Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. V, October, 1850, Volume I.

Harper’s

                           New Monthly Magazine

                      No. V.—October, 1850.—Vol. I.





CONTENTS


Wordsworth—His Character And Genius.
Sidney Smith. By George Gilfillan.
Thomas Carlyle. By George Gilfillan.
The Gentleman Beggar. An Attorney’s Story. (From Dickens’s Household
Words.)
Singular Proceedings Of The Sand Wasp. (From Howitt’s Country Year-Book.)
What Horses Think Of Men. From The Raven In The Happy Family. (From
Dickens’s Household Words.)
The Quakers During The American War. (From Howitt’s Country Year-Book.)
A Shilling’s Worth Of Science. (From Dickens’s Household Words.)
A Tuscan Vintage.
How To Make Home Unhealthy. By Harriet Martineau.
Sorrows And Joys. (From Dickens’s Household Words.)
Maurice Tiernay, The Soldier Of Fortune. (From the Dublin University
Magazine)
The Enchanted Rock. (From Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.)
The Force Of Fear. (From Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.)
Lady Alice Daventry; Or, The Night Of Crime. (From the Dublin University
Magazine.)
Mirabeau. An Anecdote Of His Private Life. (From Chambers’s Edinburgh
Journal.)
Terrestrial Magnetism. (From Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.)
Early History Of The Use Of Coal. (From Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.)
Jenny Lind. By Fredrika Bremer.
My Novel; Or, Varieties In English Life. By Pisistratus Caxton. (From
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.)
The Two Guides Of The Child. (From Dickens’s Household Words.)
The Laboratory In The Chest. (From Dickens’s Household Words.)
The Steel Pen. An Illustration Of Cheapness. (From Dickens’s Household
Words.)
Snakes And Serpent Charmers. (From Bentley’s Miscellany.)
The Magic Maze. (From Colburn’s Monthly Magazine.)
The Sun. (From Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.)
The Household Jewels. (From Dickens’s Household Words.)
The Tea-Plant. (From Hogg’s Instructor.)
Anecdotes Of Dr. Chalmers.
The Pleasures Of Illness. (From the People’s Journal.)
Obstructions To The Use Of The Telescope.
Monthly Record Of Current Events.
Literary Notices.
Autumn Fashions.
Footnotes






WORDSWORTH—HIS CHARACTER AND GENIUS.


                       [Illustration: Wordsworth.]

In a late article on Southey, we alluded to the solitary position of
Wordsworth in that lake country where he once shone the brightest star in
a large galaxy. Since then, the star of Jove, so beautiful and large, has
gone out in darkness—the greatest laureate of England has expired—the
intensest, most unique, and most pure-minded of our poets, with the single
exceptions of Milton and Cowper, is departed. And it were lesemajesty
against his mighty shade not to pay it our tribute while yet his memory,
and the grass of his grave, are green.

It is singular, that only a few months have elapsed since the great
antagonist of his literary fame—Lord Jeffrey (who, we understand,
persisted to the last in his ungenerous and unjust estimate), left the
bench of human, to appear at the bar of Divine justice. Seldom has the
death of a celebrated man produced a more powerful impression in his own
city and circle, and a less powerful impression on the wide horizon of the
world. In truth, he had outlived himself. It had been very different had
he passed away thirty years ago, when the “Edinburgh Review” was in the
plenitude of its influence. As it was, he disappeared like a star at
midnight, whose descent is almost unnoticed while the whole heavens are
white with glory, not like a sun going down, that night may come over the
earth. One of the acutest, most accomplished, most warm-hearted, and
generous of men, Jeffrey wanted that stamp of universality, that highest
order of genius, that depth of insight, and that simple directness of
purpose, not to speak of that moral and religious consecration, which
“give the world assurance of a man.” He was the idol of Edinburgh, and the
pride of Scotland, because he condensed in himself those qualities which
the modern Athens has long been accustomed to covet and admire—taste and
talent rather than genius—subtlety of appreciation rather than power of
origination—the logical understanding rather than the inventive
insight—and because his name _had_ sounded out to the ends of the earth.
But nature and man, not Edinburgh Castle, or the Grampian Hills merely,
might be summoned to mourn in Wordsworth’s departure the loss of one of
their truest high-priests, who had gazed into some of the deepest secrets
of the one, and echoed some of the loftiest aspirations of the other.

To soften such grief, however, there comes in the reflection, that the
task of this great poet had been nobly discharged. He _had_ given the
world assurance, full, and heaped, and running over, of what he meant, and
of what was meant by him. While the premature departure of a Schiller, a
Byron, or a Keats, gives us emotions similar to those wherewith we would
behold the crescent moon, snatched away as by some “insatiate archer,” up
into the Infinite, ere it grew into its full glory—Wordsworth, like Scott,
Goethe, and Southey, was permitted to fill his full and broad sphere.

What Wordsworth’s mission was, may be, perhaps, understood through some
previous remarks upon his great mistress—Nature, as a poetical personage.

There are three methods of contemplating nature.