and sentiments the natural prav v **** stance common to the classTANRV vaadith for instance:

An old man stout of heart, and strong or limi
His bodily frame had been time youth to ***
Of an unusual strength: his mind was heelte
Intense and frugal, apt for all affairs,
And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt
And watchful more than ordinary men,
Hence he had learnt the meaning of all wind,
Of blasts of every tone, and oftentimes
When others heeded not, he heard the Soutla
Make subterraneous music, like the noise
Of bagpipers on distant highland hills.
The shepherd, at such warning, of his look
Bethought him, and he to himself would say,
The winds are now devising work for me!
And truly at all times the storm, that drives
The traveller to a shelter, summond him
Up to the mountains. He had been alone
Amid the heart of many thousand mists,
That came to him and left bim on the heights,
So liv'd he, till his eightieth year wae pa'd,
And grossly that man errs, who should supp
That the greep vallies, and the strewe uw rouhe,
Were things indiferent to the shopbud' tlwybts
Fields, where with ebrarful spirita la band watw4
The Comioon air; the hills, which was
Had climb'd with rigorous sta per lavede huwed upraved
So many incidenu upou duit mund
Of hardship, skill os coproye, jou of tar;
Which like a bouk preserved that way
Oi tut dumi animals, wisu i brad son,

Had fed or shelter'd, linking to such acts,
So grateful in themselves, the certainty
Of honorable gains; these fields, these hills
Which were his living being, even more
Than his own blood—what could they less ? bad laid
Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure which there is in life itself.

事

On the other hand, in the

poems

which are pitched at a lower note, as the “ Harry Gill,” “ Idiot Boy,” &c. the feelings are those of human nature in general; though the poet has judiciously laid the scene in the country, in order to place himself in the vicinity of interesting images, without the necessity of ascribing a sentimental perception of their beauty to the persons of his drama. In the “ Idiot Boy,” indeed, the mother's character is not so much a real and native product of a “ situation where the essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in which they can attain their maturity and speak a plainer and more emphatic language," as it is an impersonation of an instinct abandoned by judgement. Hence the two following charges seem to me not wholly groundless : at least, they are the only plausible objections, which I have heard to that fine poem. The

I one is, that the author has not, in the poem itself, taken sufficient care to preclude from the reader's fancy the disgusting images of ordinary,

2

a

morbid idiocy, which yet it was by no means his intention to represent. He has even by the

burr, burr, burr," uncounteracted by any preceding description of the boy's beauty, assisted in recalling them. The other is, that the idiocy of the boy is so evenly balanced by the folly of the mother, as to present to the general reader rather a laughable burlesque on the blindness of anile dotage, than an analytic display of maternal affection in its ordinary workings.

In the 56 Thorn,” the poet himself acknowledges in a note the necessity of an introductory poem, in which he should have pourtrayed the character of the person from whom the words of the poem are supposed to proceed : a superstitious man moderately imaginative, of slow faculties and deep feelings, “a captain of a small trading vessel, for example, who being past the middle age of life, had retired upon an annuity, or small independent income, to some village or country town of which he was not a native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live. Such men having nothing to do become credulous and talkative from indolence." But in a poem, still more in a lyric poem (and the NURSE in Shakspeare's Romeo and Juliet alone preveuts me from extending the remark even to dramatic poetry, if indeed the Nurse itself can be deemed altogether a case in point) it is not possible to imitate truly a dull and

garrulous discourser, without repeating the effects of dulness and garrulity. However this may be, I dare assert, that the parts (and these form the far larger portion of the whole) which might as well or still better have proceeded from the poet's own imagination, and have been spoken in his own character, are those which have given, and which will continue to give universal delight; and that the passages exclusively appropriate to the supposed narrator, such as the last couplet of the third stanza ;* the seven last lines of the tenth ; and the five following stanzas, with the exception of the four admirable lines at the commencement of the fourteenth are felt by many unprejudiced and unsophisticated hearts, as sudden and unpleasant sinkings from the height to which the poet had previously lifted them, and to which he again re-elevates both himself and his reader.

If then I am compelled to doubt the theory, by which the choice of characters was to be directed, not only a priori, from grounds of reason, but both from the few instances in which the poet himself need be supposed to