but which is often barren and dreary ;-this transports us into smaller inclosures, but he spreads himself over the whole, and leaves no nook unembellished, and no space unfilled. The noble

Lord seizes on our attention by some striking touches of genius; while the gentler poet wins us by degrees, and laps us imperceptibly in Elysium. The former succeeds by a few striking qualities, the latter by the union and proportion of many of the gentle graces. Both are gifted with flowing and impassioned eloquence,-but that of the noble Lord is employed in displaying the inmost writhings of a perturbed and guilty spirit, or in melancholy reflection of the weakness of feeble man "whose hope is built on reeds," while that of Mr. Campbell glows with immortal fire, while it enforces the truths of eternal mercy, and expatiates in the starry regions of celestial light where the spark of genius was first enkindled. Then, encircled with a myriad of hallowed recollections, he rises into a sacred dignity, and is attired in sudden brightness. He feels the inspiration of his theme. In unmasking the sophistries of scepticism he seems to wield the spear of Ithuriel, and to go forth clad in the panoply of heaven. Unlike those authors, who in the days of their youthful ardor have run into the wildest excesses of speculative enthusiasm, and sunk in riper years into practical statesmen and men of the world, he has ever been the same zealous champion of rational liberty; the same friend of religion, ardent without bigotry; and the same sanguine aspirer after the improvement of his species.

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With all these estimable qualities, Mr. Campbell has some defects to answer for, which are the more obnoxious, because it is in his power to remove them. In all his longer works, the want of a general and pervading feeling is anxiously deplored, as well as a more artificial connection of the various parts of the composition. Each separate picture is finished with exquisite taste, but we miss the nice lines of connection by which all should be united. a much stronger ground of complaint, that his talents have been so inadequately employed. His appearances before the public have been, to use his own language, "like angel visits, few and far between." This shyness is the more to be regretted, as from the variety of his powers and the sustained dignity of his style, he is peculiarly fitted to produce a work of much greater length than any with which he has hitherto favored the world. He must not indeed expect to find his labors crowned with the same tumultuous and indiscriminate applause, lavished on more gaudy and magnificent productions; but he may be assured, that they will be dear to the finest and best minds as long as the charm of innocent affection and holy confidence shall remain unbroken, and every genuine feeling, which forms the intellectual greatness of his country shall endure.

VII. Little as Mr. COLERIDGE has written, he has manifested not only a depth but a variety of genius, from which the, most brilliant results might be expected. Educated with his friend Mr. Charles Lamb, in the excellent institution of Christ's Hospital, he affords a remarkable refutation of the fancy, that public schools are unfavorable to that fine bloom of the mind--that infantine purity of thought, which so rarely survives the happy days when its earliest beauties are unfolded. For it was there, that in the hearts of these young poets, amidst a crowd of five hundred school-fellows, those kindly affections, those holy imaginations, those sweet images of loveliness and joy were vivified and expanded, which no shock of worldly experience could ruffle or disturb. While Mr. Lamb sought only to drink pleasure from the humble urn of serene enjoyment, his friend was carrying the light of his genius into the most abstruse investigations, covering a thousand visionary schemes of freedom with its dazzling lustre, and uniting the apparently opposite qualities of ardent thirst for knowledge, with the dreaminess of poetical contemplation. He is alike skilled in throwing a thousand natural charms round the commonest objects, and of exciting by lovely description the purest sensations of delight, and of casting a deadly glare over the awful recesses of the heart, and laying bare its most terrible workings. In the deepest of his metaphysical speculations, every word is a poetical image. The most thorny paths of controversy are thick strewn with the freshest garlands when he enters them. If we are entangled in an intricate maze, its construction is of gold, and every turn opens some bewildering prospect, dim and indistinct from the delicate filminess of the tints by which it is shaded. He illumines whatever he touches. In the most gloomy desert which he traverses, there arise beneath his feet plots of ever-living verdure. In spell poetry he is far more potent than any writer of the present age, his enchantments are more marvellous and deeper woven,-his fictions wilder,-and his mysteries more heart-touching and appalling. In his ancient Mariner, the solemn helplessness of the narrator, condemned to live amidst supernatural horrors, is awfully expressed by the lines,—" a thousand thousand slimy things liv'd on and so did 1." How the image of strange loneliness strikes upon the heart, when he with the fatal ship and her ghastly crew burst into the sea, "where God himself " scarcely seemed to be present! And with how pure a thrill of delight are we refreshed, in the midst of this terrible witchery, when the poor creature, whom superior power has enchanted, sees the water-snakes sporting in the sun, which at happier seasons would have filled him with disgust, bursts into a blessing of these "happy living things," and a "gush of love" comes from a spirit haunted

with unutterable terrors. One other peculiar faculty of our autho is displayed in his charming delineations of love which, withou partaking in the feebleness of Mr. Southey's pictures of infantine affection, throw over the most voluptuous images an air of purity, which at once softens and encreases their loveliness. They combine something of that extasy of tenderness which Milton has revealed among the bowers of Paradise, with that holy attachment which stirs the bosoms of his angels, and delights the seclusions of his heaven.

The Tragedy of Remorse is the most popular of all the works of Mr. Coleridge, though by no means the fairest production of his genius. The theatre presents so near a path to fame, that it is not surprising that, seduced by its tumultuous applause, a superior writer should quit for a while the secluded walks of purer inspiration in which he delights to wander. But, although this work does not possess that still and deep charm, which its author has thrown around the holy retirements of his fancy-although its coloring has less of chasteness and more of brilliancy, it exhibits a rich vein of thought in a glowing luxuriance of diction, which the most unpoetical are compelled to admire. Its misfortune, indeed, is that it attempts too much, though even in failure the author has shewn himself acquainted with the great source of dramatic interest, in the various modifications through which it excites our sympathies. We have already had occasion to observe that the nature of Man is formed to derive gratification from all that calls forth his facultiesall that stirs and animates his soul-all that awakes into a more powerful throb the various pulses of existence. Thus the delight which he derives from the view of a tragedy, arises from a variety of causes, all of which stimulate and excite the feelings; and not from any single emotion, as some have endeavoured to maintain. Man appears on the stage elevated above the common level of his species, and the pleasure we derive from the spectacle is in proportion to the height to which he is exalted, and the ease and rapidity with which our hearts pursue him in his aspiring and stormy career. It is not that we are gratified by the mere prospect of misery, for that is in many cases disgusting. It is not that we are interested in the events represented, from a belief that they are actually passing, because no such belief ever existed. Above all, it is not that we are delighted in proportion as the representation is brought home to common nature-to the actual state of man-and to the display of his ordinary emotions. It is that we are elevated above the common occurrences of life, and the vexatious harassings of vulgar anxiety-that we are filled with noble images and lofty thoughts and that we are animated by a mixed admiration of the poet, of the actor, and of the overpowering emotions which they NO. X. Pam. VOL. V. 2 H

combine to delineate. We do not indeed stop to analyse we are carried along by a torrent of mingled sensation which assists in spiritualizing our nature, and lifting it above its weakness. Those who have seen Mrs. Siddons embody the noblest delineations of genius, have enjoyed all this mysterious rapture in its highest perfection-they saw a human being convulsed with superhuman agony, alternately pourtraying each of the sterner and more terrific passions, and at last bursting forth superior to them all-they mingledwith their admiration of her, a yet loftier delight in the powers of the writer who had raised the storm in which she rode triumphant and they sometimes were carried beyond both into a mysterious joy in the passions themselves, thus mingled with all that is stormy in imagination, and heroic in virtue. When the mind paused from the sensation which its momentary illusion had occasioned, the remembrance of that illusion heightened its admiration of the powers by which it had been excited. Thus all our delight may be resolved into the exaltation of our spirit, and its excursions beyond itselfinto our pride in the strength of human emotion and of human talent and the interest produced by the variations of the former, and the correspondent flashes of the latter. Now there are two modes by which the poet may indulge our propensities to love and wonder, at the passions and the faculties of our nature. He may exalt his characters above the world, by giving them supernatural energy of thought and boundless depth of passion, and surrounding them with the glories of imagination, and the playful coruscations of fancy-or he may encircle them merely with the stateliness of kings and heroes, the pomp of sentiment and diction, and the gorgeous pall of misery. Shakspeare has done the former, the classical school of dramatists the latter; and Mr. Coleridge, without towering nearly so high as either in their peculiar walk, has imitated both the models to which we have referred. Like the first, he made his personages talk like poets, and like the last, he has made them think and act as heroes and kings. He imitates the wild originality. of Shakspeare in the regular and pompous iambics of Addison. With the strictest mechanism of plot, he has united the breathing witchery of natural enchantment. His Ordonio thinks like one of Shakspeare's loftiest characters; but then he must tell all he thinks in the set speeches of Racine. He is a metaphysical villain, who justifies to himself the vileness of his actions by the subtleties of his perverted reason; but unlike those strange and mysterious, yet perfectly human, beings which we meet with in our great poet, he does not display the secrets of his wonderful frame by transient flashes, unconscious bursts, and sudden resolves, but in long-set dissertations, in which he finishes off his own portrait with the most careful exactness. At the same time, they are unquestionably

grand, and interspersed with dreadful pictures of agony and passion, and lovely images of pity and of peace. In a word, as the essence of tragedy is to elevate the soul either by the intellectual strength or the gorgeous majesty of its persons, Mr. Coleridge aims at uniting both these qualities; and consequently, notwithstanding the separate passages which we recognize as beautiful, the interest is divided and weakened-the passion discomposes the solemnity of the pall-and the pall conceals the emotions of the heart.

VIII. Mr. LAMB has also written a tragedy, in which, as it was never intended for the stage, he has been able to follow, without restraint, the leading of his own genius. This simple production is, therefore, wholly unincumbered with the artificial splendor and the pompous decorations with which "Remorse" was rendered palateable to the multitude, and appears in the chaste beauty which is beyond the reach of art. It contains no striking situation, no wonderful incident, no intricacy of plot-and, therefore, it has " no form nor comeliness," that ordinary readers should admire it. Those, however, who love our old dramatists for their gentler qualities, will be delighted with "John Woodvil:" they will find that the author has searched, with a fondness amounting to devotion, for those lonely springs of fresh inspiration at which they drank in the spirit of the creation in which they breathed. Of all living poets, he possesses most the faculty of delighting, he awakens the pulses of joy with more vivid touches, and by the mere force of natural imagery excites a keen shivering rapture, which, though far more serene, is scarcely less powerful than the greetings of happy lovers. There is a venerableness, a scriptural sanctity about his little narratives, which enables us to contemplate them with a feeling somewhat similar to that, with which we should gaze on an exquisite picture, dug from a buried city, in the freshness of its ancient coloring. They seem more like newly discovered narratives of holy writ, and fragments of patriarchal history, than the productions of the present generation. And yet the mind of the writer, caring little for the bustle of life, but seeking pure gratification in all that is cheerful and redeeming, amiable in its very jests and tender even in sportiveness, is clearly revealed in their sentiments. His singular qualities might disarm the most malicious criticism-for who, but the most profligate among those who sting to display their dexterity, could dare to wound oue, whose sole aim seems to render us better by making us happier? His very pathetic, touching as it is, has not the slightest tinge of agony. The very tears he draws from us are those which it is a luxury to shed. The soft" music of humanity not harsh nor grating," seems to echo alike from the scenes of infancy or the green bed of friendship; from the cradle or the grave; in the same gentle and mellow notes which make the soul forget its distresses and listen delighted.