tempted, but at length conquers all difficulties, and his triumphant return is hailed with "dance and song, and lute and lyre."

It is in the imagery of the poem that Drake's genius is pre-eminent. What, for instance, can be more ingenious that the ordeals prescribed had any "spot or taint " in his ladye-love deepened the Fay's sacrilege:

"Tied to the hornet's shady wings;

Toss'd on the pricks of nettles' stings,
Or seven long ages doom'd to dwell
With the lazy worm in the walnut shell;
Or every night to writhe and bleed
Beneath the tread of the centipede;
Or bound in a cobweb dungeon dim,
Your jailer a spider huge and grim,
Amid the carrion bodies lie

Of the worm, and the bug, and the murder'd fly."

Most appropriate tortures, these, for a fairy inquisition! Even without the metrical accompaniment, how daintily conceived are all the appointments of the fairies! Their lanterns were owlet's eyes. Some of them repose in cobweb hammocks, swinging, perhaps, on tufted spears of grass, and rocked by the zephyrs of a midsummer night. Others make their beds of lichen-green, pillowed by the breast-plumes of the humming-bird. A few, whose taste. for upholstery is quite magnificent, find a couch in the purple shade of the four-o'clock, or the little niches of rock lined with dazzling mica. The table of these minnikin epicureans is a mushroom, whose velvet surface and quaker hue make it a very respectable festal board at which to drink dew from buttercups. The king's throne is of sassafras and spice-wood, with tortoise-shellpillars, and crimson tulip-leaves for drapery. But the quaint shifts and beautiful outfit of the Culprit himself, comprise the most delectable imagery of the poem. He is worn out with fatigue and chagrin at the very commencement of

his journey, and therefore makes captive of a spotted toad, by way of a steed. Having bridled her with silkweed twist, his progress is rapid by dint of lashing her sides with an osier thong. Arrived at the beach, he launches fearlessly upon the tide, for among his other accomplishments, the Fay is a graceful swimmer; but his tender limbs are so bruised by leeches, starfish, and other watery enemies, that he is soon driven back.

The materia medica of Fairy-land is always accessible; and cobweb lint, and balsam dew of sorrel and henbane, speedily relieve the little penitent's wounds. Having refreshed himself with the juice of the calamus root, he returns to the shore, and selects a neatly-shaped muscle shell, brightly painted without, and tinged with pearl within. Nature seemed to have formed it expressly for a fairy boat. Having notched the stern, and gathered a colen bell to bale with, he sculls into the midst of the river, laughing at his old foes as they grin and chatter around his way. There, in the sweet moon-light, he sits until a sturgeon comes by, and leaps, all glistening, into the silvery atmosphere; then balancing his delicate frame upon one foot, like a Lilliputian Mercury, he lifts the flowery cup, and catches the one sparkling drop that is to wash the stain from his wing. Gay is his return voyage. Sweet nymphs clasp the boat's side with their tiny hands, and cheerily urge it onward. His next enterprise is of a more knightly species; and he proceeds to array himself accordingly, as becomes a fairy cavalier. His acorn helmet is plumed with thistle-down, a bee's nest forms his corselet, and his cloak is of butterflies' wings. With a lady-bug's shell for a shield, and waspsting lance, spurs of cockle-seed, a bow made of vinetwig, strung with maize-silk, and well supplied with nettle-shafts, he mounts his fire-fly Bucephalus, and waving his blade of blue grass, speeds upward to catch a "glim

mering spark" from some flying meteor. Again the spirits of evil are let loose upon him, and the upper elements are not more friendly than those below. Fays are as hardly beset, it seems, as we of coarser clay, by temptations in a feminine shape. A sylphid queen of the skies, "the loveliest of the forms of light," enchants the wanderer by her beauty and kindness. But though she played very archly with the butterfly cloak, and handled the tassel of his blade while he revealed to her pitying ear "the dangers he had passed," the memory of his first love and the object of pilgrimage kept his heart free. Escorted with great honour by the sylph's lovely train, his career is resumed, and his flame-wood lamp at length re-kindled, and before the "sentry elf" proclaims" a streak in the eastern sky," the Culprit has been welcomed to all his original glory.

It will be observed that the materials-the costume, as it were of this fairy tale, are of native and familiar origin. The effect is certainly quite as felicitous as that of many similar productions where the countless flowers and rich legends of the East, furnish the poet with an exhaustless mine of pleasing images. It has been remarked that the dolphin and flying-fish are the only poetical members of the finny tribes; but who, after reading the Culprit Fay, will ever hear the plash of a sturgeon in the moonlit water, without recalling the genius of Drake? Indeed, the poem which we have thus cursorily examined is one of those happy inventions of fancy, superinduced, upon fact, which afford unalloyed delight. There are various tastes as regard the style and spirit of different bards; but no one, having the slightest perception, will fail to realize at once that the Culprit Fay is a genuine This is, perhaps, the highest of praise. The mass of versified compositions are not strictly poems. Here and there only the purely ideal is apparent. A

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series of poetical fragments are linked by rhymes to other and larger portions of common-place and prosaic ideas. It is with the former as with moon-beams falling through dense foliage-they only chequer our path with light. Poetry," says Campbell, "should come to us in masses of ore, that require little sifting." The poem before us obeys this important rule. It is "of imagination all compact." It takes us completely away from the dull level of ordinary associations. As the portico of some beautiful temple, through it we are introduced into a scene of calm delight, where Fancy asserts her joyous supremacy, and woos us to forgetfulness of all outward evil, and to fresh recognition of the lovely in Nature and the graceful and gifted in humanity.

BRYANT.

IT has been well observed by an English critic that Poetry is not a branch of authorship. The vain endeavour to pervert its divine and spontaneous agency into a literary craft, is the great secret of its recent decline. Poetry is the overflowing of the soul. It is the record of what is best in the world. No product of the human mind is more disinterested. Hence comparatively few keep the poetic element alive beyond the period of early youth. All that is genuine in the art springs from vivid experience, and life seldom retains any novel aspect to those who have long mingled in its scenes and staked upon its chances. A celebrated artist of our day, when asked the process by which his delineations were rendered so effective, replied, that he drew them altogether from memory. Natural objects were portrayed not as they impressed him at the moment, but according to the lively and feeling phases in which they struck his senses in boyhood. For this reason it has been truly observed, that remembrance makes the poet, and that emotions recollected in tranquillity form the true source of inspiration. A species of literature depending upon conditions so delicate is obviously not to be successfully cultivated by those who hold it in no reverence. The great distinction between verse-writers and poets is that the former seek and the latter receive; the one attempt to command, the other meekly obey the higher impulses of their bein