The Sun.
London, England, 1851-10-22 00:00:00

could be more silly or more fantastic. Fancy a man,
on seeing a robin iii chase of a butterfly, writing—
" Galld Father Adam optu his eyes,
And .t-ee this siffhG heil,atil the skies,
he'd wish to close them again."
Fancy him addressing a sexton thus :
" Mark the spot to which I point!
From this platiorm eight feet square,
Take not even a finger joint,
Andrew's whole fireside is there."
Fancy him describing one of his precious heroines in
this manner :
" She dwelt among the untrodden ways,
Beside the springs of Dove;
A maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love."
Fancy him, moreover, on bearing of the death of a
brother, pouring out his sorrows in this exceedingly
natural strain:—
" Sea, ship, drowned, shipwreck, so it came,
The meek, the bravo, the good, was gone; .
Ho who had bean our living John
Was nothing bat a name."
Fancy his calling this poetry :
" Such seemed this man, not all alive nor dead,
Nur ail asleep--in his extreme uld age."

Or this—
" A human being destined to awake
To human life, or something very near
To human life."

Or this—
Calm did he sit under the-wide-spread tree
Of his old age; and yet less calm and meek;
Winningly meek or venerably calm,
Than slow and torpid."
Fancy his singing of the spring time, when-
- " the patient ptiniroke sits
Like a beggar in the cold;"
or employing in regard to a dead limb a simile so
very novel and exquisite as this—
"I raised, while kneeling by his side,
His hand: it dropped like lead."
Fancy this man writing—
His limbs would toss about him with delight
Like branches when strong winds the trees annoy;"
or again—
" That tall man, a giant in bulk and in height,
Not an inch of his body is free from delight;
Can keep himself still, if ho would? oh, not be!
The music stirs in him like wind through a tree."
Fancy this man squatting himself down before a
thorn and thus musing upon it :
" There is a thorn—it looks eo old, ;
In truth you'd find it hard to say
How it could ever have been young,
It looks so old and grey."
And then fancy him deliberately enstalled as the
Poet-Laureate of England, and worshipped as the
originator of a new era and the thunder of a new
school in the annals of our national literature ! Really
after this it was rather too hard upon Mr. Wakley to
abuse him for asserting that he could write poetry
like this by the mile ! But that the late Mr. Words-
worth could accomplish worse things even than any,
of those we have above particularised, it is only ne-
cessary in proof to extract a single passage from Mr.
Wright's "Introduction" to his present volume.
This passage has reference to Mr. Wordsworth's
"Anecdote for Fathers," "in which," says Mr.
Wright, " he says he has a boy of five years old, with
whom he walked and talked one morning, as was his
custom, with their quiet home all full in view.'
His own musings recurred to Kilve's delightful shore,
where they had resided a year previously. Kilve he
thought was a favoured place,' and so is Liswyn
farm.' In very idleness' be asked the boy whether
he preferred to be on Kilve's smooth shore,' or at
Liswyn farm ?' At Kilve was the answer? Why ?
the boy knew not why • and being pressed for a
reason, he hung down his head' and blushed with
shame,' but remained silent. Three times the in-
terrogatory was put ; when the boy raised his head,
and seeing a vane upon the housetop, replied—
"' At Kilve there was no weathercock
And that's the reason why.'
"Pleased with the evidence of childish sagacity, he
exclaims—

" ' 0 dearest, dearest boy! my heart
For better lore would seldom yearn,
Could I but teach the hundredth part
Of what from thee I learn.'
"If the poet's admirers be sufficiently versed in
the profound to discover the worth attached to this
revelation, they can better deal with the problematical
than I can. To me it would seem that for the sake
of bringing this child into ridicule, fifteen stanzas
were written, which, whether viewed in regard to
their meanness of diction, or poverty of idea, should
serve as well to show that he was the veritable son of
the writer,"
Well may we find it observed of the writer of
such twaddling nonsense, corrected and uncorrected
as it was, that he exemplified in himself the truth of
the proverb "Nil sine magno vita labore dedit morta-
libus." And well may Lord Byron exclaim, in regard
to the excessively vulgar persons celebrated by Mr.
Wordsworth in his versification—such persons as
Betty Foy and Susan Gale, as Goody Blake and Harry
Gill, as Alice Fell and Peter Bell, cum cateris
paribus—
Pedlars,' and boats,' and ' waggons!' Oh! ye shades
Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this?"
Yet this is the man who is crammed down our throats
as a Poet, almost as the Poet, certainly as the Poet of
Nature—as it common sense alone would not be suf-
ficient to make us recoil before this unsurpassable dis-
pley of facetious puerility and preternatural silliness.
Turning from the subject of Mr. Wright's criticism
to his own metrical productions, we must at once avow
in their regard to having experienced a very grievous
disappointment. Agreeing as we did so thoroughly
with everything he save in his " Introduction, we
must acknowledge that we were predisposed to be
gratified with his own effusion, and in mere grati-
tude for our common sympathy, to be enabled to
yield him a full meed of commendation. Not such,
however, we regret to say have been the results of
our dispassionate perusal of his volume. We look
upon it as a curiosity, certainly—seeing that it con-
sists of love songs and such like things, not one line
of which was composed before the author had entered
on his fortieth year—but assuredly we look upon it
as nothing more remarkable in any particular. Mr.
Wright has sung of all sorts of little flowers, and all
sorts of little WI ds, and all sorts of little fantastic
themes of every conceivable species. Ile has lines to
the " Snowdrop," and lines to the " Crocus," and
lines to the "Hyacinth," and lines to the " aisy,"
and lines to the " Violet," and lines to the "Nar-
cissus," and lines to the "Buttercup," and lines to the
" Bluebell." He has verses on the " Sparrow,"
and on the "Eagle," and on the "Thrush," and on
the "Blackbird," and on the " Cuckoo," and
on the " Skylark," and on the " Swift," and on the
" Skylark" again, and on the " Crow," and on the
Cuckoo" again, and on the "Swift" again, and on
other denizaus of the air besides. He indites all kinds
of amatory stanzas to "Amanda," to "A Lady," to
" A Lovely Maiden," to Lucretia," to "Her I Love;'
to "Ellen," to "A Lady Sleeping," to "A Lady de-
votedly Attached to the Person of a foolish Man,"
and to other ladies under very peculiar circumstances.
He gives us now a "Midnight Study," and now a
" Noontide Reflection," now a sonnet on a " Garden
Slug," now some lines to a "Fly," now some verses
to a "Jug," and with these a variety of other equally
attractive and bewitching lucubrations. Occasionally,
of course, he rises a trifle or so above mediocrity—a
circumstance scarcely to be wondered at even with
his extraordinary inaptitude for the production of
anything pretending to the merits of poetry, when it
is considered that the volume extends to the length
of very nearly 350 pages octavo. One of the prettiest
stanzas in the whole book is that which occurs at
page 5, where the author says, or sings, of the
snowdrop—
" In lightsomo green it breaks the ground,
By fostering nature led;
And having faintly glanced around,
Hangs down its beauteous head."
Sometimes, but for the avowal already referred to as
discernible in the "Introduction," we should have at-
tributed the verses here presented to our notice not
as the effusions of a man past forty, but as those
rather of a stripling of a very warm and impassioned
temperament. The erotic address to " Amanda,"
for example, is sufficiently bold in its amatory en-
thusiasm to have been penned even by Little. But
then we recollect, to be sure, that no man is safe from
the darts of Cupid even though he has passed his grand
climacteric—and the Lord High Chancellor Eldon is
known to have been a customer at the forge of Gretna,
having figured before the world rather late in life as
the hero of an elopement. And then, Mr.
Wright is only just past fort! Another little frag-
mwheenrte
sopeaflikiig dsoeserves mention at our hands as
containing a sort of vignette embellishment; it is,
cafrrtebseted cubcykotoh,yhleay? observes—
" The child,
Yet agreeable Stands listening with devoted heart,
DropsA ndwonders from
its hand the blooming spray,
ontdbearusgwhhattbdeeaveicefrtahgomu
fragments—(
angel's Like
angel's visits few and far bet ween")—maY
be, they
can scarcely compensate for such a very large assem-
blage
of very indifferent versification. If anything
can expiate the guilt incurred by the latter particular,
it will be the clever and sarcastic criticism (prefixed
to the volume)
Wordsworth.
upon the writings of the late Mr.

LIVERPOOL, TUESD XT.—The Boston and Liverpool
Steam-ship Company's new screw-steamer, S. S. Lewis,
Captain Cole, arrived in the ider.-ey this morning, fro
Boston. She was towed into the river by two steam tugs.
The S. S. Lewis sailed for this port on the 4th inst. at noon,
and experienced heavy E, and N.E. winds until the morning
of the [sth, when she encountered a violent gale from the
N.E., and had the misfortune to lose her propeller, being at
the time 85 miles to the westward of Cape Clear, and 106
days at sea. On the 16th inst. at seven P.M., 35 miles west
of Cape Clear, she passed the United States mail steamer
Pacific, Captain Nye, for New York. The S. S. Lewis is a
lint specimen of naval architecture. A fire occurred last night
on hoard the screw-steamer Genova, but it was extinguished
with slight damage. The screw steam-ship Mars, trading
between this port and Waterford, burst her boiler on Satur-
day last, on her passage from the latter port. No injury was
suatailted by gie crew Arid paueugeve • •