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Of England's glory and Helvetia's arms.

The smile of triumph or the frown of scorn.
Their wealthless lot or pitiless command.

&c. &c.

Of the second peculiarity of Darwin's diction, his ́Latin neology, I find but one example, 'horrent;' of his third, his material personifications-none; but his fourth and last, the reiterated verb, runs through the entire poem. The following passage is again, in this particular, completely Darwin.

He sweeps before the wind,

Treads the lov'd shore, he sigh'd to leave behind,
Meets at each step a friend's familiar face,

And flies at last to Helen's long embrace;

Wipes from her cheek the rapture-speaking tear,
And clasps with many a sigh his children dear.

Again,

Dropp'd from her nerveless grasp the shatter'd spear,
Closed her bright eye, and curb'd her high career.

Again,

Wav'd her dread standard to the breeze of morn,
Peal'd her loud drum, and twang'd her trumpet horn.

&c. &c.

Campbell's beauties, a few of the most striking of which have been quoted, are indeed numerous, and diffused over the whole poem. Like Rogers, in the Pleasures of Memory, he seldom rises to the sublime; nay, to the two or three previously extracted passages,

generally quoted as sublime, the word magnificent (expressing splendour and greatness, somewhat artificial, and divested of the awe of terror) would, perhaps, be more applicable The picturesque, or new, is equally rare; there is, however, one passage of pictural and picturesque force, in the description of the Swedish hero's fatal march through a snow storm, to Pultowa:

Froze every standard sheet, and hush'd the drum.

Campbell's chief defect of diction is that of Darwin,-a stilted, artificial monotony; the cæsura tiresomely falling, line after line, on the same accented pivot of the ten-syllabled see-saw. He has anotherhis over-chastened and classical polish often descends to tameness, and sometimes to low expressions. Thus we have Children dear,' vide supra; can wisdom lend the pledge?'' sapient eye,' 'sapient rule.' This latter word, vulgarized into irony, has been objected to Montgomery.

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Every form that fancy can repair.

From dark oblivion,

Twang'd her trumpet horn,

From whence each bright rotundity was hurl'd. • Viewless winds,' 'viewless eyes;' this equivocal adjective has been objected to Montgomery: viewless means unseeing as well as unseen.

Deep from his vaults the Loxian murmurs flow.

Vaults' is unpoetical; the passage is, besides, bad grammar. Whose vaults? The poet means, but does not express, those of the Apollo Loxius. The next line is rendered low by an unlucky anachronism—

He

And Pythia's awful organ peals below.

says of the spheres, in the language of the parade, that they―

Peal'd their first notes to sound the march of time.

The following is associated with a low image: a similar passage in Montgomery has been objected to

Or round the cope (ring ?) her living chariot driven,
And wheel'd in triumph thro' the signs of heaven.

How can thy words from balmy slumber start
Reposing virtue ?

The bard here means cause to start; the word is ungrammatical, unless in the vulgarized sense, in which it is nautically used. But enough on this head; here is enough, and more than enough, to shew that the most faultless poet of the day might furnish ample employment to hypercriticism. Mr. Campbell affects, like R. Montgomery, compound words, which, with some exceptions, appear unobjectionable. Terrormingled,' 'wonder-beaming,' passion-kindling,' rapture-heightened,' 'love-delighted,' carnagecovered,' broomwood-blossomed,' &c. &c. His rhymes are elaborately perfected, and may be pronounced faultless.

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Rogers's standard poem, the Pleasures of Memory, is free from Campbell's Darwinian ill taste of diction. It is pure and sweet, both in verse and thought. A polished equability, sometimes tinctured with pathos, and often adorned with picturesque associations, pervades it. It is rarely elevated; never attempts the sublime, and its fault in sentiment is what the University men term essayical; it is a theme replete with sensible and tasteful remarks conveyed in sweet and flowing verse. In confirmation of this opinion, I may here quote a passage of great beauty, both in diction and sentiment, in addition to another already quoted.

When joy's bright sun has shed his evening ray,
And hopes delusive meteors cease to play;

When clouds on clouds the smiling prospect close,
Still thro' the gloom thy star serenely glows;
Like yon fair orb, she gilds the brow of night
With the mild magic of reflected light.

The versification is occasionally, in this poem, but systematically in Human Life, deformed with triplets. The latter poem, far inferior to the Pleasures of Memory in thoughtful tenderness, and commenced and probably suggested by a plagiarism from Goldsmith, has been rendered a failure by its triplets, from which the anathema of Dr. Johnson* ought to have deterred our bard. Rogers's rhymes, like Campbell's, are faultless; he also affects compound words,-"root*Life of Dryden.

inwoven,' 'war-worn,' &c., and sometimes, unhappily, creates a word, as 'tapered rite.' Occasionally the diction descends from equable to feeble, and from feeble to low. Many instances of the latter might be found by word-hunters.' I shall here only note a curious circumstance, that the Poet of Memory, three times in three pages, uses the word steal in the sense, cause to steal, as

.

Stealing soft music on the ear of night,—

a circumstance which, coupled with a similar ungrammatical construction in Campbell, demonstrates our want of a causal verb, like that employed in Arabic and its parent philosophical language-Hebrew. If there be no example of the sublime in Rogers's Pleasures of Memory, replete as it is with picturesque description, it is but justice to add, that a poem, considered as a subordinate epic sketch, by the same bard, shews that the divina vis of a more elevated feeling was not wanting. Indeed, justice is not done to the Voyage of Columbus. It is but the ébauche of an epic poem; and the plot has an unredeemable vice, that of transferring the inspiration of the bard himself to a gratuitous monk,-a vice rendered more fatal by an interchange of the epic pentameter with an imitation of Scott's tetrametrical Iambics. But, if the test of Longinus be correct, that the tasteful critic may recognize the true sublime when he finds his imagination attracted, elevated, and inflamed by that

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