Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/133

Rh more from the self-refraining nature which will not merge in the creature the fulness of the heart that should be given to the Creator. Again, would not Wordsworth himself have felt his heart bound with the same kind of proud exultation which he felt when he had written such a sonnet as the grand one on Toussaint l'Ouverture for instance, if he had conceived the following, concerning the fear that when the heart has gained all in gaining God, it may lose him again by the mere intrinsic feebleness of its own wasting powers? —    These four last lines, in the exaltation of their claim that God and all his creatures conspire to strengthen the man who has won the eternal for his own, may fairly be placed — nor will they lose by the comparison — with the grand lines in which Wordsworth assured the negro patriot of the powers which would sustain him even in the "deep dungeon's earless den:" —

Again, to show how Mr. Dowden appreciates the world of limitation and convention which is bred of modern frivolity and fashion, take the fine sonnet alluding to the anger felt by David against Michal for laughing at the Oriental passion of his dance before the ark: —   Or for the mixture of sympathy with nature and the humor of its glance at human society of the religiously conventional kind, take the following graceful verses entitled, "In the Cathedral Close:" — 

