that " DESERTED COTTAGE. 513 grew in a cold, damp nook," he thus faithfully chronicles the process of his return: — "My thirst I slak'd; and from the cheerless spot The Pedlar then gives an account of the last inhabitants of the deserted cottage beside them. These were, a good industrious weaver and his wife and children. They are very happy for a while; till sickness and want of work came upon them; and then the father enlisted as a soldier, and the wife pined in that lonely cottage growing every year more careless and desponding, as her anxiety and fears for her absent husband, of whom no tidings ever reached her, accumulated. Her children died, and left her cheerless and alone; and at last she died also; and the cottage fell to decay. We must say, that there is very considerable pathos in the telling of this simple story; and that they who can get over the repugnance excited by the triteness of its incidents, and the lowness of its objects, will not fail to be struck with the author's knowledge of the human heart, and the power he possesses of stirring up its deepest and gentlest sympathies. His prolixity, indeed, it is not so easy to get over. This little story fills about twenty-five quarto pages; and abounds, of course, with mawkish sentiment, and details of preposterous minuteness. When the tale is told, the travellers take their staves, and end their first day's journey, without further adventure, at a little inn. The Second Book sets them forward betimes in the morning; they pass by a Village Wake; and as they approach a more solitary part of the mountains, the old man tells the author that he is taking him to see an old friend of his, who had formerly been chaplain to a Highland regiment had lost a beloved wife been roused from his dejection by the first enthusiasm of the French Revolution-had emigrated, on its miscarriage, to America - and returned disgusted to hide himself in the retreat to which they were now ascending. That retreat is then most tediously described a smooth green valley 514 EXCURSION MEETING WITH THE SOLITARY. in the heart of the mountain, without trees, and with only one dwelling. Just as they get sight of it from the ridge above, they see a funeral train proceeding from the solitary abode, and hurry on with some apprehension for the fate of the amiable misanthrope— whom they find, however, in very tolerable condition at the door, and learn that the funeral was that of an aged pauper who had been boarded out by the parish in that cheap farm house, and had died in consequence of long exposure to heavy rain. The old chaplain, or, as Mr. Wordsworth is pleased to call him, the Solitary, tells this dull story at prodigious length; and after giving an inflated description of an effect of mountain mists in the evening sun, treats his visitors with a rustic dinner-and they walk out to the fields at the close of the second book. The Third makes no progress in the excursion. It is entirely filled with moral and religious conversation and debate, and with a more ample detail of the Solitary's past life than had been given in the sketch of his friend. The conversation is, in our judgment, exceedingly dull and mystical; and the Solitary's confessions insufferably diffuse. Yet there is occasionally very considerable force of writing and tenderness of sentiment in this part of the work. The Fourth Book is also filled with dialogues, ethical and theological; and, with the exception of some brilliant and forcible expressions here and there, consists of an exposition of truisms, more cloudy, wordy, and inconceivably prolix, than any thing we ever met with. In the beginning of the Fifth Book, they leave the solitary valley, taking its pensive inhabitant along with them, and stray on to where the landscape sinks down into milder features, till they arrive at a church, which stands on a moderate elevation in the centre of a wide and fertile vale. Here they meditate for a while among the monuments, till the Vicar comes out and joins them; -and, recognising the Pedlar for an old acquaintance, mixes graciously in the conversation, which proceeds in a very edifying manner till the close of the book. VILLAGE OBITUARY. 515 The Sixth contains a choice obituary, or characteristic account, of several of the persons who lie buried before this group of moralizers ;-an unsuccessful lover, who had found consolation in natural history-a miner, who worked on for twenty years, in despite of universal ridicule, and at last found the vein he had expected-two political enemies reconciled in old age to each otheran old female miser-a seduced damsel-and two widowers, one who had devoted himself to the education of his daughters, and one who had preferred marrying a prudent middle-aged woman to take care of them. In the beginning of the Eighth Book, the worthy Vicar expresses, in the words of Mr. Wordsworth's own epitome, "his apprehensions that he had detained his auditors too long-invites them to his house-Solitary, disinclined to comply, rallies the Wanderer, and somewhat playfully draws a comparison between his itinerant profession and that of a knight-errant — which leads to the Wanderer giving an account of changes in the country, from the Manufacturing spirit-Its favourable effects The other side of the picture," &c. &c. After these very poetical themes are exhausted, they all go into the house, where they are introduced to the Vicar's wife and daughter; and while they sit chatting in the parlour over a family dinner, his son and one of his companions come in with a fine dish of trouts piled on a blue slate; and after being caressed by the company, are sent to dinner in the nursery. This ends the eighth book. The Ninth and last is chiefly occupied with a mystical discourse of the Pedlar; who maintains, that the whole universe is animated by an active principle, the noblest seat of which is in the human soul; and moreover, that the final end of old age is to train and enable us "To hear the mighty stream of Tendency To the vast multitude whose doom it is To run the giddy round of vain delight-" 516 CLERICAL HOSPITALITY AND PROFITABLE TALK. with other matters as luminous and emphatic. The hostess at length breaks off the harangue, by proposing that they should all make a little excursion on the lake, -and they embark accordingly; and, after navigating for some time along its shores, and drinking tea on a little island, land at last on a remote promontory, from which they see the sun go down,- and listen to a solemn and pious, but rather long prayer from the Vicar. They then walk back to the parsonage door, where the Author and his friend propose to spend the evening;- but the Solitary prefers walking back in the moonshine to his own valley, after promising to take another ramble with them If time, with free consent, be yours to give, -And here the publication somewhat abruptly closes. Our abstract of the story has been so extremely concise, that it is more than usually necessary for us to lay some specimens of the work itself before our readers. Its grand staple, as we have already said, consists of a kind of mystical morality: and the chief characteristics of the style are, that it is prolix, and very frequently unintelligible: and though we are sensible that no great gratification is to be expected from the exhibition of those qualities, yet it is necessary to give our readers a taste of them, both to justify the sentence we have passed, and to satisfy them that it was really beyond our power to present them with any abstract or intelligible account of those long conversations which we have had so much occasion to notice in our brief sketch of its contents. We need give ourselves no trouble, however, to select passages for this purpose. Here is the first that presents itself to us on opening the volume; and if our readers can form the slightest guess at its meaning, we must give them credit for a sagacity to which we have no pretension. "But, by the storms of circumstance unshaken, Duty exists;-immutably survive, For our support, the measures and the forms, MYSTICISM SOLEMN VERBOSITY. 517 Which an abstract Intelligence supplies; Whose kingdom is, where Time and Space are not: What more, that may not perish?" ""Tis, by comparison, an easy task Earth to despise; but to converse with heav'n, We have, or hope, of happiness and joy,—, Conceptions equal to the Soul's desires."- p. 144, 147. This is a fair sample of that rapturous mysticism which eludes all comprehension, and fills the despairing reader with painful giddiness and terror. The following, which we meet with on the very next page, is in the same general strain:- though the first part of it affords a good specimen of the author's talent for enveloping a plain and trite observation in all the mock majesty of solemn verbosity. A reader of plain understanding, we suspect, could hardly recognise the familiar remark, that excessive grief for our departed friends is not very consistent with a firm belief in their immortal felicity, in the first twenty lines of the following passage:- In the succeeding lines we do not ourselves pretend to recognise any thing. "From this infirmity of mortal kind at least, Sorrow proceeds, which else were not; No natural branch; despondency far less. |