Then follows an argument for regarding this one sip from the epicurean chalice, as sufficient:

"Why need I volumes, if one word'suffice? Why need I galleries, when a pupil's draught,

After the master's sketch, fills and o'erfills
My apprehension? why seek Italy,
Who cannot circumnavigate the sea

Of thoughts and things at home, but still adjourn

The nearest matter for a thousand days."

This admirable description of the spiritual epicure, shall suffice us for an instance. He begins with an estimate of the quantity of the spiritual liquor given for each day. If he drinks it all at once, he has bibbed his cup, and all is over for that twenty-four hours. But he cannot pip it and have it a terrible dilemma! Observe,-first, the end of all existence is taken to be a certain private tipple or morning dram at this little cup of liqueur. The whole theory and art of life is then, how to eke out the allowance. A more perfect exposition of the matter could hardly be conceived. The epicure counts his income, so much for the year, month, day; if he lays out the whole in one day, he can taste no more, unhappy

wretch!

That the end of life is happiness, all men seem to be agreed; but we have few who philosophize in this fashion; few who so skillfully and deliberately defend epicurism; who so leave out of the account all the common considerations, or sit down upon their spiritual income with a more Apician resolution to spend it in the most delectable style.

The world is wide, and there is room in it for all philosophies, systems, creeds, and epicurisms; and on a more liberal view of the matter, we have our doubts whether it is not best that there should be a great variety; surely 'tis all for the best. Whatever is for the best is good: therefore this new epicurism is good. It must be so, we are convinced. Evoe! Bacchus bring us the cup; come, we will drink deep; we will do what the god instigates-laugh,. fleere, flout-or applaud and wonder; it is all right: good: all one;-why not? I am a man as well as you, sir; come, sir, put up your sour looks. What! I put up my sour looks! I am a free man, sir, and will be as sour as I please. I concede it, friend; be sour, in Heaven's name! No, neighbor, you shall not concede any

thing; I despise your concessions, &c. &c. &c.

Nevertheless, we like the doctrine; it leaves one at liberty. For example, we have the glorious privilege, and no man to gainsay it, of running over this same very idle collection of verses; a slovenly, volume of poems, and pronouncing it a unpoetical, conceited little volume, narrow in sentiment, and fulsome in style; teaching doctrines of rank pride; or we might cry it up, admire its splendors, be drowned in its depths; and in either course the doctrines of the author will sustain us, so perfectly liberal are they. But this is nothing to the point.

We regret our want of room to lay before the reader a kind of extract, or medulla of the philosophy of our author, from this collection of his poems. Each one of them expresses a sentiment peculiar to himself; the key-note of all is self-(respect.) The god of this world is self-respect, and this is his book of rules, or rhythmical creed. His creed is to have no creed; his rule, to have no rule; his law, to have no law. Young and old, he would have us obey the law inscribed upon our hearts by mother nature, and that law is Impulse-Impulse. But, as we have said, our limits forbid a full exposition. At present let us pass over the substance, however elevated and instructive, and seek what pleasure may be found in the form.

Our poet is, we believe, the first of modern time who has imitated the manner of Donne, Cowley, Cleveland, and their contemporaries. Images in poetry, it has been said, are either to exalt, to illustrate, or to debase and vilify the subject of the comparison. This is the ordinary opinion concerning the uses of imagery. But no critic that we have ever read, has let us completely into the secret of imagery, or the reason of its use. Poetry that is merely witty or rhetorical, may give delight by similitude, as by comparing a hero to a lion, a chattering fool to a magpie, a clown to a clod, &c. It is the art rhetorical which assists the fancy by comparisons. In these lines of Tasso,

"As from a furnace flew the smoke to the skies,

"Such smoke as that when damned Sodom burnt,"

we have a splendid instance of simple rhetorical simile or comparison in the first line, and a figure of a different kind,

(which we shall, for present convenience, name the complex rhetorical) in the second. The first, or simple rhetorical, merely enables us to imagine a thing which no man ever saw or can see, the wall of smoke and fire about the enchanted grove of Ismeno; but the second, or complex rhetorical, adds eminent power to the first, by infusing a living and human interest into this phenomenon of smoke: "it was such a smoke as that which rose from Sodom." This is said in the true spirit of oratory, or of the grandest rhetoric. It exalts the subject.

Let us now seek an example of the rhetorical comparison intended to debase or vilify the subject. This from the Dunciad is most convenient

Which does most perfectly debase and vilify the subject, but in a rhetorical manner merely, and not in a poetical.

To give now a perfect example of poetical imagery-of which the object is not either to illustrate, to exalt, or to vilify and debase, but only to delight and satisfy, in a profound and peculiar manner-take these lines of Shakspeare

"From you I have been absent in the spring,

When proud pied April dress'd in all his trim,

Had put a spirit of youth in every thing, And heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him."

of nature; to make stones and trees love and feel with us, and persuade us of an all-pervading humanity, existent even in brutes and vegetables; we shall find it easy in every instance, whether ancient or modern, to detect the true poet, and distinguish him from the rhetorical rhymer. By this test the great contest in English literature, concerning the poetry of Pope and his school, and the similar dispute among Italian savans, in which Galileo took part, concerning the poetry of Tasso, is finally put at rest. Without diminishing the glory of our greatest wit and master of rhetoric, or of the amiable and chivalrous Tasso, we are yet compelled to assign them a class by themselves, among the most eloquent and admirable, not among the most poetical of versifiers.

At the same time, it will be necessary to admit that all the great poets were also great rhetoricians, and most of them great wits; and that they always use a mixture of rhetorical imagery with that which vivifies. But in Pope's verses we find few of these (if I may so call them) life-giving forms of speech. In Tasso they are certainly much more frequent than in Pope; at least, they are so in Fairfax's admirable translation; and if the great controversy which raged on this topic in Galileo's time were to be decided by Fairfax's version, we are inclined to believe that Tasso would be admitted as holding only a secondary rank among the great poets.

To illustrate this controversy more perfectly, let us examine another verse of Shakspeare, who stands first (we think, beyond all question) on the poetical side, when judged by the test we have just offered

"O hateful, vaporous, and foggy night, Since thou art guilty of my cureless crime, Muster thy mists to meet the eastern light, Make war against proportioned course of

time."

Into this imaginary night, the poet, by a wonderfully bold figure, has thrown all the worst qualities of humanity at a single effort: cruelty, dullness, obscurity of mind, evil intent, obduracy of soul; positive unrepentant guilt; authority, as of a commander, actual war against all the symbols of virtue; to crown all, she becomes the personal enemy of a noble spirit, the accessory of a base one.

Under this torrent of vivifying expression, the judgment cannot hold out an

instant; imagination (or rather, that function of the soul by which persons are conceived) is compelled to conceive and adopt the dreadful deity—the mistress of hell, and feel her personal reality.

The poet has invented the goddess, has shaped her with a few touches of his creative hand; she waits only an altar and a worship; and in another age, when poets were law-givers, she had

one.

Or, take these three lines of a sonnet by the same hand

"No longer mourn for me, when I am dead,

Than you shall hear the surly, sullen bell, Give warning to the world that I am fled."

The bell receives a human character, of hardness, dutifulness, and a public function; the soul is astonished with this beautiful art, which places even dead forms, and hard, heartless things in an amiable or unamiable relation with itself; and to be persuaded that this is natural and delightful, we need only remember our childhood, and the animosities and loves which we delighted to exercise toward inanimate objects. But in poetry it is more than mere animation, it is moral sympathy that is thus imparted. Thus, when Lear appeals to the gods'

ing this distinction between rhetorical and poetical imagery. The grandest passages of the great poets contain a mixture of both kinds; but the poetical predominates. On the other hand, oratory demands an absolute exclusion of the poetical kind, or, to speak modestly, a very sparing use of genuine poetical imagery.

Our author, whom we return to with a peculiar satisfaction, furnishes beautiful examples of an imagery which neither illustrates, exalts, nor intentionally vilifies. Thus in the following

"And universal nature, through her vast And crowded whole, an infinite parroquet, Repeats one note !"-(p. 220.)

Nature, a mere abstraction, is vivified by making her like a part of herself, to wit, a parroquet, and the simplicity and perpetual echo of her laws, is delicately symbolized in the monotonous " Pretty poll, poll, poll, pretty poll!" of awhat?-a parroquet! This is a slight error; it should be parrot, not parroquet. But, as we have often remarked before, great poets are the masters of all arts, and if they choose to call an eagle an owl, or a parrot a parroquet, we submit in silence; and even were we disposed to carp, the splendor and vivifying beauty of the image should prevent

With those unfathomable orbs," hight mystically his eyes. Observe the singular beauty and vivification of the imagery. Of this Cupid, one may say, he has it all in his eye, as the Hindoo god Chrishna had the world in his mouth. The eye of Uriel was a wonderful eye, but Cupid's is still more wonderful. This species of poetry we find at once instructive and full of pleasure; it teaches one the vast difference between the mere mystical comparing of all the universe to a three-legged stool, and that true poetry which throws the life of humanity into the meanest things. The last three actions ascribed to the eye of Cupid, surpass anything we have ever met with for delicacy and power of conception; what a certain Roman emperor is said to have attempted, Cupid here appears actually accomplishing. But this is nothing to what follows. Of these same eyes it is said

"Undaunted are their courages, Right Cossacks in their forages ;" A language, be it observed, which outChaucer's Chaucer, and is more Saxon than the very Saxon itself.

"Fleeter they than any creature,
They are his steeds, and not his feature;"
Where the strength of the image is so
intense, it obliges the poet to snap the
comparison in two, and finally to deny
that they are his eyes, after all:

"Inquisitive and fierce and fasting,
Restless, predatory, hasting," &c.
"He lives in his eyes,”—

A new species of verse"There doth digest, and work and spin, And buy and sell, and lose and win," &c.

In short, does everything in his eyes. They are, in fact, his all in all; and yet the prettiest part is to come ;

Here are some important facts in the history of Cupid, and in the romantic instincts of the horned cow (is not that a mistake for hornless? or does the horned love nature more than the hornless ?) and of the caribou, which is a species of reindeer, says Richardson, the naturalist. The poet too is generous with us: he doesn't stint us to one species of deer,-" bird, or deer, or caribou ;" as if one should say, "bird or quadruped, or dog,"-first, he gives us the whole kind, "bird or deer," and then adds one species for earnest :

"or caribou ;"

for which the reader is doubtless much obliged; as also for the other poetic favors and condescensions in general. A more mysterious poet than our author hath not arisen in this age. We are fain to place him at the head of his class, if class he have, before whose intellect all divisions and distinctions shrink up, are resolved into the primeval condition. If we have in any particular thrown light for the reader on his mysterious works, be it in a mere rushlight capacity, then is our soul content. We climb not to his altitudes.

But it is necessary to conclude.
himself reminds us of our duty.

poet

"But, critic, spare thy vanity, Nor show thy pompous parts, To vex with odious subtlety,

The cheerer of men's hearts."

Our

To which we reply, again offering the crown, that we cannot allow the modesty of a poet, however delicate and heroical, to stand in the way of his poetical honors. Words are things. Ideas have the force of laws. Literature is the guard of the commonwealth. Looseness and affectation in language and philosophy, lead by but one step to looseness of manner and morals. Next to the expression of an untruth, is the expression of a truth in an affected and impertinent style. The mass of men are imitative, and readily adopt a bad fashion. What defence has the world of letters, then, but to sieze upon the first bright example, and set it plainly before the eyes of men. We have done so with this little book of poems. We wish to see it appreciated.