labor and cultivation. "Italy" is another fine poem, as you may learn from the extract here appended:

ROME.

"I am in Rome! Oft as the morning ray

Visits these eyes, waking at once, I cry,

Whence this excess of joy? What has befallen me?

And from within a thrilling voice replies,

Thou art in Rome! A thousand busy thoughts

Rush on my mind, a thousand images;

And I spring up as girt to run a race!

*

*

*

Thou art in Rome! the city that so long
Reign'd absolute, the mistress of the world;
The mighty vision that the prophets saw,
And trembled.

Thou art in Rome! the city where the Gauls,
Entering, at sunrise, through her open gates,
And, through her streets silent and desolate,

Marching to slay, thought they saw gods, not men,-
The city that, by temperance, fortitude,

And love of glory, tower'd above the clouds,
Then fell-but falling, kept the highest seat,
And in her loneliness, her pomp of wo,

Where now she dwells, withdrawn into the wild,
Still o'er the mind maintains, from age to age,
Her empire undiminish'd.

Ah, little thought I, when in school I sat.
A schoolboy on his bench, at early dawn
Glowing with Roman story, I should live
To tread the Appian, once an avenue
Of monuments most glorious, palaces,
Their doors seal'd up and silent as the night,
The dwellings of the illustrious dead-to turn
Toward Tiber, and, beyond the city gate,
Pour out my unpremeditated verse,
Where, on his mule, I might have met so oft.
Horace himself-or climb the Palatine,
Dreaming of old Evander and his guest,
Dreaming and lost on that proud eminence,
Long while the seat of Rome, hereafter found
Less than enough (so monstrous was the brood
Engender'd there, so Titan-like) to lodge
One in his madness; and, the summit gain'd,
Inscribe my name on some broad aloe-leaf,

* Nero

That shoots and spreads within those very walls
Where Virgil read aloud his tale divire,
Where his voice falter'd, and a mother wept
Tears of delight!"

SECTION XIV.

THOMAS CAMPBELL (1777-1844).

To the suggestion and eloquent advocacy of this distinguished man the London University is said to have owed its origin.

"The Pleasures of Hope" is a splendid poem. "Its polish is exquisite, its topics felicitously chosen, and its illustrations natural and beautiful. He lifts you up to an exceedingly high mountain, and you see all nature in her loveliness, and man in the truth of his character, with hope irradiating, cheering, and sustaining him in the numerous ills of life. 'Gertrude of Wyoming' is preferred by some readers even to his 'Pleasures of Hope.' It is a sad tale, told with tenderness as well as genius. But if these had never been written, his songs would have given him claims as a first-rate poet. They cover sea and land. Their spirit stirs the brave, whatever may be their field of fame; whether the snow is to be their winding-sheet, or the deep their grave. National songs are of the most difficult production and of the highest value. They are the soul of national feeling and a safeguard of national honor.”—(See Knapp's Pursuits of Literature.)

Of The Pleasures of Hope," "the music," says Professor Wilson, 66 now deepens into a majesti march-now it swells into a holy hymn-and now i dies away, elegiac-like, as if mourning over a tomb; never else than beautiful, and ever and anon, we know not why, sublime. As for Gertrude of Wyoming, we love her as if she were our only daughter-filling our life with bliss, and then leaving it desolate. Never saw we a ship till Campbell indited Ye Mariners of England.' Sheer hulks before our eyes were all ships till that strain arose, but ever since in our imagnation have they brightened the roaring ocean.

STANZAS ON THE THREATENED INVASION, 1803.
Our bosoms we'll bare for the glorious strife,
And our oath is recorded on high,

To prevail in the cause that is dearer than life,
Or crush'd in its ruin to die!

Then rise, fellow-freemen, and stretch the right hand,
And swear to prevail in your dear native land!
"Tis the home we hold sacred is laid to our trust
God bless the green isle of the brave!

Should a conqueror tread on our forefathers' dust,
It would rouse the old dead from their grave!
Then rise, fellow-freemen, and stretch the right hand,
And swear to prevail in your dear native land!

*

*

*

*

*

ON REVISITING A SCOTTISH RIVER.

And call they this improvement? to have changed
My native CLYDE, thy once romantic shore,
Where nature's face is banish'd and estranged,
And Heaven reflected in thy wave no more:
Whose banks, that sweeten'd May-day's breath before,
Lie sere and leafless now in summer's beam,

With sooty exhalations cover'd o'er;

And for the daisied green-sward, down thy stream
Unsightly brick-lanes smoke, and clanking engines. gleam.
Speak not to me of swarms the scene sustains;

One heart free tasting Nature's breath and bloom

Is worth a thousand slaves to Mammon's gains.

But whither goes that wealth, and gladd'ning whom?
See, left but life enough, and breathing-room

'The hunger and the hope of life to feel,

Yon pale Mechanic bending o'er his loom,
And Childhood's self, as at Ixion's wheel,

From morn till midnight task'd to earn its little meal.
Is this improvement? where the human breed
Degenerates as they swarm and overflow,

Till Toil grows cheaper than the trodden weed,

And man competes with man, like foe with foe,
Till Death, that thins them, scarce seems public wo?
Improvement! Smiles it in the poor man's eyes,

Or blooms it on the cheek of Labor? No

To gorge a few with Trade's precarious prize,
We banish rural life, and breathe unwholesome skies.

ROGERS and CAMPBELL are thus described by Hazlitt: Rogers is a very lady-like poet. He is an elegant, but a feeble writer. He wraps up obvious thoughts in a glittering cover of fine words; is studiously inverted and scrupu

lously far-fetched; and his verses are poetry, chiefly be cause no particle, line, or syllable of them reads like prose. You can not see the thought for the ambiguity of the language, the figure for the finery, the picture for the varnish.

Campbell's Pleasures of Hope is of the same school, in which a painful attention is paid to the expression, in proportion as there is little to express, and the decomposition of prose is substituted for the composition of poetry. He too often maims and mangles his ideas before they are full formed, to form them to the Procrustes' bed of criticism; or strangles his intellectual offspring in the birth, lest they should come to an untimely end in the Edinburgh Review. No writer who thinks habitually of the critics, either to tremble at their censures or set them at defiance; can write. well. In his Gertrude, the structure of the fable is too mechanical. The story is cut into the form of a parallelogram.

SECTION XV.

MARK AKENSIDE (1721-1770).

His "Pleasures of the Imagination" is deservedly celebrated. The following is an extract:

Incline to different objects: one pursues
The vast alone, the wonderful, the wild;
Another sighs for harmony, and grace,

And gentlest beauty. Hence, when lightning fires
The arch of heaven, and thunders rock the ground,
When furious whirlwinds rend the howling air,

And ocean, groaning from his lowest bed,
Heaves his tempestuous billows to the sky;
Amid the mighty uproar, while below

The nations tremble, Shakspeare looks abroad
From some high cliff, superior, and enjoys
The elemental war; but Waller longs,
All on the margin of some flowery stream,
To spread his careless limbs, amid the cool
Of plantain shades, and to the listening deer
The tale of slighted vows, and love's disdain
Resound soft-warbling all the livelong day.

*

*

*

*

*

Such and so rario is are the tastes of men!

OH BLESS'D OF HEAVEN! whom not the languid songs

Of Luxury, the Siren; not the bribes

Of sordid Wealth, nor all the gaudy spoils

Of pageant Honor, can seduce to leave

Those ever-blooming sweets, which from he store

Of Nature fair Imagination culls

To charm the enliven'd soul !"

is another author about whom a great diversity of opinion exists. He is thought to stand at the head of what has been called the Lake School of poetry, in respect to feeling, fancy, and sublimity. His originai powers of imagination and expression are considered by some to be among the highest that have been known in the present age; but his undue devotion to metaphysics and German literature has rendered much of his poetry turgid in diction, and incomprehensible to all but those initiated into his abstruse views Many of his numerous prose compositions are equally obscure. What he says himself of one of his poems, will be considered by most intelligent readers as applicable to large portions of not a few of his other writings :

"Your poem must eternal be-
Dear, sir, it can not fail,
For 'tis incomprehensible,

And without head or tail."

Professor Frost seems to have not misrepresented Mr. C. in the sketch that follows:

"The chief fault of Coleridge's poetry lies in the style, which has been justly objected to on account of its obscurity, general turgidness of diction, and a profusion of newcoined double epithets. With regard to its obscurity he says, in the preface to a late edition of his poems, that where he appears unintelligible, the deficiency is in the reader.' This is nothing more nor less than to suppose his readers endowed with the powers of divination; for we defy any one who is not in the confidence of the author upon this subject to solve the riddle which is appended as a conclusion to Christabel. He might as well attribute a deficiency of capacity to a beholder of his countenance who should fail, in its workings, to discover the exact emotions of his mind; for Mr. Coleridge has afforded no clearer clew to the generality of his poetical arcana."