The Sun.
London, England, 1850-04-25 00:00:00

Obrrning Atlt

LONDON, THURSDAY, APRIL 25, 1850.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, the Poet Laureate, i.
now sleeping in death at his house on Rydal Mount,
near the beautiful lake of Windermere. Before the
grave has closed over his venerated remains we
would breathe our humble tribute to the memory of
the illustrious dreamer. To render our commemo-
rative words appropriate, they should be as simple as
the language in which the old man now departed
from amongst us clothed the naked and virgin graces
of his inspiration. In his instance, moreover, we
must expatiate over the circumstance of his disap-
pearance with the awe ever due to the
dread solemnity of dissolution, but at the
same time without that oppressive melan-
choly which would be unsuited to the record of a
life so protracted, a life without remorse, because ir-
reproachable, a life terminating ripely in the evening
of its maturity and in the autumn of its reputation.
Henceforth the career of WORDSWORTH may be elo-
quently epitomised in the dates which limit the ex-
tent of his eighty years' existence :
Born
Died
Within that prolonged interval he has suffused the
landscapes of England with the riches and the
glory of bis poetic sympathies. He has con-
jured up a multitude of bewitching fan-
cies in the midst of that rural scenery
which he has loved so tenderly, and in which he has
mused away the majority of his days in a golden
reverie. Among the fields and homesteads of this
island his voice has resounded as melodiously as the
pipe of THEOCRITUS among the verdure of the Sicilian
mountains. His last office has been a misnomer and
an estrangement, for WORDSWORTH was not the lau-
reate of a Court, but the bard of the farm and of the
hamlet, of the copse and of the village. He could
less readily write a Birth-day Ode or a
Coronation Hymn, than he could pen a sonnet on a
garden spade or a bucket. At any period of his
existence, therefore, the demise of a man like this
must have fallen upon the public ear with a subdued
sentiment of regret, and not have excited these pro-
found emotions of sorrow which were caused by the
intelligence of a death like that of BYRON. Elie-
daily are these feelings of regret moderated with
regard to WORDSWORTH, accompanied as they
are at this moment by the knowledge that
his death was tranquil, and that his life was pro-
tracted beyond the ordinary limits allotted to

humanity.
Simultaneously with the announcement of the
heavy loss thus experienced by the literary world,
anything in the slightest degree approaching in cha-
racter to criticism on the writings of WORDSWORTH
would be worse than an impertinence. Neither is
such an attempt to estimate the worth of his effusions
in the smallest degree requisite, seeing that already
his contemporaries have risen to the unimpassioned
judgment usually reserved exclusively for posterity.
After having been subjected to torrents of ridicule,
the most destructive of all the projet iles hurled by the
hand of the satirist, and that ridicule, moreover, di-

rected against him by the vigorous and unerring force
of the Modern Juvenal; after having been torn on
the wrack of adverse criticism by two of the most
distinguished reviewers of his generation, excruciated
now on the wheel of the Quarterly by GIFFORD, now
on that of the Edinburgh by JEFFREY—WILLIAM
WORDSWORTH survived to find himself elevated to the
rank of an idol among a certain class of peetical
enthusiasts, transformed from a byword into a pro-
totype, from a target for derision into an object of
homage and of impassioned eulogium. Any change
in public opinion so remarkable as this has,
perhaps, never before occurred, certainly never
within the life-time of the individual so
regarded. It calls to our recollection that incident
which has been so touchingly recorded by Mr.
MACAITLAY in his masterly essay on WARREN HAST-
INGS, one of the noblest prcductions of the kind in
our language, where the great pro-consul, who had
been attainted many years before in Westminster
Hall of high crimes and misdemeanours, was
summoned in his old age to give certain
evidence at the bar of the House of Com-
mons, and w hen the whole of that august

assembly, the representatives of the great Eag-
lish people, rose simultaneously and uncovered in
his presence, actuated by one unanimous feeling of

respect and admiration. It has been so with WILLIAM
WORDSWORTH. Forty years ago the scorn of all but
a few fanatical admirers, he has slowly, but steadily,
risen to the height of a national favourite—a poet
respected by the mass of his contemporaries, beloved
by the circle of his immediate acquaintance, and all
but positively worshipped by those numerous en-
thusiasts who regarded his genius with a sort of
religious veneration. Yet, as we have already inti-
mated, though viewed with these earnest sentiments
of appreciation, he ruses away from amongst us
without exciting more than a modulated sensation of
melancholy. The secret of this is, that in the decease
of WORDSWORTH we recognise• the natural close of
a well-spent life and not that abrupt and
agonizing doom which has too frequently
befallen those gifted with poetic genius,
where the tree just budding into beauty has been
riven asunder as if by a thunderbolt. It was thus
with that wonderful being, whose fragment of "Hy-
perion " was an augury of works not unworthy of
Escemus. It was thus, before the full seed •time and
the fruit-season of his resplendent genius, that the
extraordinary man whose departure was felt like a
national calamity, perished in his prime at Miss°.
longhi, the news of his sudden and premature disso-
lution descending upon this country, as Sir WALTER
SCOTT hinted in his obituary panegyric, as if the
lightnings had shaken
" The sun from out the socktt of its sphere."
Regarding the death of WORDSN:e moreonOcßTH,
thanthethat
con-
trary, it is impossible to experience
subdued sentiment of regret which is inseparable
from the knowledge that the earth has lost one of its
intellectual benefactors. Of his pastoral writings it
was said by HAZLITT himself, an acute and discrimi-

nating critic—" The vulgar do not read them ; the

learned, who see all things through books, do not un-
derstand them ; the great despise, the fashionable may
ridicule them ; but the author has created for himself

an interest in the heart of the retired and lonely
student which can never die." How far this may
be an adequate or impartial estimate of the genius and
the works of WoßnswoaTu it might be difficult
to decide at a moment when the mirror of the judg-
ment is clouded by the shadows of a mournful ca-
tastrophe. Thus far, however, we may go
in our decision upon the fame of the
departed poet,—declaring that the favourable
apini,,n entertained in its regard by the present ge-
neration is less like the opinion of contemporaries
than like that of a remote and dispassionate posterity.
It is thus that cradled in Cumberland, after eighty
years have elapsed, ripe in intellect and reputation
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH has sunk to rest on the mar-
gin of the beautiful Windermere.

Lord Jowl RUSSELL has given notice that on the
6th of May he will move for leave to bring in a Bill
for the abolition of the office of Lord-Lieutenant of
Ireland. This wise and salutary measure is the
necessary supplement of the " Treaty of Union"
which half a century before had been contracted be-
tween the English and Irish naqons. Until it be
carried into effect, the union can never be regarded as
perfect and indissoluble. One country will still be
regarded as a province and dependency on the other
so long as it possesses that which may be regarded as
the very badge and symbol of a province—a gc-
vernor
who receives his instructions from, and is
bo.ind to obey
the, orders of, a Minister residing