and still more infrequently with such as these, where ideas of sense are altogether excluded: (Macbeth regretting the effects of his crime)—

I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf:
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but in their stead,
Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

In a word, modern poetry, as to its matter, is little more than a huge pile of luxurious descriptions; as to its language, little else than an immense and somewhat confused heap of glittering periods and richlyworded phrases, slippery without being very sweet, oppressing the ear without ever taking it prisoner. We seldom find the memory dwelling on the fall of a modern cadence, or the chambers of the brain reechoing with the sound of a modern line. Reading a poem of the present day, is like floating upon a river of tepid wine, where the fumes and vapours dull both the senses and the current scenery in like manner, we glide over a stream of modern eloquence, without almost thinking of what we are doing, or where we are going; the mind is in such a state of poetical inebriation, that the imagery appears all confused to the eye, and the language altogether mystified to the ear, -the one is dazzling and the other is lubricous, but neither is impressive: they fleet with the movement.

If we examine the works of the most celebrated poets of the modern school, Byron, Moore, Cornwall,

&c.* we shall find ample proof that, generally speaking, the character of the thoughts and language to be found there, is such as I have assigned. The modern muse is certainly endowed with an uncommonly flexible tongue: Hippocrene overflows with a perennial discharge of waters, more luxurious than the bee of Athens ever sucked through the stem of the fountainflowers. I award to the writers of the present day this praise of splendid fluency, without any qualification: if Pactolus had one of them for his river-god, his sands would turn sooner to gold-dust, than if all the long-eared kings that the world ever worshipped, had been drowned in his channel. Our poets are not bees laden with sweets, but jars cheek-full of liquid bullion; their lips drop not honey, but gold, and of all these yellow-mouthed ewers, Byron is the richest : -a most prodigal stream of eloquence rolls perpetually off his tongue, but its lustre blinds the eye, its plenty chokes the ear, without enlightening or filling the mind, as considered distinctly from the senses. One of the very finest specimens of modern poetry, is the following from the Doge of Venice; and it is written in a glorious vein of eloquence,-but the animal shows its cloven foot all through, the five organs of sensile pleasure alone are titillated, it is sensual, " morbidly" sensual, like all the poetry of the same magnificent and loquacious voluptuary, and, indeed, of the age:

The music, and the banquet, and the wine-
The garlands, the rose-odours, and the flowers-

* I do not mean to include such authors as Campbell, Rogers, Crabbe, &c.; they belong rather to the silver age of poetry.

The sparkling eyes, and flashing ornaments-
The white arms and the raven hair-the braids

And bracelets; swan-like bosoms, and the necklace,
An India in itself, yet dazzling not

The eye like what it circled; the thin robes

Floating like light clouds 'twixt our gaze and heaven ;
The many twinkling feet so small and sylph-like,
Suggesting the more secret symmetry

Of the fair forms which terminate so well-
All the delusion of the dizzy scene,

Its false and true enchantments-art and nature,
Which swam before my giddy eyes, that drank
The sight of beauty as the parched pilgrim's
On Arab sands the false mirage, which offers
A lucid lake to his eluded thirst,

Are gone :-Around me are the stars and waters-
Worlds mirror'd in the ocean, goodlier sight,
Than torches glared back by a gaudy glass,
And the great element, which is to space
What ocean is to earth, spreads its blue depths,
Soften'd with the first breathings of the spring;
The high moon sails upon her beauteous way,
Serenely smoothing o'er the lofty walls
Of those tall piles and sea-girt palaces,

Whose porphyry pillars, and whose costly fronts,
Fraught with the orient spoil of many marbles,
Like altars ranged along the broad canal,
Seem each a trophy of some mighty deed,

Rear'd up from out the waters, scarce less strangely
Than those more massy and mysterious giants

Of architecture, those Titanian fabrics,

Which point on Egypt's plains to times that have
No other record, &c.

Such language as the above, may be taken as the characteristic livery which modern poetry delights to wear; the spare form of its real substance is perpetually clothed in the same rich and redundant, warm and southerly phrase. Whilst reading it, we almost think we are gasping in the sultry beams of the lower latitudes, where the scenery is all bloom and blaze where every wind is laden, till the back of the sightless courier bends with the weight of odours and perfume; where the lazy, soft-footed waters, creep along their channels, as if they feared to wake the reed that nods till it almost tumbles into the stream; and where the air itself is but a kind of invisible tunic of fur, which we can never put off to breathe freshly and freely, like a roe on the top of our own barren mountains. I do not mean to say, either that our ancient writers never fell into this southern method, or that our present writers never deviate from it. Some of the wealthiest pictures, in point of imagery and expression, are to be met with in Milton and Shakspeare, (especially the former, whose breath was somewhat less rude and wholesome than that of his predecessor); whilst our living poets, and chiefly Byron, sometimes expatiate beyond the mere bounds of sense, and become speculative poets. Moore also, whose eloquence is a kind of poetical shower-bath, falling diamonds, and spars, and spangles, upon occasion, refreshes us with a simple flow of national, or even moral sentiment.

The passionate soul of Cornwall, where woman is concerned, not unfrequently turns the drops which gush unbidden from the sensual eye, into pure and genuine tears. But, upon the whole, the taste and manner, not only of these nobler birds of song, but of all our "small poets," all the finches of the modern

grove, whether cock or hen, fledged or featherless,— are decidedly effeminate and sensual. The bleak and rocky crowns of Parnassus never kiss the sole of a modern slipper: where the moss is velvet, and the plats of herbage silky and spongy; where nature patches her green floor-cloth with a Turkey grass-carpet,— there do our modern poets amble, with their eyes boring the zenith, till they sink over the shoes in the oozy turf, or are drowned (to make bold with the metaphor) in a flood of waving flowers. They never scale the cliff, or are to be seen balancing on the ridge of a precipice; they are seldom immersed in the shadowy forests of the hill, or buried in the dusky and perilous vales which intersect it ;-never pull their wreaths off the pinnacle, but cull posies in swarms off the sunniest and gentlest declivities, where they can pluck as they lie, between sleep and awake, on their lush beds of roses and litters of rank grass, as soft and luxurious as pallets of swans'-down or flimsy coccoon. Byron is almost the only vagrant, and that only by starts, from the modern walk. One spirit seems to pervade the whole class of living poets, the spirit of effeminacy: the same grovelling (I must call it) propension to the soft and beautiful in preference to the strenuous and sublime, the same proneness to wallow in the imaginary luxuries of sense, the same gluttonous love of every thing that can excite the sensual palate of the mind,-constitute the moving principle of the school of modern poetry. Hence, taking itself as its own evidence, its characteristic has been rightly, not violently, truly, not satirically, assigned; that is to say-Sensuality. London Magazine.

FINIS.

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