or anarchy. Yet no man had more kindness of heart or displayed greater willingness to befriend either struggling genius or mediocrity, when his controversial passions were stilled. If we look at him from one point of view, he seems the most unamiable of men; while from another, he appears the most benevolent and gentle. He was a kind of St. Dominic on one side of his nature, and a kind of Fénelon on the other. His adversaries, therefore, he made his enemies, and his friends became his partisans.

As a prose writer Southey was more successful than as a poet. His prose style is of such inimitable grace, clearness and fluency, that it would make nonsense agreeable. His poetry indicates a lack of shaping imagination, and is diffusely elegant in expression. He often gives twenty lines to a comparison which Shelley or Wordsworth would have compressed into an epithet. In narrative skill, and constructive power, he excels both; and is himself excelled only by Scott. His mind was exceedingly fertile in the invention of incident. "Thalaba" and the "Curse of Kehama " are the most dazzling of his long poems, and show to the best advantage the whole resources of his mind. In these the originality consists in connecting common passions and common virtues with the most fantastical and uncommon incidents, and in exhibiting the powers and feelings of human nature in relation to the grotesque fictions of superstitious faith. The predominant faculty in exercise is fancy; and, were it not that the author's perceptions of character and conduct are rigidly severe, the whole representation would appear like a feverish dream; but the continual presence of the faults and the virtues of Robert Southey, amid the most monstrous and im

probable machinery of his story, gives to the essential substance of the poems a character of didactic reality. Inhuman or superhuman actions are performed from human motives, and relate to human ideas of duty and feeling.

In the delineation of the passions, Southey manifests generally more of the theologian than of the poet. Love is almost always represented either as lust or adoration. Macaulay pointedly remarks, that "his heroes make love either like seraphim or like cattle." There is no golden mean between the extremes of passion, in his delineations. He never could have written "Genevieve," or represented Effie Deans. There is something harsh and hard in his morality, which prevents his forming a tolerant estimate of character. His men and women are embodiments of essays

didactic rather than dramatic, on human nature, rather than embodiments of human nature itself. They evince a great lack of insight, and have little objective truth. His characters are mirrors to reflect the outlines of his own individuality. As a poet, he seems to us to fall below Scott, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and to belong to the second class of contemporary poets. In imagination and true poetic feeling, we should hesitate to place him on an equality with Campbell, Barry Cornwall, Tennyson, and Keats, although in general capacity and acquirements, and especially in force of individual character, he is their superior. It requires no prophetic gift to predict that most of his verse is destined to die.

THOMAS MOORE began his career with singing, not the "Loves of the Angels," but the loves of the roués. His early poems are probably the most disgraceful legacies of licentious thought ever bequeathed by prurient youth to

a half-penitent age. They are exceedingly clever, unprincipled, and pernicious. We never read any verses, produced by one at the same tender years, so utterly deficient in moral sense. Their gilded vulgarity is not even redeemed by any depth of passion. They are the mere children of fancy and sensation, having no law higher than appetite. They constitute the libertine's text-book of pleasant sins, full of nice morsels of wickedness, and choice tit-bits of dissoluteness. What there is poetical in them is like the reflection of a star in a mudpuddle, or the shining of rotten wood in the dark.

The taint of this youthful voluptuousness infects much of Moore's more matured composition. His mind never wholly became emancipated from the dominion of his senses. His notion of Paradise comes from the Koran, not the New Testament. His works are pictorial representations of Epicureanism. Pathos, passion, sentiment, fancy, wit, are poured melodiously forth in seemingly inexhaustible abundance, and glitter along his page as though written down with sunbeams; but they are still more or less referable to sensation, and the "trail of the serpent is over them all." He is the most superficial and empirical of all the prominent poets of his day; and, with all his acknowledged fertility of mind, with all his artistical skill and brilliancy, with all his popularity, he never makes a profound impression on the soul, and few ever think of calling him a great poet, even in the sense in which Byron is great. He is the most magnificent trifler that ever versified. Nothing can be finer than his sarcasm, nothing more brilliant than his fancy, nothing more softly voluptuous than his sentiment. But he possesses no depth of imagination, no grandeur of thought, no clear vision of purity and holiness. He has neither

loftiness nor comprehension. Those who claim for him a place among the immortals are most generally young people, who are conquered by the "dazzling fence" of his rhetoric, and the lightning-like rapidity with which he scatters fancies one upon another. He blinds the eye with diamond dust, and lulls the ear with the singing sweetness of his versification. Much of his sentiment, which fair throats warble so melodiously, is merely idealized lust. The pitch of his thought and feeling is not high. The impression gained from his works is most assuredly that of a man variously gifted by nature, adroit, ingenious, keen, versatile, "forgetive," a most remarkable man, but not a great poet. Nothing about his works "wears the aspect of eternity."

As a lyrical poet, he has written many exquisite songs, and no bad ones. His power of expression is always equal to the thought or emotion to be expressed. As far as he has conception, he has language. His lyrics are numerous and various, and relatively excellent. But even here, his strongest ground, he is not great. According to the character and capacities of a poet, will be the merit of his lyrics. Moore, in all his celebrations of patriotism and love, has never reached the elevation of his great contemporaries. To be a great lyrist, a poet must have great elements of character. These Moore does not possess. He has written nothing equal to the best songs and odes of Campbell, though the latter has no claim to his versatility and fluency of feeling and fancy.

The fame of THOMAS CAMPBELL will ultimately rest on his lyrics. They are grand and stirring compositions, full of the living energy of high emotion, and dotted, here and there, with fine flashes of imagination. They come,

too, from deep sources of feeling and inspiration. Campbell possessed a noble nature, but its impulses were checked by an incurable laziness. He "dawdled" too much over his long compositions. The capacity of the man is best displayed in those burning lyrics which were called forth by the events of his time. When his soul was roused to its utmost, it ever manifested great qualities. His poems, generally, will probably live. His descriptions of the gentler passions have exquisite tenderness and pathos, when not injured by over refinement in the expression. His condensation is often remarkable for its artistical excellence and its effectiveness. The bombast, strained metaphors, and turgid epithets, which occasionally disfigure his compositions, were the result of indolence, more than bad taste. can select lines and stanzas from his poems, having all the appearance of inspiration, which must have been produced in a state of mental apathy. His works, generally, are good examples of the distinction between poetry and eloquence, in not admitting the diffuse magnificence of the latter. Almost all his contemporaries who were deeply stirred by individual calamities, or who entered into colloquies with the public, would often merge the poet in the orator. Byron was more lavish of his passion than his imagination. Had Campbell written "Childe Harold," it would have cost him ten years more labor than it did the author, and would not have been half as long.

We

Mr. Griswold informs us, with admirable gravity, that the writings of ALFRED TENNYSON have sufficient merit "to secure him a permanent place in the third or fourth rank of contemporary English poets." This is rather an amusing slip of his cautious pen. Tennyson's genius is