While with its lofty pinions furled, Up to the altar where blest tapers 'Midst rising clouds of incense vapors― Her hands are clasped-her eyes upraised- Like threads of jet o'er alabaster,- II. "Father! invoke of Heaven the aid An icy chill is at my heart, A tale of Wo I would impart, Which I would have thee breathe to none I am a hapless Florentine, Alas! how fatal, these pale cheeks may tell! Mine is no tale of murder dire, A lovely-blest-eternal ray, Words are too weak to tell to thee, [bliss- Sent down from other world's to this, Eclipses all the stars of night. The realm of my own loving heart, And bright, illumined every part, I took no pleasure in my lute- Where Raphael's sainted Mary hung, Of my adored from side to side- I peopled with them vale and grove- III. Alas! that vision passed away, That blooms and dies in desert bower ;— IV. Kind Father! frown not on this tale And woman's Paradise below;— Where turns the compass of the soul, That over sunless chaos burst, Still blissful, bounteous as at first- V. Allured by high ambition's wiles, But he on whom my heart relied I cannot tell the pangs I felt- That should have made me Gamba's bride. VI. At last the tidings came that he Who would have bartered Paradise Then love as fondly any other; The cold world's heartless sneers to spurn; Its paralyzing finger there- VII. At first delirium seized my brain, And in the mad-house I was cooped, Where like a fettered bird I drooped: Yet 'twas some solace unto me To sit and hear the maniac's cries, Which through my cell ran constantly, And wild as demon harmonies;To list the prayer-the moan-the sighOf those who willed, but could not die :It was some happiness to know I was not all alone in wo. VIII. It passed-and I was free again, And all unknown, Even to him for whom I die. IX. Thou know'st it all-my tale is done- Thanks for thy prayer and sympathy- To Gamba when I am no more, That Eminade for Gamba bore- I pray, too, thou'lt restore to him This gold, which at my feet he threw, When lingering at Nieva's brim, To list the lute I swept for him, And me unrecognised to view. I have bedewed it with my tears, Till scarce the hue of gold it wearsI've worn it nearest to my heart, And now 'tis hard from it to part; But I would have him see the token, And life-drops of the heart he's broken!" She said, and cold, and stark, and pale, Rose-vanished from the Friar's sight, Nor in that blooming Indian glade, MODERN ENGLISH POETS. WE resume our comments on the new work of Miss Fuller, the "Papers on Literature and Art." One of the soundest, most clearly written of them all, is the one devoted to the chief of the great bards of England, who have illustrated the nineteenth century. The few present active writers, the Brownings, Tennysons, Miss Barretts, are disposed of in other articles. This is occupied with the preceding generation, the picked men of an illustrious era; and for convenience of grouping, and for the benefit of a classical device, our authoress has chosen the exact number of the Muses. We may find some matter of magazine gossip, in following her footsteps. First of the sacred nine is Campbell, the author of the Pleasures of Hope," a title which the poet having had dinned into his ears for half a century, got tired of at last. It would cause him to fume at any time to be thus spoken of, says a wag in one of the magazines, who took a melancholy pleasure in reading the jest for the last time, inscribed on his coffin-plate in Westminster Abbey. Miss Fuller, had she been fortunate enough to have visited England in his life-time, would have been sure of a welcome. In all that she says of Campbell, she does not even mention the palled Pleasures of Hope! To the grace and spirit of Gertrude, she does all due honor, for it touches her sentiment on the side of her sex, and for a similar reason springing out of that mine of poetry and philosophy, which dictated "Woman in the Nineteenth Century;" she thinks nobly, too, of the matronly Constance, in the poem of Theodoric. But the glory of Campbell is in his lyrics, and our authoress sounds the clarion note once more of the "Address to Kemble," which all will agree with her, in ranking among the finest productions of the poet. Macready, it is well known, is in the habit of ekeing out his theatrical speeches with mottos from this poem, and well he may; for the words spoken in behalf of actors, have neither been so frequent or so eloquent, that this could be omitted, His was the spell o'er hearts Full many a tone of thought sublime, And sculpture to be dumb." Miss Fuller notices the want of continuous power, the flow of which in the genius of Collins, Shelley, or Coleridge, may be said to resemble the fulness of the fountain; while Campbell's inspiration may be compared to the single flight of the arrow. Campbell, she says, has no purpose; his best effusions read like occasional snatches. True, there was this limitation, but it was a limitation of the man's genius itself, and could not well have been otherwise. No purpose or determination could have altered the matter. Decision of character would only have made it worse. Upon certain conditions Campbell might have become more voluminous; he might have left his mark on more booksellers, but he would not have been greater. There was a certain amount of poetic oil in him to be expended, and when this had blazed out in his few great odes, the flame was extinct. To what purpose to burn artificial tapers, after the heavenlighting volcano was extinct? Yet this and similar complaints are often enough made, to be worth answering. If Campbell had always written with a purpose, he would have been a comparatively dull poet; little read and speedily forgotten. Why is Miss Fuller forgetful of the " Pleasures," and mindful of the odes? The former was done with a purpose, the latter were not. Akenside is a case in point. He has left a few short poems that may be read, and a long one that no one attempts. He had a purpose, nevertheless, a most invincible purpose; he went to work like a sage with a bust of Plato, probably, before him; he remodelled his poem carefully, he published two different versions at different periods of his life, (making bad worse as usual in such cases, where the sobriety of age corrects the energy though with the license of youth) and the fate of the learned Doctors Toils" rather than Pleasures of the Imagination," has been that nobody reads his book as many times as he wrote it. If Campbell had set to work with a purpose, he would have been duller than Akenside. His genius was a rare plant, not destined to blossom every day. There were probably long level passages, extensive table lands in his life, in which Campbell was dull, perhaps occasionally lashing himself into a little spurious vitality by his spleen-his conversation for the most part being bigoted and malevolent, not seldom profane and indecorous, at some glorious moments the "splendid bile" overflowing in some rich ode, some note of inspiration like “Ye Mariners of England." There was another poem that Campbell should have written with the " Soldier's Dream,"-the "Burial of Sir John Moore." That too was the one "bright consummate flower" of the author's poetical life. Take that away from the published remains of Charles Wolfe, and nothing remains. Campbell should never have written much, not so much even as he did. His strength, like that of the ancient tribe of Israel, after he had done several things which could be counted on the fingers, should have been to sit still. Never was a pension, the temptation to learned indolence, more wisely bestowed, than upon Campbell, if we except the much cavilled at liberality of the little pittance bestowed upon Tennyson. Even with the pension, Campbell would occasionally drivel. Without it, the fate of Haydon might have been his, a lifelong struggle between mediocrity and the public. The claims of the Punch Bowl, the time destroying inventions of company or society, editing magazines, travels to Algiers, could not fill up the vaccuum. He must stuff Time's Wallet with "Pilgrims to Glencoe." Maudlin magazinists in this favored land, in like manner bawl out lachrymatory howlings in the newspapers, periodically, on the sad fate of Halleck, con demned to the "drudgery of the desk's dead wood," and prophecy the Epics and Don Juans were it otherwise. No one believes this to be gammon, the effusions of vaporous sophomores, or ladies begging stanzas for albums, more than the much honored poet himself. The good sense which has ruled over his verses has inspired him to leave them alone in their glory. If Halleck were to forget himself, read essays on decision of character, or take the prefatory advice of friends to get at our volume every now and then, he would bury his reputation alive. His friends, instead of calling upon him to commit this literary suicide, should pray for the life of John Jacob Astor, and for the perpetuity of the little Temple of Mammon and the weighty ledgers it Prince-street. The immeasurable Propontic fulness which “ne'er feels retiring ebb," belongs only to the great poets of inexhaustible vitality. There is a limit to the exuberance of even their powers. Call not then upon poets of the Campbell school for more. Second of the nine commemorated by the gentle Margaret, is Moore; but what can a lady know of Anacreon? Yet of that universal classic joy which springs up the symbol of youth and happiness, whether symbolized by the juice of the grape or the hour when fond lovers meet," she is a participant, cherishing all the wealth of the bounteous Pan. This paper, with the universal, the cosmopolitan love of letters, bears a tinge of personality which, in the name of the fair critic, we would repudiate. She thinks the charm of Moore will fade as he grows old. Gray hairs on Anacreon, the old rogue himself, in his prodigal generosity of sentiment, gave this stick to his critics, are destructive of all sentiment. We cannot see the sequitur. If poets grow old, their works do not. There is no old age, save such as mellows old wine in Love's Young Dream, 'Wreathe the bowl with flowers of soul,' or 'to ladies a round boy.' There may be something in this to the coteries of May Fair who have stiffened over the piano, and grown tremulous singing, "When Love was a Child ;” they may sigh for the era of Little, and the raven locks of those early days, the "quaffing, laughing, and unthinking time," and be quite willing to have them back again in place of the polished baldness and "silver wires" on the brow of the Laureat. But what has this new generation in America to do with the decay of Tom Moore? There is no decrepitude in type or old age in sentiment. The virgins and youths, the Horatian audience he wrote for, of the past race, live again, and will live in ever renewing cycles. The case is not so bad, my fair critic. What say you to Anacreon himself; he grew old, lived till towards ninety, and died with a phthisical affection, or as it is poetically apologued, choked to death with a grape stone; he was a venerable fellow, and moreover he is dead and buried long since, with twenty or thirty centuries on the back of him. If there was any outlawry for youth and wine, any statute of limitations in the title deeds of poetry, it might be pleaded here; but Anacreon yet lives, and Miss Fuller, like the Margarets of other days great in history, the Queeus and Princesses, we will venture to say, reads him in the original. Still is the Athenian cicada musical to her ear. With an ocean between us, we do not care for Thomas Little's Old Age: it is Anacreon Moore we care for; and when the corpse is interred and the biography written, it will be Thomas Moore, Esq., who shall be dead and buried, and not he who sung the Melodies. Walter Scott succeeds. It has got to be the fashion-one of those fashions of literature which perpetually pass and repass in society, like the wear of a garment or the cut of a beard, to undervalue his poetry, perhaps because it was once overvalued. Its effects will be remembered while the youth of this generation is remembered, for Marmion and Fitz James were names which stirred the young soul like the sound of a trumpet. They will not die, notwithstanding the persevering efforts of a school of imitators, who have of late years been endeavoring to bring them into disrepute. They are filled with the stirring strains of the old ballad age, called once more into existence, like echoes from a horn suddenly sounded in the exulting highlands. Miss Fuller sees Sir Walter (stout Sir Walter, bless him, God!) reflected in some of these poems more directly, we cannot think completely, than in the novels. Her appreciative remarks will lead many to study these poems, aye, even by the side of Wordsworth and Shelley. "Good and great man! More and more imposing as nearer seen; thou art like that product of a superhuman intellect, that stately temple, which rears its head in the clouds, yet must be studied through and through, for months and years, to be appreciated in all its grandeur." Crabbe, we fear our authoress has loved little; she adopts the common criticism, or rather stumbles over it. She would have been better and more characteristically employed in removing the impediment. He is with her the cold man of science, the harsh justiciary of the poor, and nothing more. Now, the very intensity of Crabbe's painstaking in the midst of these novels should lead the critic to suspect something else, since there can be no such self-sacrifice without love. Crabbe was a lover of his kind, a participant during youth and poverty, of the sorrows of the humblest; in better days, when he was the friend of Burke, and inmate of a ducal castle, moderate still, laboriously securing a good name, yet insensible to the noisy harlotry of fame, passing twenty years of his literary life unheard, unseen by the public-in his life, in his writings, he impresses us deeply as the profound humanitarian, not the skindeep sentimentalist. It is an error that Crabbe's writings are all gloom. Among his tales are the most genial, quaint, benevolent pictures in the language, and hence the admiration for him expressed by such men, representing the manly character in all its moods, as Charles James Fox and Sir Walter Scott. The latter was delighted with the stories of Quaker Courtships and Lovers' Journeyings. Call over the list of English poetical story-tellers, and see if Crabbe can be spared. There is a world of meaning in the next remark upon Shelley-" I turn to one whom I love still more than I admire; the gentle, the gifted, the illfated Shelley." Miss Fuller has elsewhere recorded her early obligation to the wind-harp of Shelley. His ethereal tones and unearthly melodies came to our Pythoness full of the inspiration of the woods and fields, the undefined but mighty harmonies of the spirit land. So should Shelley be read in the luxuriance of mid-summer, amidst the |