approbation or dislike, not merely innocent but salutary; and for the inexperienced disciple how many pleasures may be thus cut off, what joy, what admiration, and what love! While in their stead are introduced into the ingenuous mind misgivings, a mistrust of its own evidence, dispositions to affect to feel where there can be no real feeling, indecisive judgments, a superstructure of opinions that has no base to support it, and words uttered by rote with the impertinence of a parrot or a mocking-bird, yet which may not be listened to with the same indifference, as they can not be heard without some feeling of moral disapprobation.

These results, I contend, whatever may be the benefit to be derived from such an enlightened teacher, are in their degree inevitable. And by this process, humility and docile dispositions may exist towards the master, endued as he is with the power which personal preference confers; but at the same time they will be liable to overstep their due bounds, and to degenerate into passiveness and prostration of mind. This towards him; while, with respect to other living men, nay even to the mighty spirits of past times, there may be associated with such weakness a want of modesty and humility. Insensibly may steal in presumption and a habit of sitting in judgment in cases where no sentiment ought to have existed by diffidence or veneration. Such virtues are the sacred attributes of youth; its appropriate calling is not to distinguish in the fear of being deceived or degraded, not to analyze with scrupulous minuteness, but to accumulate in genial confidence; its instinct, its safety, its benefit, its glory, is to love, to admire, to feel, and to labor. Nature has irrevocably decreed, that our prime dependence in all stages of life after infancy and childhood have been passed through (nor do I know that this latter ought to be excepted) must be upon our own minds; and that the way to knowledge shall be long, difficult, winding, and oftentimes returning upon itself.

What has been said is a mere sketch, and that only of a part of the interesting country into which we have been led; but my correspondent will be able to enter the paths that have been pointed out. Should he do this and advance steadily for a while, he needs not fear any deviations from the truth which will be finally injurious to him. He will not long have his admiration fixed upon unworthy objects; he will neither be clogged nor drawn aside by the love of friends or kindred, betraying his un

derstanding through his affections; he will neither be bowed down by conventional arrangements of manners producing too often a lifeless decency; nor will the rock of his spirit wear away in the endless beating of the waves of the world; neither will that portion of his own time, which he must surrender to labors by which his livelihood is to be earned or his social duties performed, be unprofitable to himself indirectly, while it is directly useful to others; for that time has been primarily surrendered through an act of obedience to a moral law established by himself, and therefore he moves then also along the orbit of perfect liberty.

Let it be remembered, that the advice requested does not relate to the government of the more dangerous passions, or to the fundamental principles of right and wrong as acknowledged by the universal conscience of mankind. I may therefore assure my youthful correspondent, if he will endeavor to look into himself in the manner which I have exhorted him to do, that in him the wish will be realized, to him in due time the prayer granted, which was uttered by that living teacher of whom he speaks with gratitude as of a benefactor, when in his character of philosophical poet, having thought of morality as implying in its essence voluntary obedience, and producing the effect of order, he transfers in the transport of imagination, the law of moral to physical natures, and having contemplated, through the medium of that order, all modes of existence as subservient to one spirit, concludes his address to the power of duty in the following words:

To humbler functions, awful power!

I call thee: I myself commend
Unto thy guidance from this hour;
Oh, let my weakness have an end!
Give unto me, made lowly wise,
The spirit of self-sacrifice;
The confidence of reason give,

And in the light of truth thy bondman let me live!*

This reply to Mathetes was written by Mr. Wordsworth.-Ed.

We can not but look up with reverence to the advanced natures of the naturalists and moralists in highest repute amongst us, and wish they had been heightened by a more noble principle, which had crowned all their various sciences with the principal science, and in their brave strayings after truth helpt them to better fortune than only to meet with her handmaids, and kept them from the fate of Ulysses, who wandering through the shades met all the ghosts, yet could not see the queen.-J. H. (JOHN HALL?) his Motion to the Parliament of England concerning the Advancement of Learning.

THE preceding section, ending with the second. Landing Place, had for its express object the principles of our duty as citizens, or morality as applied to politics. According to his scheme there remained for The Friend first, to treat of the principles of morality generally, and then of those of religion. But since the commencement of this edition,* the question has repeatedly arisen in my mind, whether morality can be said to have any principle distinguishable from religion, or religion any substance divisible from morality. Or should I attempt to distinguish them by their objects, so that morality were the religion which we owe to things and persons of this life, and religion our morality toward God and the permanent concerns of our own souls, and those of our brethren ;-yet it would be evident, that the latter must involve the former, while any pretence to the former without the latter would be as bold a mockery as, if having withholden an estate from the rightful owner, we should seek to appease our conscience by the plea, that we had not failed to bestow alms on him in his beggary. It was never my purpose, and it does not appear the want of the age, to bring together the rules and inducements of

*The second.-Ed.

worldly prudence. But to substitute these for the laws of reason and conscience, or even to confound them under one name, is a prejudice, say rather a profanation, which I became more and more reluctant to flatter by even an appearance of assent, though it were only in a point of form and technical arrangement.

At a time, when my thoughts were thus employed, I met with a volume of old tracts, published during the interval from the captivity of Charles I. to the restoration of his son. Since my earliest manhood it had been among my fondest regrets, that a more direct and frequent reference had not been made by our historians to the books, pamphlets, and flying sheets of that momentous period, during which all the possible forms of truth and error (the latter being themselves for the greater part caricatures of truth) bubbled up on the surface of the public mind, as in the ferment of a chaos. It would be difficult to conceive a notion or a fancy, in politics, ethics, theology, or even in physics and physiology, not anticipated by the men of that age;—in this as in most other respects sharply contrasted with the products of the French revolution, which was scarcely more characterized by its sanguinary and sensual abominations than (to borrow the words of an eminent living poet) by

A dreary want at once of books and men.*

The parliament's army was not wholly composed of mere fanatics. There was no mean proportion of enthusiasts; and that enthusiasm must have been of no ordinary grandeur, which could draw from a common soldier, in an address to his comrades, such a dissuasive from acting in the cruel spirit of fear, and such sentiments, as are contained in the following passage, which I would rescue from oblivion,† both for the honor of our forefathers, and in proof of the difference between the republicans of that period, and the democrats, or rather demagogues, of the present. It is as follows:

"I judge it ten times more honorable for a single person, in

*Wordsworth.

The more so because every year consumes its quota. The late Sir Wilfred Lawson's predecessor, from some pique or other, left a large and unique collection of the pamphlets published from the commencement of the civil war to the Restoration to his butler, and it supplied the chandlers' and druggists' shops of Penrith and Kendal for many years.

-witnessing a truth to oppose the world in its power, wisdom, and authority, this standing in its full strength, and he singly and nakedly, than fighting many battles by force of arms, and gaining them all. I have no life but truth; and if truth be advanced by my suffering, then my life also. If truth live, I live; if justice live, I live; and these can not die, but by any man's suffering for them are enlarged, enthroned. Death can not hurt me. I sport with him, am above his reach. I live an immortal life. What we have within, that only can we see without. I can not see death; and he that hath not this freedom is a slave. He is in the arms of that, the phantom of which he beholdeth and seemeth to himself to flee from. Thus, you see that the king hath a will to redeem his present loss.

You see it by means of the lust after power in your own hearts. For my part I condemn his unlawful seeking after it. I condemn his falsehood and indirectness therein. But if he should not endeavor the restoring of the kingliness to the realm, and the dignity of its kings, he were false to his trust, false to the majesty of God that he is intrusted with. The desire of recovering his loss is justifiable. Yea, I should condemn him as unbelieving and pusillanimous, if he should not hope for it. But here is his misery and yours too at present, that ye are unbelieving and pusillanimous, and are, both alike, pursuing things of hope in the spirit of fear. Thus you condemn the parliament for acknowledging the king's power so far as to seek to him by a treaty; while by taking such pains against him you manifest your own belief that he hath a great power;-which is a wonder, that a prince despoiled of all his authority, naked, a prisoner, destitute of all friends and helps, wholly at the disposal of others, tied and bound too with all obligations that a parliament can imagine to hold him, should yet be such a terror to you, and fright you into such a large remonstrance, and such perilous proceedings to save yourselves from him. Either there is some strange power in him, or you are full of fear that are so affected with a shadow.

"But as you give testimony to his power, so you take a course to advance it; for there is nothing that hath any spark of God in it, but the more it is suppressed, the more it rises. If you did indeed believe, that the original of power were in the people, you would believe likewise that the concessions extorted from the king would rest with you. And, doubtless, such of them as in right