Spencer's translation, the far sublimer Leonora. In those poems, the perjured inconstancy of one heroine, and the blasphemous despair of the other, are justly punished.

Surely, in the protection of her father's house, and amid groups of human beings, Mary Jeane must naturally think she could better have defended herself from the renewed visits of the hideous tenant of the grave, than alone on the wild hills of St Bertrand, amid the tangled woods of Limeburgh, and on the Golgotha of Sombremond*. Is that name, so adapted to the scene, real?

Though I cannot think the author of this wild work serious, yet the subject seems to have irresistibly led him to exhibit, among his mock-terrifics, some pictures that have the genuine grandeur of horror, and some natural touches of simple beauty. The style, in general, is so meagre, that, if he can be thought in earnest, we must believe him, with many other versifiers, mistaking silliness for simplicity.

* In the prelude to this strange poem, it is asserted, that, on certain plains on the high-roads in Germany, the bodies of malefactors are exposed on wheels and gibbets; and that pilgrim travellers often pass the night amid those dire groups, to secure themselves from the living banditti that, infesting thehighways, will yet not approach the mangled carcasses of their associates.-S.

I discern no fine features of either style till the twelfth stanza; and there only in the third and fourth lines. I like the thirteenth extremely. In that, the pilgrim, looking back on the cheerful lights of the town, is natural and pleasing picture. The fourteenth finely describes the dreary journey; the fifteenth, as finely, the horrors of the plain of Sombremond; the sixteenth has nothing striking; the seventeenth is striking; the eighteenth grander still its picture of the raven is the gem of the composition; and as it is new as to position and action, so is it sublime :

"And he croak'd round the wheel as he heavily flew."

The vultures of the next couplet are commonplace, in comparison; aiming to be more, they are poetically much less impressive.

The fourth line of the nineteenth stanza is also grandly horrid; but the Little Grey Man on the field of battle, is again too ludicrous to be dreadful; and a twenty-three days walk for a man deeply wounded, outrages, not only the probable, but the possible. The real-life events ought to be natural, even where the machinery is supernatural.

The nine ensuing stanzas, till the last line of the twenty-eighth, might have been written by any common versifier

"Gave him one look of love, 'twas her fondest and last,"

Is a sweet line. In the next stanza, the Little Grey Man becomes a fiend, after Fuzeli's own heart, who has a passion for blending the ludicrous with the horrible; but the effect is seldom good, either on his canvas, or on the poet's page. And for what purpose, except to burlesque fiendism, is this absurd demon empowered to murder the amiable, unoffending lovers? The next verse is again sublime-the bell tolling over the heath, is still a fine, though somewhat hacknied, accompaniment to ghostism; but

"Wild to the blast flew the sculls and the bones,"

Is grand as any of Dante's terrifics. The ensuing stanza, though soberized, is very good; and there the ballad ought to have closed, for the remainder is common writing, and reminds us, to its own disadvantage, of the simpler and sublimer termination of Tickel's Colin and Lucy:-awful is that moral lesson, so totally wanting in this odd tale.

LETTER XXIX.

MRS CHILDERS.

Lichfield, Dec. 23, 1798.

I GRIEVE to find from your last, that no abatement of your internal malady has taken place. since we parted at Buxton, nor can conceive what operation in surgery could serve you; but if it might, if, by suffering even great increase of pain for a time, your health could be restored, your precious life prolonged, surely for the sake of your husband, daughters, sister, and friends, you would submit to endure it with a resolution worthy the affections of your heart, the strength of your mind, and the fervour of your piety. I pray to God that it may not be necessary,—that milder applications may so arrest the progress of the complaint, and assuage its pains, that they may neither shorten nor embitter existence.

Your Harriet is a noble girl,-one of that thinly-peopled class, who live for others rather than for themselves, and in whom the social passions prevail over the selfish ones. To an heart so tempered, expanded, exalted, such a mother

must be dear in a degree certain to produce sorrow and affectionate resentment, that it could be thought possible she should consent to pass this winter in town; that dissipation—the charm of polished circles, and even the renewal of former friendships, could be tasted, while you languished beneath the pressure of long-existing disease. A sensibility so inseparable from her character, rather confirms my esteem than excites it.

Your counter Sunday Morn*, so rich in piety and poetic beauty, was not first shewn to Mr Gisborne by Mrs Jones. I gave it to his neighbour, Mr Baily, desiring he would shew the poem to Mr Gisborne, assured that he would admire it, and esteem the author for its sake. Mr Baily returned it the next day, saying that he had executed my commission, and that the lines had extremely pleased Mr Gisborne.

With his Forest Walks I have been familiar from their first publication. Against those who allow their author strong abilities, knowledge, and unwearied application, but deny him genius, I have uniformly asserted his claim to that primeval irradiation, on the testimony of that work. He has looked at nature with his own eyes, and to do that happily belongs only to people of ge

* In opposition to Southey's poem of that title,—S.