In the same poem we have the verse :

"The strings of Nature crack'd with agony;"

adopted from this passage in Shakspeare's "King Lear:"

"His grief grew puisant, and the strings of life

Began to crack."

The readers of Hazlitt will remember Campbell's noted plagiarism from Blair, the author of the "Grave." Blair has it :

"Its visits,

"Like those of angels, short and far between."

And Campbell, in the "Pleasures of Hope," echoes without acknowledgment :—

"Like angels' visits, few and far between."

It is now ascertained, however, that we are indebted for this beautiful image, neither to Campbell nor to Blair, but to Norris of Bemerton, who thus expresses it in one of his poems :

"But those who soonest take their flight,

Are the most exquisite and strong;

Like angels' visits, short and bright,

Mortality 's too weak to bear them long."

It occurs also in a poem to the memory of his niece :

"No wonder such a noble mind

Her way to heaven so soon should find:
Angels, as 'tis but seldom they appear,
So neither do they make long stay;
They do but visit and away."

To these instances in Campbell may be added a forceful line in the "Pleasures of Hope," which has been adopted from one of Coleridge's sonnets. Campbell has it :

"And Freedom shriek'd as Kosciusko fell."

The passage in Coleridge stands thus:

"O what a loud and fearful shriek was there!

Ah me! they view'd beneath an hireling's sword
Fallen Koskiusco."

The next example is the famous line in "Lochiel's Warning: ".

"And coming events cast their shadows before; the origin of which will be found in Leibnitz's remark:

"Le présent est gros de l'avenir."

And in the comments made thereon by Isaac D'Israeli: the latter, referring to Leibnitz's words, says:

"The multitude live only among the shadows of things in the appearances of the present."

And in another passage he couples the word "shadow" with the word " precursor," in such a manner as to express, in the clearest language, the whole thought attributed to Campbell. The ordinary relation of a shadow to the substance by which it is formed, is that of a follower:

Envy will merit as its shade pursue ;

But, like the shadow, proves the substance true :

whereas, in the language of D'Israeli, the shadow is made to precede the substance. These are his words:

"This volume of Reynolds seems to have been the shadow and precursor of one of the most substantial of literary monsters, the 'Histriomastix, or Player's Scourge of Prynne, in 1633.'

An instance of the same thought occurs in Chapman's Tragedy of "Bussy d'Ambois his Revenge:"

"These two shadows of the Guise and Cardinal,
Fore-running thus their bodies, may approve
That all things to be done, as here we live,
Are done before all time in th' other life."

And Shelley has it in one of his prose pieces :

"Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present."

The next example is the line in "Gertrude of Wyoming :"

"But stock-doves plaining thro' its gloom profound;" which is taken from Thomson's "Castle of Indolence:".

"Or stock-doves plain amid the forest deep."

An instance in the same poem is where Campbell describes the white child led to the house of Albert, by an Indian of swarthy lineament, as

"Led by his dusky guide, like morning brought by night.”

Hazlitt says this is an admirable simile, and Jeffrey deems it somewhat fantastical; but whether admirable or fantastical, or neither, certain it is that, so far as Campbell is concerned, it is not original. Two hundred years ago, Cowley, in his "Hymn to Light," compared darkness to an old negro, and light, its offspring, to a fair child. He is addressing the Light:

"First-born of Chaos! who so fair didst come

From the old negro's darksome womb;

Which, when it saw the lovely child,

The melancholy mass put on kind looks and smiled.”

Yalden, too, has borrowed this from Cowley :

"Parent of day, whose beauteous beams of light
Spring from the darksome womb of night,
And midst their native horrors show,

Like gems adorning of the negro's brow."

To these instances may be added the line in the "Soldier's Dream:"—

"And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;"

which has been adopted from Lee's "Theodosius:"_

“The stars, Heaven's sentry, wink and seem to die.”

R. Montgomery has the same image in his Omnipresence of the Deity:"

66

"Ye quenchless stars, so eloquently bright,
Untroubled sentries of the shadowy night."

And it occurs in this passage in De La Mennais:

"All creatures praise God; the orb of day and the watchlights of the night hymn unto him their mysterious language.”

Tennyson has some striking passages which must be reckoned among unacknowledged appropriations. One of these is founded upon some remarkable lines in Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes," where that fine poet, with a delicacy and picturesqueness peculiarly his own, describes Madeline in the act of unrobing:

"Anon her heart revives; her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels, one by one,
Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees,
Half-hidden like a mermaid in sea-weed.”

The whole of this inimitable sketch has been adopted by Tennyson in his "Legend of Gondiva :"_____

"Then fled she to her inmost bower, and there
Unclasp'd the wedded eagles of her belt,
The grim earl's gift; but ever at a breath
She linger'd, looking like a summer moon
Half-dipp'd in cloud; anon she shook her head

And shower'd the rippled ringlets to her knee."

Tennyson has also an appropriated passage in the "Gardener's Daughter:"

"We coursed about

The subject most at heart, more near and near,
Like doves about a dove-cot, wheeling round

The central wish, until we settled there."