nature is a fit material on which the poet may work; forgetting that poetry has a nature of its own, and that it is the destruction of its essence to level its high being with the triteness of every-day life. Can there be a Can there be a more pointed concetto than this address to the Piping Shepherds on a Grecian Urn? 'Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; but it would be irksome to point out all the instances of this kind which are to be found in Mr. K.'s compositions. Still, we repeat, this writer is very rich both in imagination and fancy; and even a superabundance of the latter faculty is displayed in his lines On Autumn,' which bring the reality of nature more before our eyes than almost any description that we remember. TO AUTUMN. • Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; And still more, later flowers for the bees, For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 'Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours. III. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies:' If we did not fear that, young as is Mr. K., his peculiarities are fixed beyond all the power of criticism to remove, we would exhort him to become somewhat less strikingly original, to be less fond of the folly of too new or too old phrases, and to believe that poetry does not consist in either the one or the other. We could then venture to promise him a double portion of readers, and a reputation which, if he persist in his errors, he will never obtain. Be this as it may, his writings present us with so many fine and striking ideas, or passages, that we shall always read his poems with much pleasure. ART. XV. Marcian Colonna, an Italian Tale; with Three Dramatic Scenes, and other Poems. By Barry Cornwall. 8vo. pp. 190. 8s. 6d. Boards. Warren, and Ollier. 1820. WH HEN Marcian Colonna was put into our hands, we almost felt inclined to exclaim with Falstaff, "Oh thou hast damnable iteration!' Mr. Barry Cornwall, as this writer still chuses to designate himself, has no idea of losing the place which he has acquired in the estimation of the public by any want of activity on his own part; and indeed we have no wish that he should, our only desire being that he would render himself, as we are convinced he is capable of doing, still more truly worthy of the reputation which he has begun to obtain. We cannot think, however, that he will accomplish this desirable object by persisting to write in that spirit, which we have before felt ourselves required to mention with disapprobation: nor will he, in acting thus, be true to himself. He was not intended to be a mere copyist, which he seems inclined to become. The spirit of better things resides in him, and should be invoked, not exorcised. It is the fashion of that school of poetry to which Mr. C. most decidedly belongs, to worship as the models of poetic imitation the elder poets of Italy; and, as a natural consequence of this admiration, their next favourites are the writers of the age of our own Elizabeth, who pursued the same track. Indeed to such an excess was the passion for every thing that was Italian then carried, that the grave Ascham, Ascham, in one of his letters, makes serious complaints of it. Poetry ought to partake strongly of the character of the age in which it is written, we mean in its spirit; and nobody can read the works of the Augustan writers, without immediately perceiving that Rome was fast sinking into that abyss of slavish infamy from which she has never yet risen. It is in vain, also, to endeavour to transfer the feeling of one age to another. Yet this is the attempt which Mr. Barry Cornwall makes; who would sometimes transport us to the days of Boccaccio and Petrarch, and at others would make us think that we are living in the age of Shakspeare. To such an extent, in some instances, is this mal d'Italie pushed, that every thing which bears the title of Italian is sacred in the eyes of these worshippers; and the poem now before us opens with certainly a fine apostrophe to that country. This fashion of falling into raptures at the mention of a land which the writer has never seen is somewhat preposterous; and yet it is now chiefly in vogue among a knot of poets whose feet, we believe, have been mostly confined to a perambulation of the streets of our metropolis, or to the enjoyment, in common with many others of their fellow-citizens, of the prospects with which the neighbourhood of London abounds. We are told that the story of Marcian Colonna is fictitious, but that the catastrophe was suggested by paper which appeared in a northern Magazine, intitled An Extract from Gosschen's Diary." If that paper contained a powerful delineation of passion, it abounded with the overwrought and unnatural feeling which produces disgust. Marcian Colonna' was originally intended as a delineation of the fluctuations of a fatalist's mind; touched with insanity, alternately raised by kindness and depressed by neglect or severity, ameliorated by the contemplation of external nature, and generally influenced by the same causes which operate on more healthful temperaments:' but this intention has not been carried into effect; and the story, as it now stands, is nothing more than the history of the ravings of a lunatic, with whose fate the fortunes of a beautiful, tender, and devoted woman are most unaccountably connected. The general effect of a picture like this is almost revolting: but the detached sentiments, and the details of feeling, which the story contains, make some amends for the pain which the fable inflicts. The tale opens with a description of the convent of Laverna among the Appennines, which displays considerable energy and power of painting; and X 4 • Among Among the squalid crowd that lingered there, His soul had gone by many men (Who some ancestral taint had not forgot,) And marked and charter'd for the madman's lot.' From all that we can gather of the young Italian's history, this suspicion, though severe, was just. He was studious: but the themes over which he pored seem only to have furnished food to his distempered imagination. His father had resolved that he should wear the cowl: but, as his mind grew more disordered, he was conveyed by his parent's direction to the prison of the convent of Laverna. In the mean time, the Colonna palace was the scene of festivals and gladness, and the lonely misery of Marcian is well contrasted with this joyful revelry: 'He was missed By none, and when his mother fondly kissed The proud Vitelli's child, Rome's paragon, She thought no longer of her cloistered son.' Julia, amid the gaiety of the dance, questioned why Marcian joined not in it, but questioned only to cause silence or angry looks: -She dwelt upon that night till pity grew Into a wilder passion: the sweet dew That linger'd in her eye" for pity's sake," Dried and absorbed by Love.' We have now rather a long description of the situation and feelings of Marcian in the solitude of his mountainous prison. The hallucinations and wild visions of a disturbed intellect are described with much power by Mr. Cornwall: who traverses with skilful feet the dim and shadowy confines on on which the human mind sometimes wanders, and who always seems to recur to such subjects with the consciousness of power. Some memory had he of Vitelli's child, A gentle minister she was, when he (Committed or to be,) and, in his walk, Of Fate and Death, and phantom things, would talk When evening filled the woods with trembling shades, Floated before his eyes, palely by day, And glared by night, and would not pass away.' At length, Giovanni the elder brother of Marcian falls Whatever idea this line excited in the mind of the writer, it certainly conveys no very definite image to that of the reader. Marcian now sought his home, and was recognized as a descendant of the Colonnas. Soon afterward, Vitelli and his daughter Julia return to Rome. The latter had been betrothed and wedded to one of the Orsini; who had been (in Mr. Cornwall's phrase) a bitter husband;' and of whose death every person was rejoiced to hear. The young love of Julia revived when she beheld Colonna, and he saw in her the spirit which had been the softener of his solitary agony. Her character is beautiful, and the love-part of the tale is decidedly the best: 6 Oh with what deep fear He listened now, to mark if he could hear The voice that lulled him, - but she never spoke; For in her heart her own young love awoke From its long slumber, and chain'd down her tongue, Stood feasting on her melancholy smile, Till o'er his eyes a dizzy vapour hung, Which kissed and played about his temples bare, And |