We need hardly say that the central power and principle of this organic body of verse is Wordsworth himself. 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. A true criticism of his works, therefore, would be a biography of his mind, exhibiting the vital processes of its growth, and indicating the necessary connection between its gradual interior development and the imaginative forms in which it was expressed. This we cannot pretend to do, having neither the insight nor the materials for such a task, and we shall be content with attempting a faint outline of his mental character, with especial reference to those qualities which dwelt near the heart of his being, and which seem to have been woven into the texture of his mind at birth. Wordsworth was born in April, 1770, of parents sufficiently rich to give him the advantages of the usual school and collegiate education of English youth. 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. In a mind so observing, studious, thoughtful, imaginative and steadfast as his, whose power consisted more in concentration of view than rapidity of movement, the images of classical poetry must have been firmly held and lovingly contemplated; and to his collegiate culture we doubtless owe the exquisite poems of Dion and Laodamia, the grand interpretative, uplifting mythological passage in The Excursion, and the general felicity of his classical allusions and images throughout his works. He probably wrote much as well as meditated deeply at college, but very few of his juvenile pieces have been preserved, and those which are seem little more than exercises in expression. On leaving college he appears to have formed the determination of educating his poetical faculty by a communion with the forms of nature, as others study law and theology. He resided for some time in the west of England, and at about the age of twenty, made the