaker, James Naylor.

"There is a spirit which I feel, that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong; but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptations. As it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thought to any other; if it be betrayed, it bears it, for its ground and spring are the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its course is meekness; its life is everlasting love unfeigned; it takes its kingdom with entreaty, and not with contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind. In God alone it can rejoice, though none else regard it, or can own its life. It is conceived in sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it; nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression. It rejoiceth, but through sufferings, for with the world's joy it is murdered. I found it alone, being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with those who live in dens and desolate places of the earth, who through death obtained this resurrection, and eternal holy life."

There is an illumination for the critics! For these thirty years have they been astounding themselves at the originality of Wordsworth's philosophy, and expounding it by all imaginable aids of metaphysics. We have heard endless lectures on the ideality, the psychological profundity, the abstract doctrines of the poet; his new views, his spiritual communion with and exposition of the mysteries of nature, and of the soul in harmony with nature, etc., etc. That is the simple solution; it is Quakerism in poetry, neither more nor less. The question is, how Wordsworth stumbled on this doctrine; a doctrine on which his great poetical reputation is, in fact, built. Possibly, like George Fox, he found it in his solitary wanderings, and cogitations; but more probably he drew it direct from his Journal itself. It is a curious, but a well known fact, that all that knot of young and enthusiastic writers at Bristol, and afterward at Stowey and Allfoxden, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, were deeply read and imbued with the old Quaker worthies. Probably they were made acquainted with them by their two Quaker friends Lovell and Lloyd. Coleridge was so impressed with their principles that, though he preached, he did it in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that, as he said, "he might not have a rag of the woman of Babylon on him." He imbibed and proclaimed all the Quaker hatred of slavery and war. He declares in his Biographia Literaria his admiration of Fox. "One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own experience, that there exist folios on the human understanding, and the nature of man, which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if, in the whole huge volume, there could be found as much fullness of heart and intellect, as bursts forth in many a simple page of George Fox." Southey always cherished the idea of writing the life of George Fox, but never accomplished it. Charles Lamb, another visitor of Stowey, at the time of this youthful effervescence, has recorded his visit to a Friends' meeting, and says, that in it he soon began to ask himself far more questions than he could quickly answer. He declares Sewell's History of the Quakers worth all ecclesiastical history put together. Wordsworth was not only as deeply read in these books as any of them, but is still, to my knowledge, remarkably well acquainted with the history and opinions of Friends; he has immortalized the very spade of one of them, Thomas Wilkinson, and—Ecce signum—has perfected the development of this great poetical system.

Whence Wordsworth, however, gathered his philosophy, whether from the books of the Friends, or from his own meditations, it is, nevertheless, a great truth. Jacob Behmen, Emanuel Swedenborg, Kant, Justinus Kerner, and many another philosopher and poet, proclaim and maintain the same. That the Spirit of God lives throughout the universe and in the soul of man; that the more we commune with his Spirit, the more our ears and eyes, or, in better phrase, our spiritual sense, becomes open to perceive it. The closer we draw to it, and live in it, the more we become strengthened, purified, and enriched by it; the more we are able to walk amid all the fascinations, glories, and deceptions of the world, as the men of God walked in the midst of the fiery furnace, so scathless that the very smell of fire passed not on their garments. It is called by the Friends The Truth, as superior to, and including all other truths. Wordsworth gives it the same magnificent title. Standing by this central light of the universe, man learns to see how far all other offered lights, whether of books or spoken doctrines, are lights, or are actually darkness—are great or small. Holding fast by this true substance, he learns to feel how far all other things are substance or shadow; and, if he hold on, at length walks the highway of life free, invincible, and rejoicing; all nature yielding him aliment and peace.

As this is a curious subject, and particularly curious, as it has escaped the research of those who have thought themselves the most profound, I have gone the more fully into it. But to compare all such passages in Wordsworth and the writings of the early Friends, as would amply prove the fact here introduced, would make a very large volume. The writings of these old worthies are one mass of Wordsworthisms. In some particulars, he has not reached the sublime moral elevation of his masters, as in regard to war; he is martial, and thinks Slaughter, God's daughter. They very sensibly set Slaughter down as the daughter of a very opposite personage. In fact, had not the Friends overshadowed their great doctrines by broad brims, and disguised them in collarless coats; had they not put forward as the outward signs of their community, formality and singularity, the great doctrines which they hold of the great and immutable truth, more than any other people, would have made them far greater than any other people; the high and universally acknowledged instructors of the world in the principles of freedom, moral greatness, and social happiness. As it is, they have made them the most sturdy and efficient agents of peace, right notions of church government, and liberty to the enslaved; and, not the less certainly, the greatest of modern reformers in poetical philosophy. As Fox and his disciples were fiercely attacked as innovators in religion, so Wordsworth was as fiercely attacked as an innovator in literature. Little did the cold and material spirit of Scotch skeptical criticism dream that it was running its head against the old sturdy spirit of Quakerism, in the new heresy, of what they were pleased to term the Lake school.

There is, perhaps, no residence in England better known than that of William Wordsworth. Rydal Mount, where he has now lived for more than thirty years, is as perfectly poetical in its location as any poet could possibly conceive in his brightest moment of inspiration. As you advance a mile or more on the road from Ambleside toward Grasmere, a lane overhung with trees turns up to the right, and there, at some few hundred yards from the highway, stands the modest cottage of the poet, elevated on Rydal Mount, so as to look out over the surrounding sea of foliage, and to take in a glorious view. Before it, at some distance across the valley, stretches a high screen of bold and picturesque mountains; behind, it is overtowered by a precipitous hill, called Nab-scar; but to the left, you look down over the broad waters of Windermere, and to the right over the still and more embosomed flood of Grasmere. Whichever way the poet pleases to advance from his house, it must be into scenery of that beauty for mountain, stream, wood, and lake, which has made Cumberland so famous over all England. He may steal away up backward from his gate, and ascend into the solitary hills, or diverging into the grounds of Lady Mary Fleming, his near neighbor, may traverse the deep shades of the woodland, wander along the banks of the rocky rivulet, and finally stand before the well known water-fall there. If he descend into the highway, objects of beauty still present themselves. Cottages and quiet houses here and there glance from their little spots of Paradise, through the richest boughs of trees; Windermere, with its wide expanse of waters, its fairy islands, its noble hills, allures his steps in one direction; while the sweet little lake of Rydal, with its heronry and its fine background of rocks, invites him in another. In this direction the vale of Grasmere, the scene of his early married life, opens before him, and Dunmail-raise and Langdale-pikes lift their naked corky summits, as hailing him to the pleasures of old companionship. Into no quarter of this region of lakes, and mountains, and vales of primitive life, can he penetrate without coming upon ground celebrated by his muse. He is truly "sole king of rocky Cumberland."

The immediate grounds in which his house stands are worthy of the country and the man. It is, as its name implies, a mount. Before the house opens a considerable platform, and around and beneath lie various terraces and descend various walks, winding on amid a profusion of trees and luxuriant evergreens. Beyond the house, you ascend various terraces, planted with trees now completely overshadowing them; and these terraces conduct you to a level above the house-top, and extend your view of the enchanting scenery on all sides. Above you tower the rocks and precipitous slopes of Nab-scar; and below you, embosomed in its trees, lies the richly ornate villa of Mr. William Ball, a Friend, whose family and the poet's are on such social terms, that a little gate between their premises opens them both to each family alike. This cottage and grounds were formerly the property of Charles Lloyd, also a Friend, and one of the Bristol and Stowey coterie. Both he and Lovell have long been dead; Lovell, indeed, was drowned, on a voyage to Ireland, in the very heyday of the dreams of Pantisocracy, in which he was an eager participant.

The poet's house, itself, is a proper poet's abode. It is at once modest, plain, yet tasteful and elegant. An ordinary dining-room, a breakfast-room in the center, and a library beyond, form the chief apartments. There are a few pictures and bust, especially those of Scott and himself, a good engraving of Burns, and the like, with a good collection of books, few of them very modern. In the dining-room there stands an old cabinet, which is a sort of genealogical piece of furniture, bearing this inscription:—

A great part of the labor of laying out the garden, raising the terraces at Rydal, and planting the trees, has been that of the poet himself. The property belongs to Lady Fleming, but Wordsworth has bought a piece of land lying just below, with the fatherly intent, that should his daughter at any time incline to live there, she may, if she choose, erect a house for herself in the old and endeared situation.

The trees display a prodigality of growth, that make what are meant for walks almost a wilderness. On observing to the poet that he really should have his laurels pruned a little, the old man smiled, paused, and said, with a pardonable self-complacency,—"Ay, I will tell you an anecdote about that. A certain general was going round the place, attended by the gardener, when he suddenly remarked, as you do, the flourishing growth of the trees, especially of the evergreens, and said, 'Which of all your trees do you think flourishes most here?"

"'I don't know, sir,' said James; "but I think the laurel.'

"'Well, that is as it should be, you know,' added the general.

"'Why it should be so, James could not tell, and made the remark.

"'Don't you know,' continued the general, 'that the laurel is the symbol of distinction for some achievement, and especially in that art of which Mr. Wordsworth is so eminent a master? therefore it is quite right that it should flourish so conspicuously here.'

"By this," continued the poet, "James acquired two new pieces of intelligence; first, that the laurel was a symbol of eminence, and, that his master was an eminent man, of both which facts he had been before very innocently ignorant."

It may be supposed that, during the summer, Wordsworth being in the very center of a region swarming with tourists and hunters of the picturesque, and in the very highway of their route is regularly beset by them. Day after day brings up whole troops of them from every quarter of these kingdoms, and no few from America. The worthy old man professes a good deal of annoyance at being thus lionized, but it is an annoyance which obviously has its agreeable side. No one can doubt that it would be a far greater annoyance, if, after a life devoted to poetry, people, all in quest of "the sublime and beautiful," hurried past, scoured over all the hills and dales, and passed unnoticed the poet's gate. As it is, he has an ever swinging censer of the flattery of public curiosity tossing at his door. Note after note is sent in, the long levee continues from day to day—the aged minstrel votes it a bore, and quietly enjoys it. If not, how easy it would be, just, during the laking season, to vanish from the spot to another equally pleasant, and yet more retired. Yet why should he? It is not as if the visitor interrupted the progress of a life's great labor. That labor is done; competence and fame are acquired; the laurel and the larder have equally flourished at Rydal Mount: and what is more agreeable than to receive the respect of his fellow-men, and diffuse the pleasure of having seen and conversed with one of the lights of the age?

Some years ago, spending a few days there with Mrs. Howitt, we witnessed a curious scene. The servant came in, announcing that a gentleman and a large party of ladies wished to see the place. "Very well, they can see it," said Mr. Wordsworth.

"But the gentleman wished to see you, sir."

"Who is it?—Did he give his name?"

"No, sir."

"Then ask him for it."

The servant went, and returned, saying, "The gentleman said that he knew Mr. Wordsworth's name very well, as every body did, but that Mr. Wordsworth would not know his if he sent him his card."

"Then say, I am sorry, but I can not see him."

The servant once more disappeared, and the poet broke forth into a declamation on the bore of these continual and importunate, not to say impudent, visits. In the midst of it the servant entered.

"Well, what did the man say?"

"That he had had the honor to shake hands with the Duke of Wellington, and that his last remaining wish in life was to shake hands with Mr. Wordsworth."

This was too good. A universal scream of merriment burst from us. The poet rose, laughing heartily. Mrs. and Miss Dora Wordsworth, laughing as heartily, gently seized him, each by an arm, and thus merrily pushed him out of the room. In another minute, we beheld the worthy host bowing to the man who possessed such irresistible rhetoric, and to his large accompaniment of ladies, and doing the amiable, by pointing out to them the prominent beauties of the view. The cunning fellow was a Manchester manufacturer.

It is well known that the dread of a railroad into the lake country has alarmed Wordsworth into the firing off a sonnet against it, and that his annoyance has been increased by the lanch of a steamboat on Windermere. There is some mitigation of our surprise, that the poet who knows and has so well described the nuisances of cities and manufacturing towns, should thus see with disgust the beautiful and breezy region of the lakes laid open to them, when we know that this railroad is proposed to be carried close under his beloved retirement; but still it is befitting the generosity of the man, who has, in so many forms, given us an interest in the toil-worn and the lowly, to be prepared to make some sacrifice of that quiet which he has so long and so richly enjoyed, to the spread of truth and rational pleasure among the humble workers of the mill; remembering his own impressive words:—

  JAMES MONTGOMERY.

Sheffield has been poetically fortunate. It has had the honor, not to give birth to two eminent poets—a mere accident—but to produce them. Neither Montgomery nor Elliott was born in Sheffield; but they were drawn to it as the trading capital of the district in which they were born; and there their minds, tastes, and reputations grew. In both poets are strongly recognizable the intellectual features of a manufacturing town. They are both of a popular and liberal tendency of mind. They, or rather their spirits and characters, grew amid the physical sufferings and the political struggles of a busy and high-spirited population, and by these circumstances all the elements of freedom and patriotism were strengthened to full growth in their bosoms. Montgomery came upon the public stage, both as a poet and a political writer, long before Elliott, though the difference of their ages is not so vast as might be supposed from this fact, being as near as possible ten years only.

It is not my object in this article to compare or to contrast the intellectual characters of these two genuine poets. They are widely different. In both the spirit of freedom, of progress, of sympathy with the multitude, and of steady antagonism to oppression, manifest themselves, but with much difference of manner. Both possess great vigor and fervor of feeling; but in James Montgomery the decorums of style are more strictly preserved. We feel that he received his education in a very different school to that of Ebenezer Elliott. In the still halls and gardens of the Moravian brethren, Montgomery imbibed the softness of bearing, and that peculiarly religious tone which distinguish him. Amid the roughest and often most hostile crowd of struggling life, Elliott acquired a more fiery and battling aspect, and he learned involuntarily to thunder against evils, where Montgomery would reason and lament. Yet it would be difficult to say in which all that characterizes real patriotism, and real religion, most truly resides. In very different walks they have both done gloriously and well, and we will leave to others to decide which is the greater poet of the two. Elliott, by both circumstance and temperament, has been led to make his poetry bear more directly and at once upon the actual condition of the working-classes; Montgomery has displayed more uniform grace, and in lyrical beauty has far surpassed his townsman, though not in the exquisite harmony of many portions of his versification. But, they are not now to be compared, but to be admired; and nothing is more beautiful than to hear in what tone and manner they speak of each other. Montgomery gives Ebenezer Elliot the highest praise for his genius, and says, that for years in the Iris he was the only one who could or would see the merit of the great but unacknowledged bard; while Elliott modestly dedicates his poem of Spirits and Men to the author of The World before the Flood, "as an evidence of his presumption and his despair."

Mr. Montgomery had a strictly religious education; he was the son of religious parents, and belonged to a pre-eminently religious body, the Moravian brethren; and the spirit of that parentage, education, and association, is deeply diffused through all that he has written. He is essentially a religious poet. It is what of all things upon earth we can well believe he most would desire to be; and that he is in the truest sense of the word. In all his poems the spirit of a piety, profound, and beautifully benevolent, is instantly felt. Perhaps there are no lyrics in the language which are so truly Christian; that is, which breathe the same glowing love to God and man, without one tinge of the bigotry that too commonly eats into zeal as rust into the finest steel. We have no dogmas, but a pure and heavenly atmosphere of holy faith, filial and fraternal affection, and reverence of the great Architect of the universe, and of the destinies of man. There is often a tone of melancholy, but it is never that of doubt. It is the sighing of a feeling and sensitive heart over the evils of life; but ever and anon this tone rises into the more animated one of conscious strength and well placed confidence; and terminates in that pæan of happy triumph which the Christian only can ascend to. There is no "dealing damnation round the land" in the religious poetry of James Montgomery; we feel that he has peculiarly caught the genuine spirit of Christ; and a sense of beauty and goodness, and of the glorious blessedness of an immortal nature, accompanies us through all his works. That is the spirit which, more than all other, distinguishes his lyrical compositions; and how many and how beautiful are they! as, The Grave, The Joy of Grief, Verses on the Death of Joseph Browne, a prisoner for conscience' sake in York Castle, commencing, "Spirit, leave thine house of clay;" The Common Lot, The Harp of Sorrow, The Dial, The Molehill, The Peak Mountains, A Mother's Love, those noble Stanzas to the Memory of the Rev. Thomas Spencer, The Alps, Friends, Night, and the many in the same volume with the Pelican Island, perhaps some of them the most beautiful and spiritual things he ever wrote. The poetry of Montgomery is too familiar to most readers, and especially religiously intellectual readers, to need much quotation here; but a few stanzas may be ventured upon, and will of themselves more forcibly indicate the peculiar features of his poetical character, than much prose description.

The opening stanzas on the death of Thomas Spencer embody his very creed and doctrine as a poet.