The Sun.
London, England, 1850-04-26 00:00:00

APRIL 26,

1850.

DEATH of the POET LAUREATE.
(From Soulby's Vivo:stone ..-I(Lcrtistr.)
It will be seen by a rrference to our obituary of to-
day that one of the greatest luminaries of our age and
country, one who has tel:dered illustrious this distric',
the neighbourhood of his nativity, rind the scene of his
labours and his triumphs, has departed this life soon
after attaining his 800 i year.
William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, in
the county of Cumberland, on the 7th of April, 1770,
and he has since lived and mused amidst the beautiful
scenery of our own locality. His father Leing law agent
to Lord Lonsdale, was in such circumstances as enabled
him to bestow upon his children a liberal education.
Wordsworth received the rudiments of his mental cal- '
Lure at Hawkshead School, and in the year 1787 e as en-
tered at St. John's College, Cambridge. When he had
completed his studies and taken his academical de-
gree he made the tour of Scotland, accompanied
by his friend, R. Jones. It was about this
period, the period of Wordsworth's early man-
hood, that the revolution in France had attained its
grand crisis; and its influence upon the fiery imagitra-
nation and sensitive mind of Wordsw )r.h was no less
forcible thin thst pro.lucel upon the buoyant and
vigorous, but as yet, untried heart and intellect of his
friends and frequent companions, Coleridge, Southey,
and Lloyd. The earnest thoughts Vat had been gene-
rated by his continued meditations upon this theme found
an utterance in his " Descriptive Sketches" and " Even-
ing Walk," both of which made their appearance in
1793. This volume, however, ended the republican
imaginings of W ordsworth. He had no sooner stepped
upon the sturdy platform of reel life than he threw aside
the shadowy unrealities of his earlier dreamings, and de-
voted himself heart and soul to tha loftier and grander
purposss of his being.
In 1797, Wordsworth had conceived a plan for the re-
generation of English poetry. In 1798, he published, iu
conjunction with Coleridge, a collection of " Lyrical
Ballads." The majority of these productions were
from his own pen; the supernatural element of the
work was entrusted into the hands of Coleridge. This
book, so far from making converts to Wordsworth's
peculiar way of thinking, met everywhere with the bit-
terest contempt and ridicule. The Edinburgh Review
denounced his theory as " puerile," and stigmatised his
verses as a species of second-rate nursery rhymes.
There can be now no doubt that Wordsworth, in his zeal
to redeem the English muse from a corrupted and inane
phraseology, like other reactionists of a sterner cha-
racter, pushed his favourite theory too far. He sought
to establish in the place of a style whose chief charac-
teristics were lifelessness and false glitter, waning fainter
and fainter from constant repetition, one that should be
nervous, and simple, but one which would have proved
nevertheless, harsh, prosy, and ungenial. " The common
language of common men, and the illustration of com-
mon incidents," which were totally incapable of any ex-
aggeration of feeling, found no favour either with the
public or with the critics. It was well, equally for
Wordsworth and for the interests of English poetry, that
the theorist overtopped his theory. The glories of the poet's
soul shone through the stiff and ungraceful drapery in
which he sought to enshrine it; and, amidst the hard and
unseemly details of the theory, there beamed the ever-
lasting beauty and the majesty of genius.
Still Wordsworth had among his readers a few who
comprehended him, and who were therefore his admirers.
They sympathised with his views; and through their
encouragement he was induced to publish other two
volumes of poetry in 1807.
It has been said that " Wordsworth's life has been a
poetic reverie" that he has experienced few of the
crosses and trials of the tuneful tribe. He married his
cousin shortly after his continental tour; and an ample
legacy le't him by a gentleman who entertained for his
genius the profoundest admiration, coupled with several
other bequests, placed him in a position of easy inde-
pendence. In 1814 appeared his great work, " The
Excursion," which sealed his certificate to immortality;
—that glorious book, which, according to a contemporary
critic, is " brimful of splendid thoughts clothed in splen-
did language, while it breathes a spirit of enlightened
benevolence and charity, which seem wondrous, grand,
and beautiful in their drapery of glowing eloquence
when tested by the poet's own theory." About the
period of the publication of the " Excursion," Words-
worth obtained the situation of distributor of stamps,
which office he retained during the lapse of 28 years,
retiring in 1842 upon a pension of 3001., while his son
filled the vacancy thus occasioned. In the year follow-
ing Southey died, and Wordsworth was appointed poet
laureate in his stead, in the April of the same year.
Several works followed the " Excursion," among which
may be mentioned the " White Due of Rylstone;" and
in 1842 appeared a volume containing several poems,
written in the poet's early youth, accompanied by others
written in. his old age. _

It would be almo-st impossible to exaggerate or over-
estimate the importance of the influence which Words-
worth, in conjunction with Coleridge, has exercised
in the formation of the intellectual characteristics
of the present age. These two alone have
effected a complete revolution in our modes of
thought and of expression. Carlyle and Sterling,
and Emerson, with scores of others of our greitest
thinkers, have sat at the feet of Coleridge, that " old
man eloquent;" while the whole of the poetry that has
issued from the English press for years has ben tinc-
tured and coloured by the genius of Wordsworth. Other
men have had their admirers and imitators, and have
formed their respective schools of poetry and philo-
sophy; but it has fallen to the lot of few to impregnate,
with their thoughts minds great, and in some respects
original, as their own; to witness the glorious imagin-
ings of their spirit caught up and reflected by such poets
us Tennyson, Browning, and Bailey;—to behold the
current of their sentiments and reflections borne along
'through the thousand diverse channels of the press to
1 the heart of a whole people, until their names are ren-
dered as " familiar to the tongue as household words."
And yet such bas been the triumph awarded to the ge-
nius of Wordsworth. " Duriog the last thirty years,"
says a ft iendly critic," the regenerative power of bis ge-
nius has so operated upon the public taste, that the pure,
the simple and the good are now the more regarded
elements of poetry, while the Lams, Giaours, and the
other distempered objects of a feverish imagination, are
ceasing to be among the attractive imagery of song.
Perhaps the most remarkable triumph o his genius is
its conquest over that very Review' which scorned and
sneered at him in the beginning of his career; for his
spirit now undoubtedly pervades this very organ which
scoffed at him so bitterly, and even rejected his language
as too puerile for the nursery.".

For many years Wordsworth has eajoyei the inesti-
mable privilege of receiving that guerdou of love and
admiration while living, which aro too frequently brought
into operation for no other purpose, alas! then that of
scattering garlands upon the tomb of genius. Thousands
of his admirers have made a pilgrimage to the poet's
sanctuary, Rydal Mount; and nut a few have crossel over
from other lands to catch a glimpse of that great man who
has filled the world with his fame. The following is an
analysis of his powers and genius by his friend Cole-
ridge, the great poet, philosopher, and critic:—"his
genius and talents consist, first, in an austere purity of
language, both grammatically and logically; in short a
perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning;
secondly, a correspondent weight and sanity of the
thoughts and sentiments won, not from books, but from
the poet's own meditations. They are fresh, and have
the dew upon them. Even throughout his smaller poems,
there is not one which is not rendered valuable by some
just and original reflection. Thirdly, the sinewy strength
and originality of single lines and paragraphs; the
frequent cariosa felicitas of his diction. Fourthly, the
perfect truth to nature in his images, and descrip-
tions, as taken immediately from nature. Fifthly, a
mediative pathos—a union of deep and subtle
thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as
man; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator rather
than a fellow-sufferer and co-mate (spectator baud par-
ticeps), but of a contemplation from whose view no dif-
ference of rank conceals the sameness of nature; no in-
juries of wind, or weather, or toil, or even of ignorance,
wholly disguise: the human face divine. Last and pre-
emicently, I challenge for this poet the gift of imagina-
tion in the highest and strictest sense of the wore. In
the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is al-
ways graceful and sometimes recondite. Tbe likeness
is occasionally too strange, or demands too peculiar a
point of view, or is such as appears the creature of pre-
meditated research rather than spontatieJus presenta-
tion. Indeed, his fancy seldom displays itself as mere
and unmodified fancy. But in imaginative power he
stands nearest of all modern writers to Milton and
Shakspere; and yet in a mind perfectly anborrowed,
and his own. To employ his own words, which are at
once an instance and an illustration, be does indeed to
all thoughts and all objects
Add the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream.' "*
Many passages in Wordsworth's writings might be
cited as affording instances and examples of some of the
deepest revelations of the soul ofmantha
The mind
taretobemet
with in the whole range of English poetry.
of Wordsworth was pre-eminently subtle and penetratii g.
Ile looks with a large eye on the world of universal
beauty, and goes behind all objects of all thought with
silent, gliding, footstep, giving man to all nature, and all
nature to man, and reproducing, with marvellous power
and accuracy, the very thoughts, of which the mountain
and the forest, the flower and the oak, and all the averse
objects that crowd into the finished landscape are the
utterance and the expression. He saw that nature is
not final; that beauty, wherever it is seen, is
the footprint of Divinity: that the universe is the
realisation of the perfected idea of God; and all his
culture tended to this,one object, to give him insight into
tsis idea, that so he might command its correlative,
which is nature. He asked himself perpetually, " What
is the meaning which God symbolizes for me in these
varied fortes of stars, and moon, and forest, and moun-
" 110 stood at the feet of every fact, as thou2h it
were the angel of God, until he had drawn from it its
utterance. His life was a perpetual query, to which
Nature was the perpetual answer. Ile saw that a
spiritual eaose lurks behind every circumstance—that
a new revelation is written in the heavens every night
by the finger of God—fiat a truth is swathed up in
every cloud that sails over the liqeid arch—in fine, that
all nature is the publication of the all-perfect will of the
Deity. J. STANYAN 1310 G.
" Biographia Literaria."

.ARRIVAL OF THE QUEEN OF THE BELGIANS.--Her
Majer,ty the Queen of the Belgians, accompanied by the
Duchess of Orleans, with the Comte de Paris and the Duke
tie Chartres, and attended by a numerous suite, arrived at
Dover yesterday by her Majesty's steam-packet the Vivid,
Captain Smithett, from Ostend. Her Majesty was received
at Dover by Mr. Van de Weyer, the Belgian Minister, and
proceeded by special train on the South-Eastern Railway to
Guildford, en route for Claremont. His Serene Highness
the Prince Leiningen also arrived at Dover, from Calais, by
the South-Eastern and Continental Company's steam-ship
Princess Mary, and met the Royal party at the Dover
station. The Prince came to town by the tram leaving Dover
at two 1..31.

LAW INTELLIGENCE.
I COURT OF QUEEN'S BENCH, April2s.
(Siuiogs in Banco.)
THE QUEEN WILMER AND SMITH'.
I V.
The ATTORNEY. GENERAL applied to the Court to
allow the hearing of this rule to stand over until after
an action-at-law had been tried. He said that this
was an application fur a criminal information against
the defendants for an alleged libel upon the proprietors
of the electric telegraph. The very 5 Ana° alleged libel had
been published in the Morning Herald, and an action
had been brought against Mr. Chapman, the publisher
of that paper. The defendant in that action had put
a special justification on the record; and it would be
convenient, if not just, that the rule for a criminal
information should not be made absolute until after
the jury in the civil case had pronounced a verdict on
the question whether the inculpated matter was libel-
lous or not.

The COURT remarked that the defendants in the
criminal and civil cases were not the same, and that
the Court could not, according to any rules of practice,
make one proceeding dependent on another where the
paties were not the same in bath.
Application refused.
THE QUEEN V. LATIMER.
Sir F. TFIESIGER said that he was instructed to
apply to the Court for a rule to show cause why a
criminal intorroation should not be granted against
the defendant, who was the proprietor and pubii-her
of the Plymouth and Devonport Weekly Journal, for
publishing in his paper, on the 7th of March last, a
libel upon the Sisters of Mercy. There were some
ladies who, a few years since, had devoted themselves
to the performance of offices of kindness and charity,
instructing poor children, and ministering to the
wants and necessities of the afflicted and the wretched.
They went to reside near Devonport; they resided in
one house, and they formed a society by themselves,
and they gave themselves the name of the Sisters of
Mercy. They were supported by funds drawn from
their own private resources, and their affairs were ad-
minstered by one among their number, by Miss Sel-
lon, who was recognised as their superior, and who
was invested with control over them. In addition to
the funds which they enjoyed from their own pri-
vate resources, they were aided by benefactions
and subscriptions from benevolent individuals,
some of which subscriptions were devoted by the
subscribers to specific purposes, while others were ap-
plied to promote the general purposes of the establish-
ment. In the autumn of 1849, they had an opportu-
nity of showing the sincerity of their motives and in-
tentions in the zealous performance of some of the
most painful of those duties which our mutual de-
pendence as well as our natural weakness render ne-
cessary. The cholera visited with great violence the
neighbourhood of Plymouth and Devonport ; and then,
while many persons stood aloof with apprehension, or
stayed away from weakness and terror, they with the
most dauntless courage administered to the wants of
the sick, supported the drooping spirits of the dying,
and did not shrink even from performing those offices
to the dead which, though rendered by the best feel-
ings of our nature a kind of sacred duty, were yet often
most trepulsive. They felt themselves to have been
most miraculously preserved_, and they desired in some
humble but expressive way to mark their sense of
gratitude for their preservation. They had been in
the habit of attending at the church of Stoke Damerel,
for the purpose of receiving the sacrament, and when
the disease passed from among the people, they, for
the reason already described, gave to that church a
communion service of plate. They had, then, no
anticipation that their motives would be misrepre-
sented and their sincerity be questioned, and even
their integrity in the administration of their funds
brought into dispute. They were, however, shocked
at reading in the defendant's paper a libellous article
about the presentation of this plate, in which this gift
was described as "an item on the credit side of the
14,0001. which the Sisters of Mercy had received
from the public," some account of the funds thus re-
ceived being described as something to be looked for-
ward to. The Sisters of Mercy caused a letter to be
written to the defendant, requiring him to retract the
imputation thus conveyed; and saying that they must
have an apology. This was rendered necessary by •
the circumstance that the defendant in another article
referred to the imputations contained in the first.
The defendant sent an answer, in which he said that
the second had not a trace of a reference to the for-
mer article ; and to which he added, that if he had
the assurance of the Sisters of Mercy that the para-
graph was without foundation, nothing would afford
him greater pleasure than to say so. They had been
very reluctant to come into court, but they felt bound
to do so, and they looked with confidence to receiving
the protection of the law.
The Court granted the rule.
THE QUEEN V. LATIMER.
- _

Mr. Cockburn and Mr. Tap---rell showed cause
against a rule which hal been obtained for filing a
criminal information against the defendant for pub-
lishing a libel in the Plymouth and Devonport Weekly
Journal on the Rev. George Raindell Prynne, the
minister of a district church in Plymouth called St.
Peter's Church. The article in question had imputed
that "not 100 miles from Eldad Chapel, where the
abhorrent doctrines and practices of Puseyiam were
being carried out," a young and unmarried lady had
had a present of a chill on New Year's-day. The
prosecutor had stated that his district church had
formerly been known as El lad Chapel, and was still
occasionally called by that name, and chiefly on that
fact assumed that he was the person intended in the
paragraph. Some other gentlemen had sworn to a
like belief, and apparently for a like reason. These
were the grounds of the application. The answer to
them was, that the defendant did not intend, and
never had intended, to apply the paragraph in question
to the prosecutor. At the time the paragraph appeared
the defendant was confined at home by severe illness,
and knew nothing whatever of the paragraph being
sent or inserted. Of course this fact did not relieve
him from legal responsibility for what was inserted in
his paper, but it did form a reason why the Court
should not use its extraordinary powers of interfe-
rence against him, but should leave the prosecutor to
the ordinary remedy by action. All the other cir-
cumstances of the case were in like manner favour-
able to the defendant. As soon as be knew of the
paragraph complained of he had communication with
the prosecutor, in which he related how the paragraph
had got into the paper, and he disclaimed in the
strongest terms any intention to assail the prosecutor,
to whose excellent private character he was ready to
pay a sincere tribute of approval ; for although he
censured the prosecutor's mode of changing the forms
of the divine service at St. Peter's into a Puseyitio
fashion, he had never heard the slightest possible
stigma on the prosecutor's morality. The defendant
had offered to publish all this in any way the
prosecutor might wish, and had actually caused its
publication in the form of a letter in most of the
London and many of the country journals, and in
many of the publications of religious societies.
Yet, with all this, the prosecutor was .
not con-
tented; but impelled, as the defendant believed, by
a spirit of hostility, on account of their differences on
Peter's
Church, matter of these Puseyite services at St.
Church, persisted in prosecuting him, notwithstanding
all the efforts the defendant bad made to give the
prosecutor satisfaction on the subject of this article.
Under these circumstances, the defendant could only
repeat the statements he had made; and he now pro-
duced many affidavits from gentlemen of all classes of
opinions (some of them ministers of the Church of
England) in which it was plainly stated that they
never believed the paragraph to attach to the prose-
cutor, the more especially as some of the matters
i
stated in t, particularly a form of inquiry into the
charge, were things which could not possibly occur in
that shape in the Church of England. The Learce
Coumel subnxted that under these circumstances, the
defendant ought not to be subjected to the vexation
and expenses, of a criminal information.
Sir F. THESIGER and Mr. MELLOR were about to
address the Court in support of the rule, but ware
stoppei._

1..0r I CAMPBELL—We think this is a fit case on
which to take the opinion of a jury. The rule must
be absolute.
Rule absolute.

SIN ~ AND SORROW, A TALE. 3 VOLS.—The above
work is published this day by Mr. Colburn, and may be had
at all the libraries; also, now ready-2. Mr. Eliot Warbur-
ton's Reginald Hastings, an Historical Romance, 3 vols.;
3. Pride and Irresolution, a second series of " The Discipline
of Life," 3 vols. ; 4. Miss Bremer's new domestic story, The
Light-house and Life in the North, translated by Mary
Howitt, 1 vol., ss. bound; 5. The Scottish Cavalier, by the
author of " The Romance of War," 3 vols. ; 6' The Wil-
mingtons, by the author of " Emilia Wyndham," 3 vols. ;
7. Passages in the Life of Mrs. blargaret Maitland, of Sunny
Side, written by herself, second edition, 3 vols.
ol
al lraen d
t,
hdaatt e
Id 2 4
havet h
EADVERTISEMENT.J—A. Weakness of the Chest
and Asthma cured by Holloways Pills.—Copy of a declara-
tion of Mr. C. Zeitstehne,
August, 18:9:—" .1, oufnN,lcYrusleggneend, in
been perfectly cured of a weakness of the chest and difficulty
of breathing, by the use of Holloway's Pills. 1 had been a
sufferer for years, and was unable to get the least relief from
the various remedies I tried, until I took these inestimable
ffiziecittestelnt.o„ use
T ht ht.;
pills, and I invite all who may Isleigsjimietyc a.
withoutall dcealsaeys. ''o
of old coughs, recent colds, and
:.sthrnaticalAffeetions.— Sold by all Dre ' t.s,and at Professor
msaamvebreeratatcYnitt
Hollowayl Establishment, 244, Strand, tgoins
don.

THE INSURRECTION IN CEPIIALONIA.—The total
number of persons tried by courts-martial during the exist-
ence of military law in Cephalonia was 65. Of these, 44
were sentenced to death, 2 to transportation, 7 to imprison-
ment, 11 to corporal punishment, 2 were acquitted, and I
discharged by reason of a void trial. Of the number of
persons sentenced to death, 21 were executed, and 16' had
their sentence commuted. The total number of -persons
flogged in Cephalonia in the year 1849 was• 80, and the total
number of lashes inflicted 2,987. During the same period
one newspaper editor and two contributors were expelled from
the island.
EMIGRATION.—Upwards of four hundred persons
left this city yesterday by the Liverpool steamers, on their
way to America. The tide of emigration flowing from our
shores seems to be increasing threetcild from this part of the
country.— Waterford Mail.