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fact is otherwise; no men are so much honored, caressed, and confided in. It were as reasonable for a cabinetmaker to complain of want of patronage, because men would not go down to his workshop on an island in the harbor, and purchase furniture, which he has made of the most fantastic and unfashionable forms. Let him come up to the city, and make such sofas and tables as other men do, and as much handsomer as he pleases. Campbell, Scott, Crabbe, Moore, and Byron, are standing testimonies, that the world does not now compel poets to poverty and contempt; though the last of them did his utmost to drive matters to that extremity.

In regard to the second passage quoted above, we are ready to assent with all our hearts to whatever tribute it contains to the distinguished and excellent artist referred to. We would not fall a note below any one in our eulogy. But we cannot by any means allow the sentiment of the passage to be just. For what is it, when put into plain English? That if this community were not so absorbed in common wants and common pleasures,' as to be absolutely without taste or sensibility in the fine arts, they would, by generous gifts,' enable their great artist to devote himself to his mighty task,' without being called away to execute smaller works for his living; as if this employment were so degrading, that the public are bound to save him from it by a subscription, secure his independence by a charitable contribution! This is as if a poet should complain, that the nation has not provided him with lodgings, that he may leisurely write an epic poem, and be rescued from the degradation of odes and sonnets, which it wounds his feelings to have sold in the bookFor ourselves, we wish that Allston would multiply a hundred fold his minor works; because the records of his fame would be thus multiplied, and the influence of his genius extended. We should be glad, if one of his parlor pieces' were hung up in every drawingroom in the country, that the taste of the community might thus be prepared to comprehend and relish some greater work hereafter.

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If the poem under notice were the performance of an ordinary writer, we should leave it here; satisfied that we had done our duty to the poet and to the public. But Mr Percival is too important a man, and his example of too great influence, to admit of our leaving unsaid a few other things, which have suggested themselves to our thoughts. The course of our remarks must have rendered it evident, that we have read this poem with a

great mixture of feelings; and we are not willing to lay down the pen, till we have stated a little more at length some of the circumstances, which have detracted from our pleasure, and which forbid our leaving it to be inferred, that the fine extracts which we have made, are specimens of the equal merit of the whole.

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We think, then, that there is an excessive diffuseness in the style of Mr Percival. It is not sufficiently compact. It wants pith and point; it lacks the energy, which conciseness imparts. Every thing is drawn out as far as possible, always flowing and sweet, and therefore sometimes languid and monotonous. poetry is too much diluted. It consists too much in words, which are music to the ear, but too often send a feeble echo of the sense to the mind. There is also a superabundance of images in proportion to the thoughts; they skip about the magical scene in such numbers, that they stand in the way of one another and of the main design. He is too careless in selection; whatever occurs to him he puts down and lets it remain. He is not master of

That last, the greatest art,-the art to blot.'

Writing, as he evidently does, from the fulness of an excited mind, upon the impulse of the moment; his thoughts crowd one another, and cannot always fall at once into their places and in the happiest expression. There will be confusion sometimes in their ranks, and want of due proportion. This can only be remedied by the free use of the pruning knife-cutting down sentences, changing epithets, rejecting superfluities, expelling parentheses, and various other mechanical operations, to which a less gifted but more patient author would resort. By the neglect of this, he does the greatest injustice to his own powers. Every thing wears an extemporaneous and unfinished appearance. Strength and weakness are most strangely combined, and passages of surpassing elegance and magnificence crowded in amongst slovenly and incomplete. Hence it is rare to meet with a paragraph of any length equally sustained throughout. Flaws show themselves in the most brilliant, and the reader is compelled to stop with a criticism in the midst of his admiration. Instead of giving us, like other poets, the finished work, he gives us the first rough draft; as if Phidias should have ceased laboring on his statues as soon as the marble assumed a human semblance. It is the last touches, which create perfection. It is in them that immor

tality lies. It is they that remove the last corruptible particles, and leave the mass indestructible. Without them, Virgil, Pope, and Milton, would have gone down to forgetfulness, and Demosthenes and Bossuet have been remembered only by tradition. But Mr Percival, through impatience of labor or some false notions, declines the necessary toil, and takes his chance for immortality in company with imperfection.

For this reason, his powers are displayed to greater advantage in particular passages and in short pieces, than in any extended composition. At a single heat he may strike out a fine conception, and give it the happiest shape. But when his thoughts and pen run on through successive parts of a subject, he easily loses himself in a wilderness of words, beautiful and musical, but conveying indistinct impressions; or rather conveying impressions instead of ideas; reminding us of poetry read while we are falling asleep, sweet and soothing, but presenting very shadowy images. Yet no man has more felicity in expression, or more thoroughly delights and fascinates in his peculiar passages. He has a superior delicacy and richness of imagery, together with an extraordinary affluence of language, of which he can well afford to be, as he is, lavish. It is probably a consciousness of this opulence, which betrays him so often into verbiage. He throws away images and words with a profusion which astonishes more economical men, and which would impoverish almost any one else. He may possibly afford it, yet a discreet frugality of expenditure would be far more wise; as a simple, chastened elegance is far preferable to a wasteful display, which exhibits its whole wardrobe and furniture without selection or arrangement. We find it difficult to select a passage, which may illustrate our remarks, as those which are most to our purpose run on, line after line, almost indefinitely. The following example is within as small a compass as any.

• With such a gifted spirit, one may read

The open leaves of a philosophy,

Not reared from cold deduction, but descending,
A living spirit, from the purer shrine

Of a celestial reason. One is found

By slow and lingering search, and then requires
Close questioning of minutest circumstance,
To know, it has the genuine stamp. The other
Is in us, as an instinct, where it lives
A part of us, we can as ill throw off,
As bid the vital pulses cease to play,

And yet expect to live-the spirit of life,
And hope, and elevation, and eternity,—
The fountain of all honor, all desire
After a higher and a better state,—
An influence so quickening, it imbues
All things we see, with its own qualities,
And therefore Poetry, another name
For this innate Philosophy, so often
Gives life and body to invisible things,
And animates the insensible, diffusing
The feelings, passions, tendencies of Man,

Through the whole range of being. Though on earth,
And most of all in living things, as birds
And flowers, in things that beautify, and fill
The air with harmony, and in the waters,
So full of change, so apt to elegance
Or power-so tranquil when they lie at rest,
So sportive when they trip it lightly on
Their prattling way, and with so terrible
And lionlike severity, when roused

To break their bonds, and hurry forth to war
With winds and storms-though it find much on earth
Suited to its high purpose, yet the sky

Is its peculiar home.'

Now we conceive that there is no little beauty in this passage, and yet the sensation after reading it is that of confusion and fatigue. Its beauties come upon the eye by glimpses, like the sparkling of a river, here and there, through the hills and forests, among which it winds. The writer's thoughts poured fast, and without selection or amendment he transferred them to his page. But it is obvious, that a careful revision, which should reduce the lines to half their number, would more than double the value of those that remain. We are stopped at the very outset by an obscurity arising from the circumstance, that the poet uses the words one and the other, to refer to the form in which the preceding sentence lay in his own mind, instead of its form as written. The reader is obliged to study for some time ere he can discover to what two things he alludes. To know, it has the genuine stamp.' Here too the construction disturbs him; he must read a second time before he sees, that whether it have ' would give the true sense. In the next sentence, which contains fifteen lines, he very soon becomes a little bewildered, and when he reaches the words 'so often,' he is thrown out of his

track altogether and compelled to try again. For ourselves we confess, that even the second reading did not sufficiently disentangle the construction. In the next sentence, he stumbles at once upon a parenthesis of ten lines, without any intimation from any quarter that his path is thus turned aside, and he travels on to the end, blindfold, not knowing whither he is going. After a few pages like this, most readers would be inclined to give up the study in despair; and if called upon to remark how wonderful it is, that it should have been written in so short a time; they might be expected to reply, Very true, but Sheridan's remark is true also, Easy writing is hard reading.'

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A similar example occurs in the long chain of sentences, which are linked together on pages 14, 15, 16, and which evidently owe their blemishes to their extemporaneous composition. 'Chasing him in his exile till they left

No pillow for his head.'

The antecedent of they is Florence.

O! it is painful,

To think the very chiefest of the mighty,
Heroes in song, as there are those in war-

How they were made the butt and sport of fools.'

This is slovenly.

'We may well

Forgive a heart, that could not brook the sight
Of any suffering thing, that he indulged

Such fond imaginings.'

Here again the pronoun has forgotten the gender of its antecedent, as in the preceding instance its number.

Speaking of the stars in a bright winter's night;

And all the skyey creatures have a touch

Of majesty about them.'

These, as they had no favor from the world,

Whose love is change, so they are still above it.'

Meaning, we suppose, 'whose love is changeable.'

In a passage already quoted, he makes the visions of the soul higher than the leap of Execution; and Execution lagging behind the glance of Conception.

We are inclined to attribute many of the blemishes of Mr

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