Various

“ Let us now survey the power and scope of Wordsworth’s imagination, considered in its intellectual manifestation. Here nothing bounds its activity but its sentiments. It is descriptive, pictorial, reflective, shaping, creative, and ecstatic; it can body forth abstract ideas in sensible imagery; it can organize, as in “The White Doe,” a whole poem round one central idea; it can make audible in the melody of words, shades of feeling and thought which elude the grasp of imagery; it can fuse and diffuse itself at pleasure, animating, coloring, vitalizing every thing it touches. ”

“ Even into the drudgery of the farm Apollos bore with him his musical mania, and while he sowed the seed and planted the corn it was all done to music, so that when the green grain burst through the ground there was no stiff regularity about it, but falling off into minims, crotchets, quavers and demi-semi-quavers, it swept through the broad fields like a living sheet of music, from which no doubt the little ground-sparrow and the glassy-winged grasshopper, learned many new variations. ”

“ It is true, he knew before that his love was hopeless—that the young and fair object of his adoration could be no more to him than the distant planet shining so gloriously in the glittering dome of the heavens—but here stood one possessing that priceless gift, her heart, one on whom her first pure affections were bestowed—ah, poor Apollos—it was not in human nature to resist the workings of jealousy and envy—great drops of anguish stood on his pale brow, and he almost groaned aloud! ”

“ He never goes out, except on the Sabbath, upon whose sacred services he is a constant attendant, and may always be seen in his suit of homespun gray, standing erect near the choir, and beating time with his long, bony hand, to the music of the psalms.
Upon the calm summer evenings, the notes of his violin are borne on the gentle breeze to the ears of the villagers, and as the plough-boy hies him to his task, with the early up-rising of the lark, he hears the morning hymn of the forest choristers, accompanied in their notes of praise by the music of Apollos’ violin. ”

“ He took nothing at second-hand; and his nature is therefore not the nature of Homer, or Dante, or Shakspeare, or Milton, or Scott, but essentially the nature of Wordsworth, the nature which he saw with his own eyes, and shaped with his own imagination. His humanity sprung from this insight, for not until he became impressed with the spirit of nature, and divined its perfect adaptation to nourish and elevate the human mind, did he perceive the worth and dignity of man. ”

“ She waited only until the torrent had passed the straits—until the bayou was silent—when she fastened her little boat to the willows which completely enveloped her, and boldly stepped upon the land. With a rare instinct which proved how deeply her heart had interested itself in the operations of her senses, she moved directly to the spot whence she had heard the bugle-note of her lover. The place was not far distant from the point where she had been in lurking. Her progress was arrested by the prostrate trunk of a great cypress, which the hurricane might have cast down some fifty years before. ”

“ The English are, as a nation, fond of music, but their love for it seldom reaches the enthusiasm which is felt for the art by a German, an Italian, a Frenchman, or a Spaniard. It would, perhaps, be more correct to say that the English admire music rather than that they love it. The uneducated classes will gladly listen to music, but they are never moved by it. They may learn or become acquainted with certain airs, but they never impart to what they sing or whistle that elegance or depth of feeling which a really musical mind never fails to throw into an air which pleases him. ”

“ Indeed, his mind’s ear was even more acute than his mind’s eye; and no poet has excelled him in the subtle perception of the most remote relations of tone. Often, when he is on the peaks of spiritual contemplation, he hears voices when he cannot see shapes, and mutters mystically of his whereabouts in words which suggest rather than embody meaning. He grew in spiritual strength and height by assimilating the life of nature, as bodies grow by assimilating her grosser elements; and this process was little disturbed by communion with other minds, either through books or society. ”

“ MUSIC BY
ENNA DUVAL.
Oh, follow our counsel,
And rest thee in gladness;
The flow’rs ’neath the willows shall
ease thee of sadness.
Here slumber thou lov’d one,
Thy labours shall cease;
We breathe and we warble of gladness and peace.
THE FINE ARTS. The Opera.—Strange, that Philadelphia, with so much musical taste and cultivation, cannot have an Opera. Once in a while an Operatic troupe wanders along, and rests, for a short time, in our sober town, gives a few representations, then away it goes. ”

“ He is like the banyan tree in the marvelous fertility of his creativeness, and the province of humanity he covers; but the fertility all comes from one root and trunk, and indicates simply the greatness of the kind, as compared with other kinds of trees. The variety in the operation of Wordsworth’s imagination we will consider first in its emotional, and second in its intellectual, manifestation—of course, using these words as terms of distinction, not of division, because when we employ the word imagination we desire to imply a fusion of the whole nature of the man into one living power. ”

“ Moonlight and starlight seem to make a special atmosphere for youth, and the heart which loves, even when most troubled with anxieties for the beloved one, never, at such a season, proves wholly insensible to the soft, seductive influences of such an atmosphere. Our Frederica was not the heroine of convention. She had never imbibed romance from books; but she had affections out of which books might be written, filled with all those qualities, at once strong and tender, which make the heroine in the moment of emergency. ”

“ They combine in a remarkable degree ecstasy with reflection, and are marvelously refined both in their perception of the life of nature and the subtle workings of human affections. Those elusive emotions which flit dimly before ordinary imaginations and then instantly disappear, Wordsworth arrests and embodies; and the remotest shades of feeling and thought, which play on the vanishing edges of conception, he connects with familiar objects, and brings home to our common contemplations. In the sphere of the affections he is confessedly great. ”

“ Study of the Dictionary is the great want of a majority of American writers. They neither drink at the sources nor draw from the depths of the language, to supply the thirst for purity, variety, and force of expression, with which truly masculine minds are panting. With a vocabulary equal to the largest demands of truth in its labors, or of imagination in its play, we find constantly recurring the same set-phrases, the same commonplaces, the same worn-out figures. ”

“ We have no space to particularize the felicity of Wordsworth’s muse in dealing with the affections, or the depth and power of his pathos. Before leaving the subject of his genius, however, we cannot withhold a reference to his “Ode on the Power of Sound,” which appears to be little known even to readers of the poet, though in the thronging abundance of its ideas and images, in the exquisite variety of its music, and in the soul of imagination which animates it throughout, it yields the palm to no ode in the language. ”

“ He early manifested a love for study, but it may be inferred that his studies were such as mostly ministered to the imagination, from the fact that he displayed, from his earliest years, a passion for poetry, and never seems to have had a thought of choosing a profession. At the university of Cambridge he appears to have studied the classics with the divining eye and assimilating mind of a poet, and if he did not attain the first position as a classical scholar, he certainly drank in beyond all his fellows the spirit of the great writers of Greece and Rome. ”

“ A moment after, and just when her boat was abreast of the bayou which Dunbar and his men were required to cross in penetrating the place of refuge, she heard the sudden pistol shooting under which Coulter had fallen. With a heart full of terror, trembling with anxiety and fear, Frederica had the strength of will to remain quiet for the present. Seizing upon an overhanging bough, she lay concealed within the shadow of the copse until the loyalists had rushed across the bayou, and were busy, with lighted torches, exploring the thickets. ”

“ For more than an hour we pulled on in silence. As no sail had been in sight when darkness shut in, it was useless to hail: and so we continued without a word being spoken. Not a sound, therefore, broke the hush except the measured rollicking of the oars, and the surging noise of the launch as it was propelled heavily through the water. The darkness still continued, for numerous clouds flecked the sky, and every here and there, in consequence, would a star find its way out. ”

“ The style of Bellini, on the other hand, is totally different from that of Rossini. Bellini is at once unaffected and chaste. There is no seeking after applause by introducing difficult passages requiring great flexibility of intonation. Every air, every symphony, every prelude and introduction appear to have been written with the view to the expression of some passion, or the demonstration of some feeling which it was required to convey. It is deeply to be regretted that so bright a genius, promising so brilliant a future, should so early have been lost to the world. ”

“ In the course of the summer Paul again solicited the hand of Linda, which was no longer refused him—
“For money has a power above
The stars, and fate, to manage love.”
But Apollos refused to be present at the happy event which his noble kindness had so materially assisted to bring about; and little did either of them surmise the generous devotion which had called it forth.
As soon as his solitary dwelling was completed, Apollos, taking with him a few goods and chattels, removed thereto. And there he still abides with peace in his heart, and “good-will to all men.” ”

“ Howell’s other four daughters had all married rich men; and as Linda was the fairest and most accomplished, he had planned for her a match which might be considered brilliant. When, therefore, Paul asked for her hand, it was refused with the contempt of one who feels that riches, not affection and kindness make up the summum bonum of life’s happiness, and with whom the weight of the purse out-balances the weight of both head and heart. And then Pride, too, put in her voice—what, his daughter marry the son of Leonard Davis, who died in a jail! ”

“ Wordsworth is most assuredly not a popular poet in the sense in which Moore and Byron are popular; and he probably never will be so among those readers who do not distinguish between being passionate and being impassioned, and who prefer the strength of convulsion to the strength of repose; readers who will attend only to what stirs and startles the sensibility, who read poetry not for its nourishing but its inflaming qualities, and who look upon poetic fire as properly consuming the mind it animates. ”

“ A sweet face becomes almost as the face of an angel, when seen in the calm moonlight; and as Linda stood there, her large, brown eyes, looking out into the holy night, her high, pure forehead clasped in the glossy braids of her dark hair, and her light, graceful figure folded in a snowy robe, no wonder she seemed to Apollos too pure, too beautiful, for a being of earth’s mould. ”

“ He is at its heart and circumference, and through all its veins and arteries, as the vivifying and organizing force—coloring every thing with his peculiar individuality, representing man and nature through the medium of his own original and originating genius, and creating, as it were, a new world of forms and beings, idealized from hints given by the actual appearances of things. This world is not so various as that of Shakspeare or Scott, nor so supernatural as that of Milton, but it is still Wordsworth’s world, a world conceived by himself, and in which he lived and moved and had his being. ”

“ With a prayer that was inaudible to herself, she invoked Heaven’s mercy on her enterprise, as with a strong arm, familiar in this exercise, she plied from side to side, the little paddle which, with the favoring currents of the river, soon carried her down toward the bit of swamp forest where her lover found his refuge. ”

“ In our view of the quality it must necessarily be the limitation of a poet’s creativeness, for the imagination cannot represent or create objects to which it does not tend by a sentiment; and Wordsworth, while he has a sentiment for visible nature, a religious sentiment, a sentiment of humanity, is still confined to the serious side of things, and has no sentiment of humor. If he had humor as a sentiment, he, dowered as he is with imagination, would have it as a creative faculty, for humor is the intellectual imagination inspired by the sentiment of mirth. ”

“ Perhaps even our organ, which is an ancient invention, will not escape the critical censure of a coming age. And there can be little doubt that much remains yet to be known in the manufacture of musical instruments. It may be said with much reason that the only perfect instruments now in use are the violin, the violincello, the double-bass, the tenor, and one or two others. On these any tone of which their compass is capable can be produced in every possible variety of execution. The piano forte, delightful as are its powers, cannot produce a gliding sound from one note to the other ”