"Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victory!" 'Tis our way, you know, to pass from gay to grave matter, and often from a jocular to a serious view of the same subject--it being natural to us--and having become habitual too, from our writing occasionally in _Blackwood's Magazine_. All the world knows our admiration of Wordsworth, and admits that we have done almost as much as Jeffrey or Taylor to make his poetry popular among the "educated circles." But we are not a nation of idolaters, and worship neither graven image nor man that is born of a woman. We may seem to have treated the Pedlar with insufficient respect in that playful parallel between him and Ourselves; but there you are wrong again, for we desire thereby to do him honour. We wish now to say a few words on the wisdom of making such a personage the chief character in a Philosophical Poem. He is described as endowed by nature with a great intellect, a noble imagination, a profound soul, and a tender heart. It will not be said that nature keeps these her noblest gifts for human beings born in this or that condition of life: she gives them to her favourites--for so, in the highest sense, they are to whom such gifts befall; and not unfrequently, in an obscure place, of one of the FORTUNATI "The fulgent head Star-bright appears." Wordsworth appropriately places the birth of such a being in a humble dwelling in the Highlands of Scotland. "Among the hills of Atholl he was born; Where on a small hereditary farm, An unproductive slip of barren ground, His parents, with their numerous offspring, dwelt; A virtuous household, though exceeding poor." His childhood was nurtured at home in Christian love and truth--and acquired other knowledge at a winter school; for in summer he "tended cattle on the hill,"-- "that stood Sole building on a mountain's dreary edge." And the influence of such education and occupation among such natural objects, Wordsworth expounds in some as fine poetry as ever issued from the cells of philosophic thought. "So the foundations of his mind were laid." The boy had small need of books-- "For many a tale Traditionary, round the mountains hung, And many a legend, peopling the dark woods, Nourish'd Imagination in her growth, And gave the mind that apprehensive power By which she is made quick to recognise The moral properties and scope of things." But in the Manse there were books--and he read "Whate'er the minister's old shelf supplied, The life and death of martyrs, who sustain'd, With will inflexible, those fearful pangs, Triumphantly display'd in records left Of persecution and the Covenant."