THOMAS CAMPBELL, LL.D.
(1777-1844-)

CAMPBELL was the youngest son of a Glasgow merchant, who traced his descent to a distinguished family of Argyleshire. Commercial misfortunes had reduced his father to comparative poverty, but he was able to give his favourite and promising son an education in Glasgow university. Through the classes of that seminary the youth passed with great reputation, especially for Greek literature; and abandoning his original prospect of church preferment, he came to Edinburgh with some vague intention of studying law. Poetical sympathies and want of opportunity fortunately threw his energies in another direction. The publication of the "Pleasures of Hope," in 1799, in his twenty-second year, elevated

1 The poem was suggested by Akenside's "Pleasures of Imagination," and Rogers's "Pleasures of Memory."

him to the rank of a popular poet. He then travelled in Germany,1 from whence he transmitted some of his admired minor poems to Mr. Perry of the Morning Chronicle, in which journal they first appeared. He saw some of the horrors of war in Germany, but did not witness, as is often stated, the battle of Hohenlinden, which he so nobly commemorated. In 1803 he married his cousin Miss Matilda Sinclair, and settled in the neighbourhood of London. His married life was happy,

but the death of one son and the madness of another cast a dark shadow on Campbell's latter years. He long struggled with narrowness of circumstances, caused in a great measure by his generosity to his destitute mother, sisters, and other relations. His health was not robust, while his subsistence demanded the incessant exercise of his pen, chiefly in the task-work of compilation. For a number of years (1820-1831) he edited the New Monthly Magazine. He was frequently on the continent, and the death of his wife in 1828 leaving the poet stripped of his last domestic comfort, seemed to give his wandering propensities a wider range; he visited Algiers in 1834. He had the honour of being thrice elected to the Lord Rectorship of his native university. During his later years, in the enjoyment of a pension of £200 per annum granted by the Whig Government of 1806, he resided chiefly in London, engaged in literary pursuits, and enjoying the society of his friends. He died in 1844 at Boulogne, to which he had removed in search of health. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Campbell's poetical works consist of the "Pleasures of Hope;" "Gertrude of Wyoming," an affecting tale of an Indian incursion on that Pennsylvanian village during the American war; "Theodoric,” a domestic Swiss tale, etc. His lyrics are among the noblest in the language. He is one of the most correct and finished of modern writers, and a tasteful critic.1

3

Campbell's scholarship was extensive; he was as proud of his Greek as of his poetry. His industry was great, though fortune often compelled its expenditure on objects beneath his genius. No man was more earnest in his sympathy with all that was generous and noble,-witness his attachment to the cause of Poland, 5 -nor more truly fulfilled the practical duties of family affection.

FROM PLEASURES OF HOPE.

HOPE THE LAST BLESSING THAT FORSAKES MAN.
PRIMEVAL Hope, the Aönian muses say,
When Man and Nature mourn'd their first decay;
When every form of death, and every woe,
Shot from malignant stars to earth below;

1 To the growing taste in Britain for the literature and philosophy of that country, we have alluded in the notices of Scott and Coleridge.

2 Hazlitt calls it a "historical paraphrase of Mr. Wordsworth's 'Ruth.""

3 Indeed, he is accused of spoiling his poetry, like Callimachus, by excess of polish; he rubs away the salient points.-See in Beattie the difference between the draughts and the published forms of some of his lyrics; in many instances the former are superior to the latter. "He plays the hypercritic on himself," says Hazlitt, “and starves his genius to death through needless apprehension of a plethora."

4 See his "Specimens of the British Poets.

At his funeral, a portion of earth from the grave of Kosciusko at Cracow was thrown into the poet's grave by a member of the Polish Association.

6 See note 5, p. 195.

FROM PLEASURES OF HOPE.

When Murder bared her arm, and rampant War
Yoked the red dragons of her iron car;
When Peace and Mercy, banish'd from the plain,
Sprung on the viewless winds to Heaven again;
All, all forsook the friendless guilty mind,
But Hope, the charmer, linger'd still behind.1

HOPE'S EXHORTATION TO YOUTHFUL GENIUS.

435

"Go, child of Heaven! (thy2 wingéd words proclaim
'Tis thine to search the boundless fields of fame!
Lo! Newton, priest of nature, shines afar,
Scans the wide world, and numbers every star!
Wilt thou, with him, mysterious rites apply,
And watch the shrine with wonder-beaming eye?
Yes! thou shalt mark, with magic art profound,
The speed of light, the circling march of sound;
With Franklin3 grasp the lightning's fiery wing,
Or yield the lyre of Heaven another string.*

"The Swedish sage" admires, in yonder bowers,
His winged insects, and his rosy flowers;
Calls from their woodland haunts the savage train,
With sounding horn, and counts them on the plain-
So once, at Heaven's command, the wand'rers came
To Eden's shade, and heard their various name.

"Far from the world, in yon sequester'd clime,
Slow pass the sons of Wisdom, more sublime;
Calm as the fields of Heaven, his sapient eye,
The loved Athenian lifts to realms on high,
Admiring Plato, on his spotless page,

6

Stamps the bright dictates of the Father Sage:
'Shall Nature bound to Earth's diurnal span
The fire of God, the immortal soul of man?'

"Turn, child of Heaven, thy rapture-lighten'd eye,

To wisdom's walks, the sacred Nine are nigh:

Hark! from bright spires that gild the Delphian height,
From streams that wander in eternal light,
Ranged on their hill, Harmonia's daughters swell
The mingling tones of horn, and harp, and shell;

1 Alluding to the celebrated Mythus of Pandora's box in Hesiod, "Works and Days," 55-107.-See Keightley's Mythology. 2 Thy, viz. Hope's.

3 Benjamin Franklin was the first who identified electricity with lightning, by experiments with a paper kite.

4 Allusion to the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres, and to Sir W. Herschel's discovery of the Georgium Sidus.

5 Linnæus of Upsala, the author of the "sexual" system of botany.

"Sons of Wisdom," philosophers. "Athenian," Socrates, whose disciple, Plato, embodies and expands in his writings the doctrines of the "Father Sage." One conspicuous tenet of the Platonic philosophy is the immortality of the soul.

Deep from his vaults the Loxian murmurs flow,
And Pythia's awful organ peals below.1

"Beloved of Heaven! the smiling Muse shall shed
Her moonlight halo on thy beauteous head ;
Shall swell thy heart to rapture unconfined,
And breathe a holy madness o'er thy mind.
I see thee roam her guardian power beneath,
And talk with spirits on the midnight heath;
Inquire of guilty wanderers whence they came,
And ask each blood-stain'd form his earthly name;
Then weave in rapid verse the deeds they tell,
And read the trembling world the tales of hell.2

"When Venus, throned in clouds of rosy hue,
Flings from her golden urn the vesper dew,3
And bids fond man her glimmering noon employ,
Sacred to love, and walks of tender joy;
A milder mood the goddess shall recal,
And soft as dew thy tones of music fall;
While Beauty's deeply-pictured smiles impart
A pang more dear than pleasure to the heart-
Warm as thy sighs shall flow the Lesbian strain,*
And plead in Beauty's ear, nor plead in vain.

"Or wilt thou Orphean hymns more sacred deem,
And steep thy song in Mercy's mellow stream;
To pensive drops the radiant eye beguile-
For Beauty's tears are lovelier than her smile ;-
On Nature's throbbing anguish pour relief,
And teach impassion'd souls the joy of grief?

"Yes; to thy tongue shall seraph words be given,
And power on earth to plead the cause of Heaven;
The proud, the cold untroubled heart of stone,
That never mused on sorrow but its own,

1 The nine muses are, in mythology, the daughters of Zeus (Jupiter) and Mnemosyne (Memory); the Attic legend makes them the daughters of Harmonia, the bride of Cadmus, who introduced the Alphabet into Greece, Eurip. Medea, 830-834Delphos in Phocis, at the foot of Parnassus, the seat of Apollo and the Muses, and of the celebrated oracle.-See note 9, p. 205.-Loxias (from loxos, oblique) was an appellation of Apollo, from the obscurity of his oracles; the Pythia, the priestess who uttered the oracular responses, received this epithet from Pytho, the old name of Delphi, properly denoting the putid gaseous exhalation by which she was inspired.

2 These ten lines allude to the young poet's cultivation of his gift in subjects derived from the beautiful and the terrible in nature and in belief.

Love is the turning point of the interest of most poems in modern times.-Venus, the love-deity, gives name to the evening star (Hesperus); the idea in the text seems taken from the lines of Sappho, expanded by Dante (Purgatorio, canto viii.), and imitated from that poet by Byron (Don Juan, iii. 107).-"Golden Urn;" of this classical expression the moderns have made common property.

4 Sappho, whose love-tale is so celebrated in verse, was a native of Lesbos.-See note 3, p. 218.

FROM PLEASURES OF HOPE.

Unlocks a generous store at thy command,
Like Horeb's rocks beneath the prophet's hand.

The living lumber of his kindred earth,
Charm'd into soul, receives a second birth;
Feels thy dread power another heart afford,
Whose passion-touch'd harmonious strings accord,
True as the circling spheres to Nature's plan :
And man, the brother, lives the friend of man."

THE FINAL TRIUMPH OF HOPE.

Eternal Hope! when yonder spheres sublime
Peal'd their first notes1 to sound the march of time,
Thy joyous youth began-but not to fade.-
When all the sister planets have decay'd;
When rapt in fire the realms of ether glow,

And Heaven's last thunder shakes the world below;
Thou, undismay'd, shalt o'er the ruins smile,
And light thy torch at Nature's funeral pile!

BATTLE OF THE BALTIC.

I.

Of Nelson and the North,

Sing the glorious day's renown,

When to battle fierce came forth

All the might of Denmark's crown,

And her arms along the deep proudly shone;

By each gun the lighted brand,

In a bold determined hand,

And the prince of all the land

Led them on.