the higher and more energetic tone of the Corsair, or Childe Harold, or Don Juan. He has indeed borrowed the manner of this last piece in two of the poems in this little volume-but has shown no great aptitude for wit or sarcasm, and has succeeded only in the parts that are pathetic and tender. There is a great deal of the diction of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and some imitation of their beauties: but we think the natural bent of his genius is more like that of Leigh Hunt than any other author. He has the same play of fancy, and the same capacity of deep and delicate feeling, together with the same relish for the old Italian poetry, and the plain and simple pathos of Dante and Boccacio. We doubt, however, whether he has equal force of original talent, or whether he could have written any thing so good, on the whole, as the beautiful story of Rimini. But he has better taste and better judgment-or, what perhaps is but saying the same thing, he has less affectation, and far less conceit. He has scarcely any other affectation, indeed, than is almost necessarily implied in a sedulous imitator of difficult models-and no visible conceit at all. On the contrary, we cannot help supposing him to be a very natural and amiable person, who has taken to write poetry, more for the love he bears it, than the fame to which it may raise him-who cares nothing for the sects and factions into which the poetical world may be divided;-but, regarding himself as a debtor to every writer who has given him pleasure, desires nothing better than to range freely over the whole Parnassian garden, "stealing and giving odour" with a free spirit and a grateful and joyous heart.

It is this apparent devotion to the purer part of his art, and the total exclusion of all contentious and dogmatical matter, that constitutes the great charm of his writing. The fever of party spirit, and the bitterness of speculative contention, have of late years infected all our literature; and Poetry itself, instead of being the balm and anodyne of minds, hurt and ruffled with the rugged tasks and angry struggles of the world, has too often been made the vehicle of moral and political animosity, religious antipathy, and personal offence. We cannot always, with all our philosophy, escape the soil and tarnish of those contagious pursuits; but it is delightful to turn from them awhile, to the unalloyed sweets of such poetry as Mr. Cornwall's; and to refresh our fancies, and strengthen and compose our good affections, among the images of love and beauty, and gentle sympathy and sorrow, with which it every where presents us.

If it be the peculiar province of Poetry to give delight, this author should rank very high among our poets; and, in spite of his neglect of the terrible passions, he does rank very high in our estimation. He has a beautiful fancy and a beautiful diction-and a fine ear for the music of verse, and great tenderness and delicacy of feeling. He seems, moreover, to be altogether free from any tincture of bitterness, rancour, or jealousy; and never shocks us with atrocity, or stiffens us with horror, or confounds us with the dreadful sublimities of demoniacal energy. His soul, on the contrary, seems filled to overflowing with images of love and beauty, and gentle sorrows, and tender pity, and mild and holy resignation. The character of his poetry is to soothe, and melt, and delight: to make us kind, and thoughtful, and imaginative to purge away the dregs of our earthly passions, by the refining fires of a pure imagination, and to lap us up from the eating cares of life, in visions so soft and bright, as to sink like morning dreams on our

senses, and at the same time so distinct and truly fashioned upon the eter– nal patterns of nature, as to hold their place before our eyes long after they have again been opened on the dimmer scenes of the world.

Why this should not be thought the highest kind of poetry, we profess ourselves rather at a loss to explain; -and certainly are ourselves often in a mood to think that it is so; and to believe that the more tremendous agitations of the breast, to which the art has so often been made subservient, have attracted more admiration, and engrossed more talent, thán ought in justice to have been assigned them. The real lovers of poetry, we suspect, will generally incline their cars most willingly to its softer and more winning strains-nor can we believe that it was for them that its more tumultuous measures were invented. Men of delicate sensibility and inflammable imaginations do not require the stronger excitement of those boisterous and agonising emotions, without which it may be difficult to rouse the sympathies. of more tardy and rugged natures. The poetical temperament is intrinsically dreamy and contemplative; and subsists in passionate imaginings, and beautiful presentments of the fancy. Wrath, and scorn, and misanthropy, are scarcely among its natural elements. It has but little legitimate affinity with horror and agony, and none at all with aversion and disgust; nor is it easy to conceive that it should very long maintain its attraction where the predominating feelings it excites are those of dread, astonishment, and disdain. Some strong and gloomy spirits there may be, that really enjoy the stormy trouble of the elements; but the greater and the better part of the lovers of poetry will always be happy to escape to milder and more temperate regions, and to pursue their meditations among enchantments of a more engaging character, and forms of a gentler aspect.*

KEATS. †

We have been exceedingly struck with the genius which these volumes. display, and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their extravagance. That imitation of our older writers, and especially of our older dramatists, to which we cannot help flattering ourselves that we have somewhat contributed, has brought on, as it were, a second spring in our poetry; and few of its blossoms are either more profuse of sweetness, or richer in promise, than this which is now before us. Mr. Keats, we understand, is still a very young man; and his whole works, indeed, bear evidence enough of the fact. They are full of extravagance and irregularity, rash attempts at originality, interminable wanderings, and excessive obscurity. They manifestly require, therefore, all the indulgence that can be claimed for a first attempt: -but we think it no less plain that they deserve it; for they are flushed all over with the rich lights of fancy, and so coloured and bestrewn with the flowers of poetry, that even while perplexed and bewildered in their labyrinths, it is impossible to resist the intoxication of their sweetness, or to shut our hearts to the enchantments they so lavishly pre

The concluding paragraph of this critique is taken from a review of Cornwall's "Marcian Colonna," Vol. xxxiv. p. 449.

Endymion, and other Poems. By John Keats.-Vol. xxxiv. p. 203. August, 1820.

sent. The models upon which he has formed himself, in the Endymion, the earliest and by much the most considerable of his poems, are obviously the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher, and the Sad Shepherd of Ben Jonson; -the exquisite metres and inspired diction of which he has copied with great boldness and fidelity,-and, like his great originals, has also contrived to impart to the whole piece that true rural and poetical air, which breathes only in them and in Theocritus,-which is at once homely and majestic, luxurious and rude, and sets before us the genuine sights and sounds and smells of the country, with all the magic and grace of Elysium. His subject has the disadvantage of being mythological; and in this respect, as well as on account of the raised and rapturous tone it consequently assumes, his poetry may be better compared perhaps to the Comus and the Arcades of Milton, of which also there are many traces of imitation. The great distinction, however, between him and these divine authors is, that imagination in them is subordinate to reason and judgment, while with him, it is paramount and supreme; that their ornaments and images are employed to embellish and recommend just sentiments, engaging incidents, and natural characters, while his are poured out without measure or restraint, and with no apparent design but to unburden the breast of the author, and give vent to the overflowing vein of his fancy. The thin and scanty tissue of his story is merely the light frame-work on which his florid wreaths are suspended; and while his imaginations go rambling and entangling themselves every where, like wild honeysuckles, all idea of sober reason, and plan, and consistency, is utterly forgotten, and are "strangled in their waste fertility." A great part of the work, indeed, is written in the strangest and most fantastical manner that can be imagined. It seems as if the author had ventured every thing that occurred to him in the shape of a glittering image or striking expression-taking the first word that presented itself to make up a rhyme, and then made that word the germ of a new cluster of images-a hint for a new excursion of the fancy-and so wandered on, equally forgetful whence he came, and heedless whither he was going, till he had covered his pages with an interminable arabesque of connected and incongruous figures, that multiplied as they extended, and were only harmonised by the brightness of their tints, and the graces of their forms. In this rash and headlong career he has of course many lapses and failures. There is no work, accordingly, from which a malicious critic could cull more matter for ridicule, or select more obscure, unnatural, or absurd passages. But we do not take that to be our office; -and just beg leave, on the contrary, to say, that any one who, on this account, would represent the whole poem as despicable, must either have no notion of poetry, or no regard to truth.

It is, in truth, at least as full of genius as of absurdity; and he who does not find a great deal in it to admire and to give delight, cannot in his heart see much beauty in the two exquisite dramas to which we have already alluded, or find any great pleasure in some of the finest creations of Milton and Shakspeare. There are very many such persons, we verily believe, even among the reading and judicious part of the communitycorrect scholars, we have no doubt, many of them, and, it may be, very classical composers in prose and in verse-but utterly ignorant of the true genius of English poetry, and incapable of estimating its appropriate and most exquisite beauties. With that spirit we have no hesitation in saying that Mr. Keats is deeply imbued--and of those beauties he has presented us with many striking examples. We are very much inclined indeed to

add, that we do not know any book which we would sooner employ as a test to ascertain whether any one had in him a native relish for poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm. The greater and more distinguished poets of our country have so much else in them to gratify other tastes and propensities, that they are pretty sure to captivate and amuse those to whom their poetry is but an hinderance and obstruction, as well as those to whom it constitutes their chief attraction. The interest of the stories they tell-the vivacity of the characters they delineate-the weight and force of the maxims and sentiments in which they abound-the very pathos and wit and humour they display, which may all and each of them exist apart from their poetry and independent of it, are quite sufficient to account for their popularity, without referring much to that still higher gift, by which they subdue to their enchantments those whose souls are attuned to the finer impulses of poetry. It is only where those other recommendations are wanting, or exist in a weaker degree, that the true force of the attraction, exercised by the pure poetry with which they are so often combined, can be fairly appreciated-where, without much incident or many characters, and with little wit, wisdom, or arrangement, a number of bright pictures are presented to the imagination, and a fine feeling expressed of those mysterious relations by which visible external things are assimilated with inward thoughts and emotions, and become the images and exponents of all passions and affections. To an unpoetical reader such passages always appear mere raving and absurdity-and to this censure a very great part of the volume before us will certainly be exposed, with this class of readers. Even in the judgment of a fitter audience, however, it must, we fear, be admitted, that, besides the riot and extravagance of his fancy, the scope and substance of Mr. Keats's poetry is rather too dreary and abstracted to excite the strongest interest, or to sustain the attention through a work of any great compass or extent. He deals too much with shadowy and incomprehensible beings, and is too constantly rapt into an extramundane Elysium, to command a lasting interest with ordinary mortals-and must employ the agency of more varied and coarser emotions, if he wishes to take rank with the seducing poets of this or of former generations. There is something very curious too, we think, in the way in which he, and Mr. Barry Cornwall also, have dealt with the Pagan mythology, of which they have made so much use in their poetry. Instead of presenting its imaginary persons under the trite and vulgar traits that belong to them in the ordinary systems, little more is borrowed from these than the general conception of their conditions and relations; and an original character and distinct individuality is bestowed upon them, which has all the merit of invention, and all the grace and attraction of the fictions on which it is engrafted. The ancients, though they probably did not stand in any great awe of their deities, have yet abstained very much from any minute or dramatic representation of their feelings and affections. In Hesiod and Homer, they are coarsely delineated by some of their actions and adventures, and introduced to us merely as the agents in those particular transactions; while in the Hymns, from those ascribed to Orpheus and Homer down to those of Callimachus, we have little but pompous epithets and invocations, with a flattering commemoration of their most famous exploits-and are never allowed to enter into their bosoms, or follow out the train of their feelings, with the presumption of our human sympathy. Except the love-song of the Cyclops to his Sea

Nymph, in Theocritus-the Lamentation of Venus for Adonis, in Moschus -and the more recent Legend of Apuleius, we scarcely recollect a passage in all the writings of antiquity in which the passions of an immortal are fairly disclosed to the scrutiny and observation of men. The author before us, however, and some of his contemporaries, have dealt differently with the subject;-and, sheltering the violence of the fiction under the ancient traditionary fable, have created and imagined an entire new set of characters, and brought closely and minutely before us the loves and sorrows and perplexities of beings, with whose names and supernatural attributes we had long been familiar, without any sense or feeling of their personal character. We have more than doubts of the fitness of such personages to maintain a permanent interest with the modern public;— but the way in which they are here managed certainly gives them the best chance that now remains for them; and, at all events, it cannot be denied that the effect is striking and graceful. Mr. Keats has unquestionably a very beautiful imagination, and a great familiarity with the finest diction of English poetry; but he must learn not to misuse or misapply these advantages,-and neither to waste the good gifts of nature and study on intractable themes, nor to luxuriate too recklessly on such as are more suitable.

SHELLEY."

Mr. Shelley's style is to poetry what astrology is to natural science,passionate dream, a straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstractions,-a fever of the soul, thirsting and craving after what it cannot have, indulging its love of power and novelty at the expense of truth and nature, associating ideas by contraries, and wasting great powers by their application to unattainable objects.

Poetry, we grant, creates a world of its own; but it creates it out of existing materials. Mr. Shelley is the maker of his own poetry-out of nothing. Not that he is deficient in the true sources of strength and beauty, if he had given himself fair play (the volume before us, as well as his other productions, contains many proofs to the contrary): but in him, fancy, will, caprice, predominated over and absorbed the natural influences of things; and he had no respect for any poetry that did not strain the intellect as well as fire the imagination-and was not sublimed into a high spirit of metaphysical philosophy. Instead of giving a language to thought, or lending the heart a tongue, he utters dark sayings, and deals in allegories and riddles. His Muse offers her services to clothe shadowy doubts and inscrutable difficulties in a robe of glittering words, and to turn nature into a brilliant paradox. We thank him-but we must be excused. Where we see the dazzling beacon lights streaming over the darkness of the abyss, we dread the quicksands and the rocks below. Mr. Shelley's mind was of "too fiery a quality to repose (for any continuance) on the probable or the true-it soared "beyond the visible diurnal sphere," to the strange, the

* Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley.-Vol. xl. p. 494. July, 1825.