button to main menu  Gents Mag 1850 part 2 p.465
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Gentleman's Magazine 1850 part 2 p.465

Was going then to bury those two books:
The one that held acquaintance with the stars,
And wedded soul to soul in purest bond
Of reason, undistrubed by space or time:
The other that was a god, yea many gods,
Had voices more than all the winds, with power
To exhilarate the spirit, and to soothe
Through every clime the heart of human kind.
The Arab proceeds on his mission: the dreamer attends him across the waste, until looking backwards he descries

-- O'er half the wilderness diffused,
A bed of glittering light: I asked the cause;
"It is," said he, "the waters of the deep
Gathering upon us;" quickening the pace
Of the unwieldy creature he bestrode,
He left me: I called after him aloud;
He heeded not; but, with his twofold charge
Still in his grasp, before me, full in view,
Went hurrying o'er the illimitable waste,
With the fleet waters of a drowning world
In chase of him.
Our last extract has been long; but it is an extract from Wordsworth, and we were unwilling to mutilate the dream-machinery by stricter compression. We must now hurry onwards. Nine books of the autobiography remain, of which our limits permit only a meagre outline, although we could easily transcribe beauty or wisdom from every page. The society of Cambridge became less attractive to Wordsworth; he resumed in great measure his communings with nature, and even felt those blind motions of the spirit that whispered to him his future vocation as a poet. He wandered during his second summer vacation.

Between romantic Dovedale's spiry rocks,
Pried into Yorkshire's dales, or hidden tracts
Of my own native region -
and when the third summer had freed him from restraint accompanied a youthful friend, mountain-bred like himself, on an excursion through France and northern Italy. The first aspect of the continent, even now when steamboats and railways have nearly banished all startling or picturesque distinctions, is an epoch in every man's life; and most especially so if the man should by some millionth chance be a poet. But it was no ordinary phase of diversity that greeted Wordsworth upon landing in France. It was the Jubilee of the great Federation: the whole land wore a face of joy, - joy for the moment as deep as being, and as universal as light - joy springing from the certainty of one great deliverance, and from the unconsciousness at the moment that tyranny, unlike destiny, is not one form under many names, but that both her names and her aspects are myriad and multiform. We are tempted by the narrowness of our limits to deviate for an instant from chronological order, and to bring into one view, and into this place, the general results of Wordsworth's tour and residence in France upon his character and poetry. We have already observed that his sympathies were not readily moved; we have seen that at Cambridge, after a brief interim, his bias to lonely communings with nature and his own heart returned upon him; and that he was rather a spectator of life than an actor in any of its scenes. But the French Revolution was an electric shock to his whole spiritual being, perversive in its immediate, and permanent in its remote effects. It led him, both in its transit and catastrophe, to meditate deeply on the destinies and capacities of man; upon the powers and duties of the poet; upon the relations of society and nature; upon all that keeps man little, and upon all that might render him great. The lyrical ballads, the critical prefaces, and the
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