FIG. 1. A PROMENADE DRESS of a beautiful lavender taffetas, the front of the skirt trimmed with folds of the same, confined at regular distances with seven flutes of lavender gauze ribbon, put on the reverse of the folds; a double fluted frilling, rather narrow, encircles the opening of the body, which is made high at the back, and closed in the front with a fluting of ribbon similar to that on the skirt; demi-long sleeves, cut up in a kind of wave at the back, so as to show the under full sleeve of spotted white muslin. Chemisette of fulled muslin, confined with bands of needle-work. Scarf of white China crape, beautifully embroidered, and finished with a deep, white, silk fringe. Drawn capote of pink crape, adorned in the interior with half-wreaths of green myrtle. FIG. 2. COSTUME FOR A YOUNG LADY.-A dress of white barège trimmed with three deep vandyked flounces put on close to each other; high body, formed of worked inlet, finished with a stand-up row round the throat; the sleeves descend as low as the elbow, where they are finished with two deep frillings, vandyked similar to the flounces. Half-long gloves of straw-colored kid, surmounted with a bracelet of black velvet. Drawn capote of white crape, adorned with clusters of the rose de mott both in the interior and exterior. Pardessus of pink glacé silk, trimmed with three frillings of the same, edged with a narrow silk fringe, which also forms a heading to the same; over each hip is a trimming en tablier formed of the fringe; short sleeves, trimmed with one fulling edged with fringe; these sleeves are of the same piece as the cape, not cut separate; the trimming over the top of the arms being similar to that under, and formed also of fringe; this pardessus is perfectly round in its form, and only closes just upon the front of the waist. MORNING CAPS which are slightly ornamented, vary more in the way in which they are trimmed, than in the positive form; some being trimmed with chicorées, wreaths of gauze ribbon, or knobs of ribbon edged with a festooned open-work encircling a simple round of tulle, or what is perhaps prettier, a cluster of lace. A pretty form, differing a little from the monotonous round, is composed of a round forming a star, the points being cut off; these points are brought close together, and are encircled with a narrow bavolet, the front part being formed so as to descend just below MORNING CAPS FIG. 4. MORNING COSTUME.-Dress and pardessus of printed cambric muslin, the pattern consisting of wreaths and bouquets of flowers. Jupon of plain, white cambric muslin, edged with a border of rich open needlework. The sleeves of the pardessus are gathered up in front of the arm. The white under-sleeves, which do not descend to the wrists, are finished by two rows of vandyked needlework. A small needlework collar. Lace cap of the round form, placed very backward on the head, and trimmed with full coques of pink and green ribbon at each ear. FIG. 4.-MORNING COSTUME. [From the Eclectic Review.] WORDSWORTH-HIS CHARACTER IN AND GENIUS. a late article on Southey, we alluded to the solitary position of Wordsworth in that lake country where he once shone the brightest star in a large galaxy. Since then, the star of Jove, so beautiful and large, has gone out in darkness the greatest laureate of England has expired-the intensest, most unique, and most pure-minded of our poets, with the single exceptions of Milton and Cowper, is departed. And it were lesemajesty against his mighty shade not to pay it our tribute while yet his, memory, and the grass of his grave, are green. It is singular, that only a few months have elapsed since the great antagonist of his literary VOL. I.-No. 5.-00 fame-Lord Jeffrey (who, we understand, persisted to the last in his ungenerous and unjust estimate), left the bench of human, to appear at the bar of Divine justice. Seldom has the death of a celebrated man produced a more powerful impression in his own city and circle, and a less powerful impression on the wide horizon of the world. In truth, he had outlived himself. It had been very different had he passed away thirty years ago, when the "Edinburgh Review" was in the plenitude of its influence. As it was, he disappeared like a star at midnight, whose descent is almost unnoticed while the whole heavens are white with glory, not like a sun going down, that night may come over the earth. One of the acutest, most accomplished, most warm-hearted, and generous of men. Jeffrey wanted that stamp of univer ence. 66 66 sality, that highest order of genius, that depth without identifying it with the Divine pres of insight, and that simple directness of purpose, not to speak of that moral and religious consecration, which "give the world assurance of a man." He was the idol of Edinburgh, and the pride of Scotland, because he condensed in himself those qualities which the modern Athens has long been accustomed to covet and admire -taste and talent rather than genius-subtlety of appreciation rather than power of originationthe logical understanding rather than the inventive insight—and because his name had sounded out to the ends of the earth. But nature and man, not Edinburgh Castle, or the Grampian Hills merely, might be summoned to mourn in Wordsworth's departure the loss of one of their truest high-priests, who had gazed into some of the deepest secrets of the one, and echoed some of the loftiest aspirations of the other. To soften such grief, however, there comes in the reflection, that the task of this great poet had been nobly discharged. He had given the world assurance, full, and heaped, and running over, of what he meant, and of what was meant by him. While the premature departure of a Schiller, a Byron, or a Keats, gives us emotions similar to those wherewith we would behold the crescent moon, snatched away as by some "insatiate archer,' up into the Infinite, ere it grew into its full glory-Wordsworth, like Scott, Goethe, and Southey, was permitted to fill his full and broad sphere. What Wordsworth's mission was, may be, perhaps, understood through some previous remarks upon his great mistress-Nature, as a poetical personage. The notions suggested by this view, which is that of Scripture, are exceedingly comprehensive and magnificent. Nature becomes to the poet's eye a great sheet let down from God out of heaven," and in which there is no object common or unclean." The purpose and the Being above cast such a grandeur over the pettiest or barest objects, as did the fiery piilar upon the sand, or the shrubs of the howling desert of its march. Every thing becomes valuable when looked upon as a communication from God, imperfect only from the nature of the material used. What otherwise might have been concluded discords, now appear only starmerings or whisperings in the Divine voice; thorns and thistles spring above the primeval curse, the "meanest flower that blows" gives "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." The creation is neither unduly exalted nor contemptuously trampled under-foot, but maintains its dignified position, as an embassador from the Divine King. The glory of something far beyond association—that of a divine and perpetual presence-is shed over the landscape, and its golden-drops are spilled upon the stars. Objects the most diverse-the cradle of the child, the wet hole of the centipede, the bed of the corpse, and the lair of the earthquake, the nest of the lark, and the crag on which sits, half asleep, the dark vulture, digesting bloodare all clothed in a light the same in kind, though varying in degree "A light which never was on sea or shore." In the poetry of the Hebrews, accordingly, the locusts are God's "great army;"-the winds are his messengers, the thunder his voice, the lightning a "fiery stream going before him," the moon his witness in the heavens, the sun a strong man rejoicing to run his race-all creation is roused and startled into life through him There are three methods of contemplating nature. These are the material, the shadowy, and the mediatorial. The materialist looks upon it as the great and only reality. It is a vast solid fact, for ever burning and rolling around, below and above him. The idealist, on the contrary, regards it as a shadow-a mode of mind-the infinite projection of his own thought. The man who stands between the two extremes,—its every beautiful, or dire, or strange shape in looks on nature as a great, but not ultimate or everlasting scheme of mediation, or compromise, between pure and absolute spirit and humanity -adumbrating God to man, and bringing man near to God. To the materialist, there is an altar, star-lighted heaven-high, but no God. To the idealist, there is a God, but no altar. He who holds the theory of mediation, has the Great Spirit as his God, and the universe as the altar on which he presents the gift of his poetical (we do not speak at present so much of his theological) adoration. It must be obvious, at once, which of those three views of nature is the most poetical. It is surely that which keeps the two principles of spirit and matter distinct and unconfoundedpreserves in their proper relations-the soul and the body of things-God within, and without the garment by which, in Goethe's grand thought, we see him by." While one party deify, and another destroy matter, the third impregnate, the earth or the sky, is God's movable tent; the place where, for a season, his honor, his beauty, his strength, and his justice dwell-the tenant not degraded, and inconceivable dignity being added to the abode. His mere "tent," however-for while the great and the infinite are thus connected with the little and the finite, the subordination of the latter to the former is always maintained. The most magnificent objects in nature are but the mirrors to God's face-the scaffolding to his future purposes; and, like mirrors, are to wax dim; and, like scaffolding, to be removed. The great sheet is to be received up again into heaven. The heavens and the earth are to pass away, and to be succeeded, if not by a purely mental economy, yet by one of a more spiritual materialism, compared to which the former shall no more be remembered, neither come into mind. Those frightful and fantastic forms of animated life, through which God's glory seems to shine "And one eternal spring encircles all!" 66 with a struggle, and but faintly, shall disappear | His eye had been anointed with eye-salve, and -nay, the worlds which bore, and sheltered he saw, as his poet-predecessors had done, the them in their rugged dens and caves, shall flee temple in which he was standing, heard in every from the face of the regenerator. 66 A milder breeze and ocean billow the sound of a templeday" is to dawn on the universe-the refine- service, and felt that the grandeur of the ritual ment of matter is to keep pace with the eleva- and of its recipient, threw the shadow of their tion of mind. Evil and sin are to be eternally greatness upon every stone in the corners of the banished to some Siberia of space. The word edifice, and upon every eft crawling along its of the poet is to be fulfilled, floors. Reversing the miracle, he saw trees as men walking"-heard the speechless sing, and, in the beautiful thought of "the Roman,' caught on his ear the fragments of a "divine soliloquy," filling up the pauses in a universal anthem. Hence the tumultuous, yet awful joy of his youthful feelings to Nature. Hence his estimation of its lowliest features; for does not every bush and tree appear to him a “pillar in the temple of his God?" The leaping fish pleases him, because its "cheer" in the lonely tarn is of praise. The dropping of the earth on the coffin lid, is a slow and solemn psalm, mingling in austere sympathy with the raven's croak, and in his "Power of sound" he proceeds elaborately to condense all those varied voices, high or low, soft or harsh, united or discordant, into one crushing chorus, like the choruses of Haydn, or of heaven. Nature undergoes no outward change to his eye, but undergoes a far deeper transfiguration to his spirit-as she stands up in the white robes, and with the sounding psalmodies of her mediatorial office, between him and the Infinite I AM. The mediatorial purpose of creation, fully subserved, is to be abandoned, that we may see "eye to eye," and that God may be "all in all." That such views of matter-its present ministry-the source of its beauty and glory-and its future destiny, transferred from the pages of both Testaments to those of our great moral and religious poets, have deepened some of their profoundest, and swelled some of their highest strains, is unquestionable. Such prospects as were in Milton's eye, when he sung, "Thy Saviour and thy Lord Last in the clouds from heaven to be revealed, In glory of the Father to dissolve Satan with his perverted world; then raise From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined, New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date," may be found in Thomson, in his closing Hymn to the Seasons, in Coleridge's "Religious Musings," (in Shelley's "Prometheus" even, but perverted and disguised), in Bailey's "Festus" (cumbered and entangled with his religious theory); and more rootedly, although less theologically, than in all the rest, in the poetry of Wordsworth. The secret of Wordsworth's profound and peculiar love for Nature, even in her meaner and minuter forms, may lie, perhaps, here. De Quincey seeks for it in a peculiar conformation of the eye, as if he actually did see more in the object than other men-in the rose a richer red, in the sky a deeper azure, in the broom a yellower gold, in the sun a more dazzling ray, in the sea a finer foam, and in the star a more sparkling splendor, than even Nature's own "sweet and cunning" hand put on; but the critic has not sought to explain the rationale of this peculiarity. Mere acuteness of vision it can not have been, else the eagle might have felt, though not written, "The Excursion". else the fact is not accountable why many of weak sight, such as Burke, have been rapturous admirers of Nature; and so, till we learn that Mr. De Quincey has looked through Wordsworth's eyes, we must call this a mere fancy. Hazlitt again, and others since, have accounted for the phenomenon by association-but this fails, we suspect, fully to explain the deep, native, and brooding passion in question-a passion which, instead of being swelled by the associations of after life, rose to full stature in youth, as "Tintern Abbey" testifies. One word of his own, perhaps, better solves the mystery-it is the one word "consecration". "The consecration and the poet's dream." Never must this feeling be confounded with Pantheism. All does not seem to him to be God, nor even (strictly speaking) divine; but all seems to be immediately from God-rushing out from him in being, to rush instantly back to him in service and praise. Again the natal dew of the first morning is seen lying on bud and blade, and the low voice of the first evening's song becomes audible again. Although Coleridge in his youth was a Spinozist, Wordsworth seems at once, and forever, to have recoiled from even his friend's eloquent version of that creedless creed, that baseless foundation, that system, through the phenomenon of which look not the bright eyes of Supreme Intelligence, but the blind face of irresponsible and infinite necessity. Shelley himself-with all the power his critics attribute to him of painting night, animating Atheism, and giving strange loveliness to annihilation-has failed in redeeming Spinoza's theory from the reproach of being as hateful as it is false; and there is no axiom we hold more strongly than this-that the theory which can not be rendered poetical, can not be true. Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty," said poor Keats, to whom time, however, was not granted to come down from the first glowing generalization of his heart, to the particular creeds which his ripened intellect would have, according to it, rejected or received. Nor, although Wordsworth is a devoted lover of Nature, down to what many consider the very blots—or, at least, dashes and commas in her page, is he blind to the fact of her transient |