whose reputation had assumed so much the aspect of a fixed star, and yet only proved" the comet of a season.” Anna Seward, yclept the Swan of Litchfield, was the Sappho of that era of ribbons and gumflowers, and a fitting one for such a Juvenal as Hayley, and such a Lucretius as Darwin. She wrote with fluency, and poured out a cataract of verse. Her Elegies on Captain Cook and Major André, from the interest attached to the subjects, and the kind of electro-galvanic animation which characterised her compositions, attracted general attention, and ran successfully the round of popularity. With equal adaptation to the prevailing tastes, Paul Whitehead wore the laurel crown; and, mounted on his spavined Pegasus, duly chaunted his New Year and Birthday Odes, according to the terms of the statute.

As nothing in reference to literature, except what is founded on truth and nature, can be expected to be permanent and as Darwin, Hayley, and the Litchfield coterie were deficient in both-so their triumph was an evanescent one. It has been well said, that "the poetry of Darwin was as bright and transient as the plants and flowers that formed the subject of his verse." He had fancy, command of language, varied metaphor, and magniloquent versification; but the want of nature marred all; and although his bow was bent occasionally with nervous strength, and always with artistic skill, yet his arrows fell pointless to the earth. He had no repose, no passion; and consequently his poetry alike palled on the ear, and failed to touch the heart. He had the power to astonish and to dazzle; but lacked that tenderness necessary to create sympathetic interest, and without which the other is but a tinkling cymbal.

In matter and in manner, the Lake and Darwinian schools of poetry are the very antipodes of each other— hostile in every doctrine, and opposed in every characteristic. The extreme radical error of the former

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consists in the debasing what is in itself essentially dignified and lofty, by meanness of style, triteness of simile, and puerility of description; it clothes Achilles once more in female habiliments, and sets Hercules to the distaff. The other endeavours (if I may be allowed the comparison) to buoy up the materials of prose into the regions of poetry, by putting them into an airballoon, not expanded by the divine afflatus, but by hydrogenous gas; while the aëronaut, as he ascends, waves his embroidered flag, and scatters among the gaping crowds below gilded knick-knacks, tinsel trinkets, and artificial flowers, amazingly like nature! The one reminds us of Cincinnatus throwing aside the ensigns of office, and withdrawing from the bustle of camps and cabinets to the tranquillity of his Sabine farm: the other to Abon Hassan in the Arabian Tales, transported from the tavern to the palace, when under the influence of a somniferous potion, and awaking amid the music of a morning concert, surrounded with the splendours of mock royalty.

Were it not for the similes, which are, however, too frequently pressed into the service, "The Botanic Garden " and "The Temple of Nature," with all their luxuriant description, splendid imagery, and pompous versification, would be the most tedious and uninteresting performances imaginable; "altogether flat, stale, and unprofitable." The subject-matter, abstractedly considered, wholly precludes pathos and sympathy-elements without which, in our critical opinion, poetry is a mere caput mortuum, and stripped of all fascination. We can easily conceive how Lucretius could construct a grand poem, "De Rerum Naturâ," and how the genius of Virgil could be suitably employed on "The Georgics; "-rural sights and sounds continuing to exert those imaginative influences in the days of Thomson, Cowper, and Grahame, which they did in the patriarchal ages, alike when Isaac went forth to meditate at eventide, and when Ruth gleaned in the

fields of Boaz; and which they will never, can never cease to exert, while human nature preserves its present constitution. Almost any subject may be invested with a poetical interest, although that interest is not prominently inherent in the thing itself, nor even in the associations immediately connecting themselves with it. Garth's

"Dispensary," and Armstrong's "Art of Preserving Health," for instance, as well as the "Eclogues of Sannizarius" and "The Nurse of Tansillo," are essentially and intrinsically prosaic. That these writers have sprinkled a poetical garnish over them, alters not the case. Darwin had no faith in simplicity and nature; and he spoiled all his delineations "by gilding refined gold, and painting the lily;" while the faults and failures of Wordsworth and his followers, on the other hand, originated in equally vain attempts, either to dignify the intrinsically mean, or to decorate the hopelessly worthless.

For utilitarianism, as strictly applied to poetry, I have no liking. What possible end could be gained by describing the machinery of a cotton-mill, or the improvements on the steam-engine in verse, that could not be better attained in prose ? If Dr Darwin intended to excite pleasurable feelings in his readers, he might have unquestionably chosen a more appropriate subject; if instruction was his aim, verse ought not to have been his vehicle. We are told, indeed, that it is the design of "The Botanic Garden " "to enlist imagination under the banners of science, and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies that dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones which form the ratiocinations of philosophy." But the great end of poetry is here forgotten. We look on, and are dazzled; but we have none of those emotions which either "entrance the soul and lap it in Elysium;" or that awaken "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." "The Loves of the Plants" are wholly different from "The Metamorphoses" of Ovid; because, in the latter, the transmutation is merely a secondary object,

OVID'S METAMORPHOSES.

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both in the eyes of the poet and in the estimation of the reader. As the hero or heroine falls off from all intellectual grandeur, and thereby ceases utterly to excite aught of moral sympathy, we are wholly indifferent, since the absurdity of transformation must take place, into what it may be-au animal, or a stone, or a flower. Swift and Prior have admirably travestied some of these stories; and in the "Baucis and Philemon," the former has with great naïveté adapted the classic fable to rural English manners, and turned his hospitable domestic pair into yew trees, which long remained objects of wonder :

"Till once a Parson of our town,

To mend his barn, cut Baucis down;
At which 'tis hard to be believed-
How much the other tree was grieved,
Grew scrubby, died a-top, was stunted;
So the next Parson stubbed and brunt it."

Ovid, indeed, tells us that, when Ajax stabbed himself, his blood was turned into the violet. But this is only the supernatural winding up of a scene of human passion, full of nature, feeling, and heroic action. He has previously introduced us to the two great leaders who plead their claims before the assembled Grecian chiefs for the armour of Achilles. We are taught to listen to the applausive shouts of the soldiery, and to have our hearts touched with the eloquence of the champions, as either in turn recounts the services he has rendered to his country, and "his hair-breadth 'scapes by flood and field." Of Darwin in his purest form take the following short specimen :—

"Nymphs! you disjoin, unite, condense, expand,
And give new wonders to the Chemist's hand;

On tepid clouds of rising steam aspire,

And fix in sulphur all its solid fire;

With boundless string elastic airs unfold,

Or fill the fine vacuities of gold;

With sudden flash vitrescent sparks reveal,
By fierce collision from the flint and steel;
Or mark with shining letters Kunkel's name
In the pale Phospor's self-consuming flame.
So the chaste heart of some enchanted maid
Shines with insidious light by love betrayed.
Round her pale bosom plays the young desire,

And slow she wastes with self-consuming fire."

Here is science united to poetry with a vengeance! Now, we maintain that the passage has no title whatever to the latter appellation, save for the simile so strangely conveyed in the last four lines, which carries us back from dry art to images of natural beauty.

The parts of Darwin's writings worthy of admiration (and the finer portions are well worthy of it) are, without an exception that strikes me, only those passages which are subsidiary to the main objects of his poetry, and introduced by way of apostrophe or illustration. We do not think of the Digitalis purpurea, but of philanthropy and Howard; we do not think of the embryo seeds, but of Herschel and the starry firmament; not of the Carline thistle, but of the ascent of Montgolfier; not of the Orchis, but of Eliza and the battle of Minden; not of the vegetable poisons, but of the desolation of Palmyra. Incongruity, instead of being disclaimed by, seems a favourite axiom of Darwin and his school-subjects, hopelessly prosaic, being artificially stilted into eminence, and loaded with epithet and embellishment. If a beggar were to be introduced, it would be in a tattered lace-coat, and he would ride to the lower regions- down the “facilis descensus Averni”—on a broken-kneed horse; and, if a "slaughterer of horned cattle," he would, after stalking through the shambles like a dancing-master, apostrophise his slain bullock in the fashion of Mark Anthony over Cæsar. As, with persons technically termed fine singers, sense is sacrificed to sound, so there is with the Darwinians no solicitude about the sentiment, provided