The fourth book, entitled "Despondency Corrected," we consider as the most valuable portion of the poem. For moral grandeur; for wide scope of thought and a long train of lofty imagery; for tender personal appeals; and a _versification_ which we feel we ought to notice, but feel it also so involved in the poetry, that we can hardly mention it as a distinct excellence; it stands without competition among our didactic and descriptive verse. The general tendency of the argument (which we might almost affirm to be the leading moral of the poem) is to abate the pride of the calculating _understanding_, and to reinstate the _imagination_ and the _affections_ in those seats from which modern philosophy has laboured but too successfully to expel them. "Life's autumn past," says the grey-haired Wanderer, ----I stand on Winter's verge, And daily lose what I desire to keep: Yet rather would I instantly decline To the traditionary sympathies Of a most rustic ignorance, and take A fearful apprehension from the owl Or death-watch,--and as readily rejoice, If two auspicious magpies crossed my way; This rather would I do than see and hear The repetitions wearisome of sense, Where soul is dead, and feeling hath no place;--p. 168. In the same spirit, those illusions of the imaginative faculty to which the peasantry in solitary districts are peculiarly subject, are represented as the kindly ministers of _conscience_: ----with whose service charged They come and go, appear and disappear; Diverting evil purposes, remorse Awakening, chastening an intemperate grief, Or pride of heart abating: Reverting to more distant ages of the world, the operation of that same faculty in producing the several fictions of Chaldean, Persian, and Grecian idolatry, is described with such seductive power, that the Solitary, in good earnest, seems alarmed at the tendency of his own argument.--Notwithstanding his fears, however, there is one thought so uncommonly fine, relative to the spirituality which lay hid beneath the gross material forms of Greek worship, in metal or stone, that we cannot resist the allurement of transcribing it--