Water-witches, crowned with raits,1
Bear me to your lethal tide :

I die! I come! my true love waits.
Thus the damsel spake, and died.

But perhaps the grandest thing in all Chatterton is his fragmentary Ode to Liberty in his Tragedy of Godwin. We know nothing finer in its kind in the whole range of English poetry. A chorus is supposed to sing the song; which is throughout, it will be seen, a burst of glorious and sustained personification:

When Freedom, drest in blood-stained vest,
To every knight her war-song sung,

Upon her head wild weeds were spread,
A gory anlace2 by her hung.

She danced on the heath;

She heard the voice of Death;

Pale-eyed Affright, his heart of silver hue,
In vain assailed her bosom to acale.3

She heard unflemed the shrieking voice of woe,
And sadness in the owlet shake the dale.

She shook the burlèd 5 spear;

On high she jeest her shield;
Her foemen all appear,

And flizz along the field.

Power, with his heafod straught into the skies,
His spear a sun-beam, and his shield a star,
Alike tway breming gronfires rolls his eyes,
Chafts with his iron feet and sounds to war.
She sits upon a rock;

She bends before his spear;
She rises from the shock,
Wielding her own in air.

Hard as the thunder doth she drive it on;

Wit skilly wimpled 9 guides it to his crown;

His long sharp spear, his spreading shield is gone;

He falls, and falling rolleth thousands down.

War, gore-faced War, by envy burl'd, 10 arist

His fiery helm nodding to the air,

Ten bloody arrows in his straining fist."

What a picture in the last line! With no other evidence before us than is afforded by this and the other antique pieces which we have quoted, one may assert unhesitatingly, not only that Chatterton was a true English poet of the eighteenth century, but also that, compared with the other English poets of the part of that century immediately prior to the new era

begun by Burns and Wordsworth, he was, with all his immaturity, almost solitary in the possession of the highest poetic gift. Pope, Thomson, and Goldsmith, were poets of this century; and no sensible man will for a moment think of comparing the boy of Bristol, in respect of his whole activity, with these fine stars of our literature, or even with some of the lesser stars that shone along with them. But he had a specific fire and force of imagination in him which they had not; and when one remembers that he was but seventeen years and nine months old when he died, and that most of his antiques were written fully a year before that time, little wonder that, with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats, one looks back again and again on his brief existence with a kind of awe, as on the track of a heaven-shot meteor earthwards through a night of gloom.

WORDSWORTH.*

ANOTHER great spirit has recently gone from the midst of us. It is now three months since the nation heard, with a deep though quiet sadness, that an aged man of venerable mien, who for fifty years had borne worthily the name of English poet, had at length disappeared from those scenes of lake and mountain, where, in stately care of his own worth, he had fixed his recluse abode, and passed forward, one star the more, into the still unfeatured future, whither all that lives is rolling, and whither, as he well knew and believed, the Shakespeares and Miltons, whom men count dead, had but as yesterday transferred their kindred radiance. When the news spread, it seemed as if our island were suddenly a man the poorer, as if some pillar or other notable object, long conspicuous on its broad surface, had suddenly fallen down. It is right, then, that we should detain our thoughts for a little in the vicinity of this event; that, the worldly course of such a man having now been ended, we should stand for a little around his grave, and think solemnly of what he was. Neither few nor unimportant, we may be sure, are the reflections that should suggest themselves over the grave of William Wordsworth.

Of the various mysteries that the human mind can contemplate, none is more baffling, and at the same time more charming to the understanding, than the nature of that law which determines the differences of power and mental manifestation between age and age. That all history is an evolution, that each generation inherits all that had been accumulated by its predecessor, and bequeathes in turn all that itself contains to

* NORTH BRITISH REVIEW: August, 1850.-The Poetical Works of WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, D.C.L., Poet Laureate, &c. London, 1849.

its successor, is an idea to which, in one form or another, science binds us down. But, native as this idea now is in all cultivated minds, with how many facts, and with what a large proportion of our daily speech, does it not still stand in apparent contradiction! Looking back upon the past career of our race, does not the eye single out, as by instinct, certain epochs that are epochs of virtue and glory, and others that are epochs of frivolity and shame? Do we not speak of the age of Pericles in Greece, of the Augustan age in Rome, of the outburst of chivalry in modern Europe, of the noble era of Elizabeth in England, and of the sad decrepitude that followed it? And is there not a certain justice of perception in this mode of speaking? Does it not seem as if all ages were not equally favoured from on high; gifts both moral and in-. tellectual being vouchsafed to one that are all but withheld from another? As with individual men, so with nations and with humanity at large, may not the hour of highest spiritual elevation and sternest moral resolve be nearest the hour of most absolute obliviousness and most profound degradation? Has not humanity also its moods—now brutal and full-acorned, large in physical device, and pregnant with the wit of unconcern; again, touched to higher things, tearful for very goodness, turning an upward eye to the stars, and shivering to its smallest nerve with the power and the sense of beauty? In rude and superficial expression of which fact, have not our literary men coined the common-place that a critical and sceptical age always follows an age of heroism and creative genius? These, we say, are queries which, though they may not be answered to their depths, it is still useful to put and ponder. One remark only will we venture in connexion with them. According to one theory, it is a sufficient explanation of these moral and intellectual changes in the spirit of nations, to suppose that they take place by a law of mere contagion or propagation from individual to individual. One man of powerful and original nature, or of unusually accurate perceptions, makes his appearance in some central, or, it may be, sequestered spot; he gains admirers or makes converts; disciples gather round him, or try to form an opinion of him from a distance; they,