the swift coinage of thoughts that shall die only with time, be cause they bear about them, and in them, the vitality of truth. High place, it is true, has been attained by intellectual energy, where the moral principle had no visible ascendancy in the individual. But it is false and inconclusive logic, to argue from the height that has been reached by certain powers, the impossibility of gaining one still above, by the help of additional ones. The true reasoning is the reverse. Shakspeare is an exception to the remark that will apply here. Though of a spirit that made no pretension, certainly, to unction, still the wonderful lessons which his poetry embalms come home to our sympathies and our consciences with the effect of so many saintly homilies. His truths search us like sermons pregnant with holiness. But Shakspeare is an anomaly. Who can speak in this strain of Burns or Byron? And yet who does not see what mighty things, above all that either has effected for the world, would have been accomplished by Burns and Byron, had the moral taken precedence of the intellectual principle in their poetry! No one can deny, that, with the same mental energy at work, and under the precedence referred to, there certainly would have been nothing to diminish it: in both cases, the poet would have been so much greater as the man had been better. The triumph had been contemporaneous and parallel. But we pass to another consideration.

Simplicity, when under the direction of good taste, is undoubtedly a virtue of good poetry. But we hold it not to be the cardinal one to which some would elevate it. There are others certainly before it. As an ingredient, it has its value; but when the higher properties of the composition are made subservient to it, there is great danger of failure. Manliness and power should never wait upon simplicity. As it is, indeed, it is a fault, and, we conceive, a childish one, among some of the poetic brotherhood on this side the water. Cowper, on the other, may be said to have set the example of the plain, domestic poetry of modern days. But, since his time, the mania, that in him was delightful, has spread, gathering sad symptoms, till it has passed from the character of simple-hearted, to that of simple-headed; until, indeed, in some instances, it has degenerated from pure simplicity, to something worse than weakness-to folly, and almost to grossness. Now this is the joint effect of a proneness to imitate English standards-of a mistaken notion in the writers themselves, and of public opinion; that is, so far as criticism may be said to express it. It would be idle, we think, to go gravely to work to prove the inclination, with ten out of twelve of our native poets, to conform themselves to some British copy, whenever they give themselves to verse. It is, and has long been, matter of common knowledge and common

complaint. We mean to be understood that the imitation has been of what will one day be, if they are not now, decried as the very worst faults of the originals. Of high and commanding models we cannot have too much imitation, if imitation it may be called, that is but a sympathetic expression of strong mind in strong language. In the great features of power, all great writers will have a resemblance; and so far as this is concerned, it is no imitation. It is coincidence.

Our own poets, in some instances, have mistaken the spirit of simplicity altogether; or, if they have not mistaken it, they have, like some of their prototypes, suffered themselves to commit divers poetical felonies, under the name. We too frequently meet extreme quaintness, or a train of thought teeming with improbable devices, or bad conclusions; but the writer tells us this is simplicity. Again, we are struck with the degree of quietness that marks his style-perchance it may be sleepiness; there seems to be a continual aim at suppression of thought, as though it were unrefined to give it play-as some men hold it so to be natural and hearty in society; but the author tells us again, this is simplicity. Still again we fall in company with a writer who travels perpetually in a mist; who loses himself and his readers in his own metaphysical labyrinth, and who torments us with a display of what Mr. Pollock calls merely the "tops of thoughts ;" and here our only consolation is that every thing about us is simplicity.

To these causes need scarcely be added the tone of cricitism, to account for the present character of a great portion of our poetry. Writers have been reviewed into a refinement and polish that has ended frequently in an absolute frittering of their thoughts, and a total loss of that better energy of which they are capable. They write, as though they were writing with restraint, for a drawing-room, and not with freedom, for a world. But we shall recur to this consideration directly. Meanwhile, it is observable that this very condition of our poetry is as much a consequence of the increase of readers and intelligence-with the variety of taste incident thereto-as it is of a change of times and people. These may be added as remoter causes, to those already referred to. This change, we would add, is greater than we, who have gone along with it, are apt to perceive. A more material one has not accompanied human improvement than that which literature has undergone from one period to another; and in no one department of literature has it been more effectual or more striking than in poetry-the poetry of our own day. View writing at large, and instead of the mystical and laboured style that ran through the best productions of earlier times, and which, moreover, was so accordant with the comparative seclusion and silence of letters, we now hear both the

philosopher and the elegant scholar delivering themselves with that free and graceful expression which so well comports with the liberal character of the age; and as to poetry, a popular air has been breathed into the best works of the best writers, imparting to them a freshness and meaning that come home with the attractiveness of domestic story to all who are capable of any intellectual delight. Poetry, we may be suffered to repeat it, has become a part of our lives. It has, in a sense, conformed itself to our conditions; and it speaks to us in the direct language of an acquaintance, who is accustomed to converse with us at all seasons and in all places. Divested of the heroics and the pomp with which it once awed and overshadowed the children of men, it now comes to us like a kind, but superior spirit, enlivening, beguiling and instructing us, amidst the offices and sympathies of life. This is the true character of poetry. This, too, is the character of the genuine poetry of the present day. Let us not be misunderstood. We would not qualify any of our preceding remarks. They refer to no such poetry as we refer to here-the poetry of the unchastened and fearless spirit-the poetry that stirs us while it blesses us—the poetry that carries all its persuasiveness, without relinquishing any of its power. It may be said we lay great stress upon this quality of strength. We do so; but not more than it deserves; and we do so because there is a disposition to make it a secondary affair in poetic composition. With those who hold this doctrine, we utterly disagree; and whenever poetry departs from its primitive and natural dignity, to become the medium of ephemeral fancies, or the minister to a sickly taste; when it parts with its better properties merely to flaunt in the colours of sentiment, or effeminacy, or something worse, we hold that it has no longer a title to the name of poetry. Genius disowns it for ever.

If it be true that public opinion may sometimes happily interfere to correct or modify the works of art, it is equally certain, that, under some form or other, its interference may go far to injure or destroy them. There are traits of nature too closely allied to the most accomplished efforts of mind, ever to yield to the requisitions of an artificial state of society. What would we think of the sculptor who should bring us forth a statue robed in the fashion of our drawing-rooms, and call it the true Apollo; the very Belvidere! The truth is, these traits need never be, they never must be, surrendered. There exists no necessity for their surrender, as, in politics, there does for the relinquishment of individual natural rights, for the good of the whole body. They are the holy things of nature; thrice holy in poetry; which, if once associated with what is uncongenial or irrelevant, lose their virtue and their beauty; and the

work they were thought to adorn, is miserably and utterly destroyed.

We think it cannot have escaped even passing observation, that there is a class of people who profess to be great admirers of poetry, and many of whom assume to be its critical high priests and dissectors, who would set aside the hallowed inspiration of the poet in favour of elaborateness or mere stratagems of style. With them, finish, polish, is every thing; and the greater the degree of attenuation, the better. Now, did we believe that public sentiment on this subject was to be met by such a profanation of the high offices of poetry, we should say indeed that the submlie art was approaching a fearful crisis. But the hallelujahs of partisans do not constitute public sentiment. The reading public demands no such relinquishment; and the doctrines of those critics who would make poets so unfaithful to themselves and their divinity, by maintaining this system of poetical mechanics-by encouraging them in it, and praising them for it, under the grave sanction of a review, totally misrepresent the prevailing feeling of the community in this matter. Doubtless the spirit of poetry has been outraged by the very means which have been used, by mistaken heads and unskilful hands, to give it a direction, and to propound to it rules and proprieties. Still we believe that this same spirit, though circulating among grosser materials, is yet virtually unsullied; that it still holds its wizard power undisputed, though not untroubled. We have only to lament that in its nearer companionship with man, it has to endure the unsatisfying things it meets there. But we hope for a good issue. Better were it, indeed, that poetry, and the spirit of poetry, should pass from the world, than suffer the continued shame of such sacrifice as this to which we have alluded; and we would willingly forego, for ever, the delight of realizing it when in its purity, like some sweet friend, going abroad with us in our wanderings, and again returning to make glad our hearts and hearths, rather than see it casting away its nobler properties, to conform itself to the childish and morbid tastes of those who cannot appreciate its hidden power or its better attributes; who, calling themselves its judges, are nothing but its bane. Rather would we, than witness such abasement, be compelled to seek it in the blind old masters of antiquity-rather be driven back, to see it again, like jewels in a casket, locked in the shrine of the idolized men who ruled and rejoiced the simple but strong hearts of their hearers, in earlier but better times.

In leaving this part of our subject, we would merely observe, in reference to the spirit of criticism, that it is one of the strong enemies which poetry is doomed to encounter. In the same person the critical and the poetic faculties are not only distinct, VOL. XXI. NO. 42. 34

but they have no particular and observable sympathy. It would seem natural-indeed we hardly see how it could be otherwise that the calm and continuous exercise of judgment, in the matter of the execution, should be incompatible with that excitement which the fervour of inspiration supposes; that the "thoughts that breathe and words that burn" will not wait upon any minister of language, whose business it is solely to square and gauge, with an ever-accompanying readiness to be astonished at any disregard of the fixtures of style, those received manners of expression, which literal spirits view as unalterable as a truth of mathematics. True poetry is too inartificial, as well as too irrepressible, to suffer itself to lose the peculiarities of its character in those of its guise. In the same individual then, we repeat it, the critical and poetical faculties are evidently distinct. So it is in literary collision, where one, as may be supposed, in these days of writers and reviewers, is arrayed against the other; and we believe that the unsatisfactory and dangerous business of verbal criticism has done more to make a mannerist of the poet, and to blast the natural and healthy purity of his verse, than all other things combined. It has compelled him to second thoughts. It has driven him to artifice. It has made him, what he ought never to be, a mere courtier in his art.

In another view of the subject, the poetic taste of our time has been, and still is, in many respects, essentially bad. It lingers with more complacency upon the morbid and melancholy character of poetry, than upon its kindling and transcendent attributes. It has been taught that the sad, complaining spirit of genius was the legitimate object of admiration, because it sang of afflictions that it could not designate, and of which it would have us believe it held solitary endurance. It has been told by the worshippers of diseased sensibility, that the selftortured mind was the only home of true poetry; that there can be no better romance than that which haunts the ruins of a great, restless, and unhappy, because unsettled spirit; and that imagination cannot busy itself better than in talking musically to the world of fancied wrongs, or, it may be, of personal deformities, while it is admitted, on all hands, that there are round us, unsung, still new and strange beauties, springing continually from a vast and inexhaustible creation.

The influence which the character and poetry of Lord Byron exercised upon his time, will warrant the foregoing remarks. That influence is not yet dispelled. Great as was his beautiful and splendid genius, he was not unwilling to submit it to the employment of trickery altogether unworthy of its rank, but to which it was induced as much perhaps by the measureless flattery of certain readers of a green and lack-a-daisical romance,