causes which have imparted to his writings their dark and terrible expression, are doubtless to be found in the afflictions into which he has been plunged, and the scenes among which he has indulged his sorrows. His mind has been fertilised by the overflowing anguish of his spirit. The glittering follies of his rank have receded from his view, and ceased to interrupt his reflecting moments as soon as they became insufficient to make him forget his miseries. When all around him was gloom and despondence, he felt the necessity of escaping into a world of shadows, in order to obtain a temporary alleviation of his own sadness. The effects of his melancholy were, however, of a different kind from those which would have followed the grief of a spirit of a gentler order, and accustomed to the lowlier paths of existence. Nursed in the proud expectations of fortune, and the aristocratical prejudices of nobility, he was unaccustomed to the exercise of subduing the passions, and unfitted to endure with tranquillity the disappointment of his favorite hopes. Affliction, therefore, did not tend to soften his heart or diffuse over it the meek and gentle graces which it sheds upon humbler and more patient sufferers. His unhappy scepticism, too, deprived him of those blissful and enchanting hopes which beam upon the resigned Christian, and pour the gentleness of heaven over his distresses. Regarding this weary and unintelligible world as the only state of being for which he was created, he endured that despondence "which dares not look beyond the tomb, which cannot hope for rest before;" a feeling scarcely less terrible than that state imagined by Milton, into which, hope never enters. His mind thus darkened even in its communications with heaven, recoiled into itself from the miseries with which it was encompassed here, and the nothingness it expected hereafter; and found its only relief in the turbulence and force of its own sensations. While thus engaged in the dreary gratification of feeding upon his own sorrows, he wandered among the loveliest scenes of creation, and the most sacred relics of ancient heroism and genius, cursed with the iron sceptre of ignorant tyranny, and polluted by the residence of worthless and degraded beings. While his fancy caught the inspiration of those enchanted regions, his own feelings found among them materials to feed their melancholy, unsoftened in their deep recesses by the bright radiance of his expanding genius. Hence the latter beamed on the former, like the sunshine over a lake, which beneath it flows black and deadly. All the charms and graces of this transitory life were but flowers on the fathomless precipice of eternity, roses growing over a cold and final sepulchre. Hence he was led to shape out characters of dark and dreadful complexion, agitated and convulsed with superhuman passion, and endowed with the energy ascribed to malignant spirits, and thus,

while rapt in visions in some degree allied to his feelings, he lost in ideal horrors the sense of individual woe. The very circumstance that his persons were totally to expire when they fell, produced a fearful strength in all their emotions, as if ages could be concentrated in a moment of powerful feeling; and as if minds so soon to perish should palpitate and throb with strange intenseness. His love, therefore, was furious and daring, not a sweet and holy affection, but an attachment which excluded all other sensations, and suspended the pulses of existence. Childe Harold was the first of his masterly conceptions; a knight originally of tender and delicate sensibilities, but almost wholly changed by the most miserable and heartless dissipation, sated with the pleasures of a life which he was totally unfit to leave, and retaining no vestige of the days of his boyish romance and innocence, but faint wishes for their return, and a sense that they were lost to him for ever. The Giaour was a more striking, though not so natural a portrait, a daring, amorous, and most impetuous spirit, glorying to the last in the vehemence of his love and rage, and full of the fury of his early desires, when their fire was just expiring. The Corsair, in the two characters of Conrad and Lara, is more carefully elaborated, and more exquisitely finished-but he is more wildly inconsistent, for while his vices are of a deadlier hue, inasmuch as a life of crime is more horrible than a single act of sanguinary vengeance, his love is far more chaste, tender and delicate. Indeed, were he any other than a pirate, he might be deemed the flower of chivalry; so respectful, and so lofty is his affection. All however, even the more humane hero of the " Bride of Abydos," bear a family resemblance, and evince themselves to be the offspring of similar emotions.

It cannot certainly be denied, that there is merit of a very high order in the conception and execution of these marvellous sketches, which bear some analogy in the wildness of their strength to the best paintings of Salvator Rosa. But we are inclined to regard the taste which could delight in such subjects alone, as in some degree perverted. The noblest object of Poetry is to present us with beings whose sympathies and sorrows shall prove their kindred with ourselves, while their sweet and engaging affections, and their lofty elevation of soul, shall exalt us above the cares and anxieties of an ordinary world. It is surely then better to draw pictures of goodness too pure and too sublime; to enrapture us, like the author of Clarissa, with the visits of an angel in earthly mould which fills us with the brightest images we can conceive of the Divine holiness; than to conjure up dark and infernal spirits from the gloomiest recesses of horror, and to link them as defor mities to a nature of which they are scarcely partakers. But it is

still more to be lamented, that Lord Byron has indulged a miserable scepticism, which has shut out from his view the most beautiful images of poetry, which had its birth among altars and temples, and was first employed in hymns of thanksgiving. His unbelief, too, was not like the metaphysical infidelity of the German philosophers, who, while they foolishly rejected the clear revelation which the Deity has afforded us of his attributes, clung with rapture to the dubious glimpses of his power and kindness, which pervade the universe, and while they made the future existence of the soul the subject of speculative fancy, cherished the belief that it was immortal,--and who thus unconsciously arrayed the religion of nature with the loveliest charms of the faith of Jesus. All with him was gloomy, dark, and revolting— uncertainty here, and nothingness hereafter. Thus was he excluded from those living fountains of inspiration, where Milton was contented to adore. The haunts of poetry opened fresh and delightful before him, but the soul and Divinity were wanting. Surely, if scepticism be folly in a mathematician and an astroit is worse than madness in a poet.

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It might, however, easily have been foreseen that the works of Lord Byron would become popular. In their very repulsiveness the multitude were captivated by novelty, and in the delineation of strong passion, they found a glaring magnificence which all were capable of admiring. In the midst too of his darkest views of our nature, there is always something to redeem; some single virtue which we feel a mysterious delight in contemplating, when we find it in the worst of our species. It assures us, more perhaps than the most heroic efforts of greatness, of our high origin and glorious destinies; and while thus it awakens a train of sensations quite opposite to the general coloring of the production, we gaze on it anew with peculiar pleasure, as we are enchanted by a pure fountain springing up in the midst of a desert. In the richness of his imagery, and in the power he possesses to touch the finest chords of the heart, he has displayed a capacity for nobler themes. It is pleasing to observe how rapidly he is soaring from that tempestuous region, over which he has acquired so vast a dominion, to the lovelier fields of primitive inspiration; and with what anxiety he is mellowing his narrations, and relieving their gloom with associations which breathe a gentler and holier spirit. The milder light is at length breaking in upon his genius-his sadness is giving way to a soft melancholy, diffusing a serene holiness; and those celestial visions are beginning to dawn around him “which paint the lost on earth reviv'd in heaven." Let him proceed in this unclouded course, and he will not only secure a solid and a consecrated fame, but will find an elevation above human life, far

exceeding the depth of his severest sorrows. Then, instead of one dark gloom, awful, yet unvaried, hanging over his images of death, a thousand springs of pure and ever-changing delight will burst forth in an aerial Paradise: instead of riding in the whirlwind, and directing the storm, which although sublime in their terror, are but a little space removed from earth, he will move in the clear serene of azure;-inhabit the highest heaven of invention, and range amidst the vernal gentleness of worlds, "where love and bliss immortal reign."

VI. It is not perhaps so easy to estimate the merits of MR. CAMPBELL, as of most of his poetical rivals, because, unquestionable as his genius is, it possesses no very prominent quality or distinguishing character. While it is easy to describe with precision the feeling which is excited by the view of a cloud-capt mountain, a stormy cataract, a time-hallowed ruin, or a sweet nook secluded from the world; it is difficult to shadow out the various tints in that confusion of delight which is imparted to us by a landscape, composed of harmonising beauties, and forming a picture in the heart of various associations of innocence, and peace, and repose. We cannot call Mr. Campbell a passionate, a descriptive, a sententious, a moral, or a pathetic poet, for he is all of these by turns, and none, except the last, in the highest degree of excellence. Perhaps the variety of elegances which he has at different times displayed, may have tended, in some degree, to lessen the admiration, which he must otherwise have obtained, as the most exquisite monuments of art appear less in size, in consequence of the nice finishing of their several parts, and the exquisite harmony of their proportions. His first avowed publication, "The Pleasures of Hope," was one of the most promising essays of youthful genius, which has appeared in modern times. It was full of noble and elevated feelings, of interesting pictures of infantine purity, and maternal love; and of the enthusiasm of patriotism and virtue. The passage, which concentrates the emotions of the good on the shameful division of Poland, might have immortalized the death of Kosciusko, had we not lately been informed that the venerable patriot is still alive, preserved, we anxiously hope, to behold the brightest act of retarded justice, in the restoration of his afflicted country to her rights, and to the bloom of a renovated youth. But it is in the softer and more tender delineations, which transport us into the bowers of Paradise, that he shines forth in the loveliness of his grandeur. It is true, indeed, that we seem to breathe the air of Helvetian liberty amidst her tallest mountains, when oppression is represented as nerving the rustic sinews of Tell, and awaking into god-like energy "the might that slumbered in a peasant's arm;" but it is when he throws the radiance of

The

heaven over the features of the dying saint, penetrates into the retreats of innocent love, or wins with the ingenuous playfulness of infant smiles, that every heart beats in unison with his own. naval songs, the battle of the Baltic, and above all, Hohenlinden, manifest a power for a very different kind of sublimity. The sketches of battles at sea and in midnight are full of the breathlessness of horror. Every word is an image unspeakably dreadful. The gloom is increased by those strange and vivid touches, which can be effected only by a master's hand. By the same skill it is admirably relieved with the finest flashes of the pathetic, and leaves us full of the impression of its grandeur, and haunted by nameless and horrible imaginings. But it is to Gertrude of Wyoming that we are to look for the perfection of Mr. Campbell's genius. There he has not aimed at astonishing us, but completely succeeded in subduing our hearts. There the delicious Eden, of which, in his earlier poems, he afforded us such enchanting glimpses, is fully unfolded to our view. Never, surely, could the philanthropist, in the most charming dreams of speculation, imagine a state of more blissful and perfect repose: nor could the deepest lover of the pathetic desire a more softened and amiable sorrow, than are exhibited in this simple and unassuming tale.

Mr. Campbell produces a class of associations in the mind the very opposite of those feelings which are awakened by the poetry of Lord Byron. The former perpetually conveys us into loftier orders of being, by imaging patriotism and virtue more exalted than we meet with in the ordinary paths of life. The latter indulges a belief that they no longer exist. The first is full of lively hope and generous enthusiasm-the last of awful gloom and terrible despair. Both of them are often pensive; but the melancholy of the latter is dark, cheerless, and unsoftened; while that of the former awakens a thousand gentle perceptions of retired beauty, and diffuses around a "love of peace and lonely musing." Both delight in images of sorrow;-but while the latter excites only horror and heart-rending sympathy, the sorrow of the former is hallowed by the gentleness of heaven, and rendered soothing and lovely by the consoling prospects of unfading joy. Both derive considerable interest from the strong propensity we indulge to entertain kindly opinions of the nature to which we are allied; but it operates in very different directions-Mr. Campbell obtains it by the loveliness and dignity which he has shed upon virtue; Lord Byron from the few redeeming qualities with which his darkest characters are endowed, and to which we cling with fondness, as so many proofs that man retains some vestiges of his native goodness, in the most degraded state of pollution. That conducts us into a wild and mountainous tract, in which there are some spots of rich and luxuriant verdure,