and, after watching it for a few minutes, we turned back to a dark cleft in the rock which afforded a rude seat, and sat musing in silence.

Several parties had strolled past without seeing us in our recess, when two female figures, with their arms around each other's waists, sauntered slowly around the jutting rock below, and approached us, eagerly engaged in conversation. They came on to the very edge of the shadow which enveloped us, and turned to look back at the scene. As the head nearest me was raised to the light, I started half to my feet: it was Edith! In the same instant her voice of music broke on my ear, and an irresistible impulse to listen unobserved drew me down again upon my seat, and Job, with a similar instinct, laid his hand on my arm.

"It was his favourite spot!" said Edith. (We had been at Trenton together years before.) "I stood here with him, and I wish he stood here now that I might tell him what my hand hesitates to write." "Poor Philip!" said her companion, whom by the voice I recognised as the youngest of the Flemings, "I cannot conceive how you can resolve so coldly to break his heart."

I felt a dagger entering my bosom, but still I listened. Edith

went on.

Why, I will tell you, my dear little innocent. I loved Philip Slingsby when I thought I was going to die. It was then a fitting attachment, for I never thought to need of the goods of this world more than a sick chamber and a nurse; and Phil. was kind-hearted and devoted to me, and I lived at home. But, with returned health, a thousand ambitious desires have sprung up in my heart, and I find myself admired by whom I will, and every day growing more selfish and less poetical. Philip is poor, and love in a cottage, though very well for you if you like it, would never do for me. I should like him very well for a friend, for he is gentlemanlike and devoted, but, with my ideas, I should only make him miserable, and so-I think I had better put him out of misery at once-don't you think?"

A half-smothered groan of anguish escaped my lips; but it was lost in the roar of the waters, and Edith's voice, as she walked on, lessened and became inaudible to my ear. As her figure was lost in the shadow of the rocks beyond, I threw myself on the bosom of my friend, and wept in the unutterable agony of a crushed heart. I know not how that night was spent, but I awoke at noon of the next day, in my bed, with Job's hand clasped tenderly in my own.

V.

I kept my tryst. I was to meet Edith Linsey at Saratoga in July,the last month of the probation by which I had won a right to her love. I had not spoken to her, or written, or seen her (save, unknown to her, in the moment I have described) in the three long years to which my constancy was devoted. I had gained the usual meed of industry in my profession, and was admitted to its practice. I was on the threshold of manhood; and she had promised, before Heaven, here to give me heart and hand.

I had parted from her at twelve on that night three years, and, as the clock struck, I stood again by her side in the crowded ball-room of Saratoga.

"Good God! Mr. Slingsby !" she exclaimed as I put out my hand.

"Am I so changed that you do not know me, Miss Linsey ?" I asked, as she still looked with a wondering gaze into my face, pressing my hand, however, with real warmth, and evidently under the control, for the moment, of the feelings with which we had parted.!

Changed, indeed! Why, you have studied yourself to a skeleton! My dear Philip, you are ill!"

I was, but it was only for a moment. I asked her hand for a waltz, and never before or since came wit and laughter so freely to my lip. I was collected, but, at the same time, I was the gayest of the gay; and when everybody had congratulated me, in her hearing, on the school to which I had put my wits in my long apprenticeship to the law, I retired to the gallery looking down upon the garden, and cooled my brow and rallied my sinking heart.

The candles were burning low, and the ball was nearly over, when I entered the room again, and requested Edith to take a turn with me on the colonnade. She at once assented, and I could feel by her arm in mine, and see by the fixed expression on her lip, that she did so with the intention of revealing to me what she little thought I could so well anticipate.

"My probation is over," I said, breaking the silence which she seemed willing to prolong, and which had lasted till we had twice measured the long colonnade.

It was three years ago to-night, I think, since we parted." She spoke in an absent and careless tone, as if trying to work out another more prominent thought in her mind.

"Do you find me changed?" I asked.

"Yes-oh, yes! very!"

"But I am more changed than I seem, dear Edith!"

She turned to me as if to ask me to explain myself.

"Will you listen to me while I tell you how ?" "What can you mean ? Certainly."

"Then listen, for I fear I can scarce bring myself to repeat what I am going to say. When I first learned to love you, and when I promised to love you for life, you were thought to be dying, and I was a boy. I did not count on the future, for I despaired of your living to share it with me, and, if I had done so, I was still a child and knew nothing of the world. I have since grown more ambitious, and, I may as well say at once, more selfish and less poetical. You will easily divine my drift. You are poor, and I find myself, as you have seen tonight, in a position which will enable me to marry more to my advantage; and, with these views, I am sure I should only make you miserable by fulfilling my contract with you, and will agree with me that I consult our mutual happiness by this course-don't you think?"

you

At this instant I gave a signal to Job, who approached and made some sensible remarks about the weather; and, after another turn or two, I released Miss Linsey's arm, and, cautioning her against the night air, left her to finish her promenade and swallow her own projected speech and mine, and went to bed.

And so ended my first love!

SLINGSBY.

WORDSWORTH'S NEW POEMS.

A LATE celebrated critic used to say that the three greatest egotists he knew of, that is, the three writers who felt their own being most powerfully and exclusively, were Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Benvenuto Cellini. He would defy the world, in Swift's fashion, to furnish out a fourth.

There is unquestionably great truth in this; but the men must be taken with a very wide distinction. The genius of all of them we certainly most sincerely believe to have been the result of their temperament-an intensification of themselves. The interest they create is that of their own feelings; the sentiment with which they inform their writings is born of a thousand personal recollections; every object standing out upon the page, stands out there with the very being of the writer wound, as it were, around it. But there is a wide distinction notwithstanding. It would scarcely be pertinent here, with our present purpose, to examine its details with reference to the three writers. The singular character of the memoirs of the Italian we shall, indeed, take some other opportunity of examining; but we may say a few words, not inaptly, on the different development of egotism in Rousseau and in Wordsworth.

The egotism of Rousseau is of that exaggerated nature which the night cannot calm nor the day cheer. The incidents of his life, having fixed themselves upon his heart with the inveteracy of passion, prey there continually. Nature is moulded to their will, and to their purposes every aspect of nature is exaggerated to contribute. This is not Wordsworth's way. His personal feelings, intense as they are, are moulded to the sweet will of Nature, are calmed by her sway, are cheered by her influence: it is in her eye that he analyses his feelings and contemplates his powers-it is through her mirror he reflects his favourite thoughts, and from the height of her sublimity rebukes the frailties of worldly aspiring, and inculcates the knowledge which leads to love. His egotism has other than personal objects. His life has not been a life of incident, but of contemplation-his thoughts, therefore, have no retrospective passion to sway them to the mood of what it likes or loathes. When Rousseau is arrested by the periwinkle in his path, and cries out with startling fondness, Ah! Voila de la pervenche! we are carried back to a dream of love, of passion, and of hope quite gone, and have visions of youth and Madame de Warens. When Wordsworth recognises the sparkling eye of the daisy, it is only some contemplative feeling at that instant passing through his own mind, which makes the daisy to him for the moment the most beautiful of flowers, and enriches him with thoughts that lie too deep for tears. The object with both, the reader will remark, derives not its interest from itself, but from the power of association-from that which connects it with a thousand personal feelings, which makes it for the time a link in the chain of the personal thought, a fibre of the heart, of the observer. The periwinkle is not admired for its own sake, nor is the daisy. Neither Rousseau nor Wordsworth present their flower as a thing to be immediately admired; both of them have the antipathy to immediate effect; and the repugnance to place that before the reader which tells for itself without

the intervention of the poet. But how wide, nevertheless, the distinction is between them, we have endeavoured to show.

We have said nothing in these remarks on the egotism of Wordsworth which detracts from his wonderful genius. We love, for our own parts, to view the aspects of nature through such feelings as those of this great poet, which belong, as we believe, to the highest and noblest attributes of humanity. Wherever there is a display of natural beauty, sublimity, or grandeur, we feel that there Wordsworth has a right to be. We would have him with us--at once a fellow-worshipper and a superior being, whose more intimate communion with the glories before which we are prostrate-realizing the immortal comparison of Moses and Elias in the Transfiguration-" only adds to the simplicity of his zeal and the humility of his devotion." Would we wish to pass

"Bare trees and mountains bare,
And grass in the green fields,"

With the commonest as

alone? We would have Wordsworth with us. the loftiest things, his companionship is grateful and appropriate. Without that, the cuckoo's cry might salute our ear in vain, and in vain the linnet's nest arrest our eye! Without him, a grey cloak seen in the distance on the lonely moor would have no meaning, nor the lichens on the rock a life, nor a withered thorn be pressed down, as now, with thoughts of sublimity and pathos! The egotism of Wordsworth is noble and elevating to nature," linking to her fair works the human soul," and considering everything, both in nature and in humanity, a portion alone of the vast chain which comprehends the universe. When the struggles of the one are over, still he carries into death the memory of their living associations with the other, and

"Nature's pleasant robe of green, Humanity's appointed shroud, enwraps Their monuments and their memory!"

Egotism here is nothing more than an intense activity given to one faculty for the nobler development of others. Let us always remember, too, the subjects to which Wordsworth has generally devoted himself. They are such as would have been passed, perhaps, unnoticed but for him-but for the light of sentiment and thought he furnishes to their view from the recesses of his own mind. It is out of the very simplicity and apparent insignificance of a natural object that his noblest illustrations have been drawn, and his noblest lessons taught. Are we not in this the clear gainers? Undoubtedly we are. Nothing is lost in the want of the ordinary accidents and accessaries of grandeur. Reality is exalted far above them. The simplest of thoughts becomes sublime. In that we recognize the glory of the Epic. In that a whole world may lie shadowed

"Exchange the shepherd's frock of native grey
For robes with regal purple tinged; convert
The crook into a sceptre; give the pomp
Of circumstance, and here the tragic Muse
Shall find apt subjects for her highest art.
Amid the groves, beneath the shadowy hills
The generations are prepared; the pangs,
The internal pangs are ready; the dread strife
Of poor humanity's afflicted will
Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny!"

In one point of view, notwithstanding, we are ready to admit that Wordsworth's egotism stands in the way of truth, and intercepts its genuineness of colour. We think, for instance, that Crabbe's pictures of homely life are infinitely more true. If Wordsworth draws you a beggar, it is a beggar of his own—if a sailor, if a schoolmaster, he does it in the like fashion. He particularizes, but only to draw some general

conclusion.

"From their gross matter he abstracts their forms,

And draws a kind of quintessence from things."

He presents separate lineaments to you, as representations, not so properly of distinct individual character, as of the medium through which, for the moment, he desires to convey to you the current of his thought. And than that thought, perhaps, nothing can be deeper, nothing more original, nothing more true, nothing grander or more beautiful;—but it takes the place of the character on which it is induced, and we find ourselves familiar, after reading the poem, not with the proper qualities and peculiar natures of the persons it refers to, but with some new section of Mr. Wordsworth's philosophy, educed from a subtle inquisition into the relative natures of the vagrant, or the beggar, or the schoolmaster, or whomever we had been led to hope acquaintance with. We are quite aware that we must deny to Wordsworth that noble title of a philosopher as well as poet, which he so richly merits-before we hesitate to concede that in all this there is deep instruction. We do not question that; but we say that it proves a want in the poetry of Wordsworth, as poetry. We wish at times to go into the company of the rustic, the unfortunate, or the poor, as a companion. We wish to have nothing to do with philosophy or morality. We wish only to see the life to which we have been unaccustomed, without the restraint which would be forced upon it by its consciousness of our presence. This we cannot find in the poetry of Wordsworth. We recollect reading with surprise some time ago, in an excellent paper upon this great poet, that immediately before the first publication of the " Lyrical Ballads," Coleridge waited on an eminent bookselling house to ask whether, in the opinion of the partners, a series of poems" in the manner of Teniers' paintings" was likely to attract popular notice and favour. We wonder what the gentlemen said; but we wonder far more what could have induced Coleridge to commit such a blunder. Teniers is literal, if ever the literal existed. Teniers never attempts to carry you beyond his scene. Wordsworth's only motive for introducing it to you is, on the contrary, to carry you beyond it. It is very true that familiar characters and incidents are handled by both, but there the likeness ends. One set of them eat, and drink, and laugh, and play, and enjoy themselves the other illustrate the philosophy of general human nature.

Since writing this, we have turned with some misgivings to passages of "Peter Bell." They are very masterly indeed, and may, in one or two respects, detract from what we have written; but not materially. And this poem, it will be recollected, stands in some points quite alone among Wordsworth's writings. The first portrait of Peter Bell himself is masterly and powerful in the highest degree. As a description, it is unquestionably finer and more true-thoughted than anything in Crabbe; and it is only just, therefore, after what we have said, to refer the reader to it. Still it is not a picture which Teniers could have painted.