poets, then, can hardly claim to have unfettered English poetry as to rhythm; since there is scarce an imaginable metre, which may not be found exemplified with great harmony and beauty among the writings of their fathers. For whatever extension they may have given to the measures of the English muse, we are duly grateful. But the most important change, was that attempted by Southey, in the experiment of writing long poems in a kind of anarchical prose, knowing neither law nor rule, but measured off irregularly and ad libitum,' at once passing beyond the noble freedom of prose, and falling short of the musical charm of poetry. The attempt proved to be a failure, as might have been expected. The endeavor to engraft this species of prose-poetry on the rugged stock of our monosyllabic language, is about as hopeful an enterprise, as it would be to close the majestic flow of Latin and Greek hexameters in jingling rhythms, and Southey's Thalaba and Curse of Kehama, in spite of their fine language and splendid imagery, are read only by the curious. That, which the experience of the readers of poetry in all languages will prove, may be confidently asserted, that any poem, to be permanently popular, must not only express poetical thoughts, but be invested with harmonious rhythm. The greatest stickler for abstract excellence, will not love the figure without the robe. All men feel rhyme, or at least rhythm, to be agreeable, and to deny the fact, or dispute its consonance with reason, is folly. How futile, then, to expect that the heroic measure, and other measures, whether in rhyme or blank verse, of a regularly recurring consonance of sounds, or perceptible harmony of cadence, will ever go out of date, and be supplanted by those compositions, in which the ear can detect no metre, or, if any, only by a painful effort, and with an abstraction of the mind from the sense of the writer in the search after the rhythm, and the doubt whether he is reading poetry or prose! And this constitutes a real and most obvious objection to many English poems, of earlier and of later days. Is there any other excellence which you require, and which you miss in them?

'Yes! I miss the deep probing of the soul; the subtle investigation of the laws of our being; the dreamy reveries on the undefined and undefinable emotions of the spirit; the Orphic hints at the mysteries of our strange, psychological existence.' Ah, well! This, I believe, you will not find in them. The kind of poetry you wish may be obtained, I presume, by taking the beautiful, but aimless vagaries of the gifted Shelly, the poetic prose of Coleridge's Table Talk and Friend, and the prosaic poetry of the Excursion, and fusing them together in a kind of witches' caldron, when after many years of double, double, toil and trouble,' you may catch a half-glimpse of what they supposed they meant in their eloquent rantings. But I willingly grant that in our well-beloved friends, the old English classics, you can find nothing of this philosophical poetry, or poetic philosophy, which bears so strong an affinity to those reasonings which darken counsel by words without wisdom,' once spoken of by the puzzled Scotchman, who said, 'when a man dinna ken what he means himsel', and naebody else kens, they call it metaphysics.' They were neither Mystics nor Gnostics. They attempted not to popularize in rhyme the sublimated philosophy of

6

Plato, nor reduced to poetry the pantheism of Spinoza. Their highest conceptions were only common sense etherealized. They had not been inoculated with neological divinity, or mesmerized with super-rational transcendentalism. What they believed, they comprehended; what they aimed at, they knew; what they felt, they wrote. They caught no ecstatic glimpses of that double-natured and shifting' tertium-quid,' invisible to vulgar eyes, which hangs somewhere between something and nothing. They attempted not to explain what by its nature is inexplicable, or hint wisely at mysteries, which they could only hint at. The visible appearances of the world without, and the sensible movements of the world within, were the themes of all their writings, objective or subjective. The emotions which gushed up ebullient and spontaneous from the well-spring of their hearts, they transfused into the hearts of others, and with this they were satisfied. And where among later productions (unless it be in those of the old-school style, such as The Pleasures of Hope, and Human Life,) are to be found the extended poems of a grand but definite and rational scope, whose outline encompasses a great and worthy field, and whose filling-up is wrought with minute and careful accuracy, like the Essay on Man; the Night Thoughts; the Seasons; the Traveller; the Deserted Village, and several of Cowper's Poems? I have looked in vain. The poems of Campbell, Rogers, and Crabbe, are to be thrown out of the account, because, as before hinted, their writings are essentially after the old models. Of the remaining poets of modern England, the only ones, who can advance their claims in rivalry with the authors of the fine old poems mentioned above, are Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, and some might say Southey and Shelley. As for Moore, Wilson, Keats, White, Hemans, etc., etc., in regard to any thing but fugitive poems, they are entirely out of the question. Most of my readers will join me in throwing out of the contest Southey and Shelley. As to Scott, his two principal poems, Marmion and The Lady of the Lake, are nothing more than novels, fertile in pleasing incident and natural description, and clothed in easy, spirited, and sometimes captivating verse. They bear the same relation to the loftier efforts of the Epic muse, which a genteel and graceful melodrame bears to a stern, high tragedy of old. Loth am I to depreciate even the poetry of the Scottish magician, though I much prefer his rich and pictured prose. But surely I may say that no man ever rose from his poems with an impression of majesty and power, such as he feels after reading the Night Thoughts, or the Seasons. In reference to Wordsworth and Byron, I have much to say hereafter. But here it may be remarked, that those older poems have a definite aim, a vigorous coloring, and a healthy tone. They did not guide their course by vague impulse, and leave their meaning to dubious conjecture, as is done in some aimless excursions of roving genius. Pegasus could fly; but they thought it necessary to bridle him, lest their ride should be like Phaeton's of old, ending in discomfiture and ruin.

Their

Coleridge might, perhaps, have been the greatest poet of the Nineteenth Century. The sublime Hymn at Sunrise in the Valley of Chamouni,' the wizard Christabel,' the awful Rime of the Auntient

Marinere,' and 'Genevieve,' of all love-verses most musical, most melancholy,' are ample evidence of splendid imagination, and perfect mastery of language. For these we may well forgive his endless egotism, his mystified Platonism, and incomprehensible metaphysics. Could he have refrained from prying, by the aid of opinion into the arcana of the human soul, and the mysteries of our complicated life, he, in his true vocation of poet, might have struck a harp

The sweetest of a thousand shells.'

But German speculations bewildered his noble genius, and looking through a smoked glass at the sun of some alchemic, universal science, dimmed his clear and beautiful vision. Coleridge and Wordsworth are always inseparably associated in my mind, both from their early intimacy, and because they both have filled their writings with intimations that they had discovered, in fact, systematized a philosophy, whose principles, in their particular application, would regenerate, not poetry alone, but also the whole science of human society and of human life. With vain anxiety I have searched through their writings, in the attempt to discover and reunite this system, if any such there were. In the Table Talk and The Friend, I find many obscure oracles, which may rank with the unfulfilled and uninterpreted prophecies of Ezekiel. Also in the Excursion, and other philosophical poems of Wordsworth, I find many high thoughts and wise counsels, which, however, in so far as they are true, correspond, in all save their mode of enunciation, with the teachings of the Bible, and with the sentiments of the wise and good of all ages. But I cannot find, and I think the initiated' cannot find in the writings of either of them, a full and new system of poetical or social doctrine. And I say further, that he who believes this world has slumbered until now in ignorance of philosophy, whether poetical, social, moral or religious, and who supposes or pretends that he has discovered a new and true philosophy, is, either intentionally or unintentionally, a quack. A man may present the great truths of life and of art in a clearer or more attractive manner than any of his predecessors; but a new system has not been, and cannot be invented. If Wordsworth had discovered one, why did he not neglect his minor poems and complete the Excursion, the vehicle selected by himself for this new and wondrous revelation?

I have been so deeply impressed, at time, with the beautiful imaginings and heartfelt enthusiasm displayed in many passages of their writings, that in saying aught to disparage the merits of Coleridge and Wordsworth, I almost feel as if I were a cold and sceptical blasphemer. But my own reason rebukes my feelings, and tells me that the numerous lines of light traceable in their poetry and poeticized philosophy, are too straggling and indefinite to discover much beside themselves. They are such as sun-beams might be, when separated from the sun. They cross and intermingle with each other, shedding the beauty of light and warmth on many a secret recess and gloomy corner of our microcosm; but they reveal only corners; they show us only one thing at a time; they give us no connected view; and we can form therefrom no full

system, whether of thought or of action. If they were, as their admirers assert, the great apostles of a new and more humanized poetic gospel, as warm as love and wide as the world, why did they not give it a clear and tangible shape; why not digest it in a creed of comprehensive and comprehensible meaning, needing no commentary but the commentary of the heart? But in their pregnant hints' and oracular pointings at lonely truths, long buried in night, but of universal application and renovating power, the intellect is so often bewildered in the search for a mystic je ne sais quoi,' that the heart has frequently no time to be affected. The springing feelings struggle with the puzzled judgment, and the affections are afraid to sympathize at all, lest they should sympathize with the sublime of nonsense. They had the power of mind and the compass of language, to weave a perfect and intelligible system, if they had any, and where they hardly made themselves comprehended by others, I infer that they scarce understood themselves. If they had not the ability to unite the scattered pillars and architraves in a finished temple, how could they expect their readers to possess and exercise that disposing and synthetic skill? These disjointed fragments can scarce excite any other emotion than one mingled of admiration, bewilderment, and regret. And, furthermore, how could a new system, even if a true one, ever become either popular or useful, if the mastery of it requires such long and intense application, and if, to borrow Wordsworth's own beautiful words in his lines on a poet :

'AND you must know it, ere to you

It will seem worthy of your love?'

To conclude for the present. At the risk of being thought a soul born in the dark ages, and transmitted, modo Pythagorico, into a body of the nineteenth century, I must say that, so far as the Lake School started a new system of poetico-social philosophy, or philosophico-social poetry, I believe its depth consisted in the profundity of unfathomable nonsense. That men of their beauty and capacity of mind could meditate for years on exalted subjects, without leaving in their writings numerous traces of originality and power, would be impossible. And we do find many new things said in a new manner; many passages which speak directly and earnestly to every mind and every heart. But, whatever they or their exclusive worshippers may have thought, those passages were the offspring of that same high philosophy, which has prompted the great writers of every age. They were constructed by the old and eternal principles of art: they appeal to the old and unchangeable feelings of our nature; and they have been and will be admired like all other writings which unite thought with passion, enoble harmony by reason, and impregnate eloquence with truth. More

THE DOOM OF MALAGA.

BY MARY GARDINER.

"T WAS the Christian monarch's triumph day,
And thousands thronged his pageant way;
Bright shields were flashing to the light,
And burnished spears on every height
Reflected back the silvery gleam

Of breaking wave and glancing stream.
The fiery steeds in war array,
And restless as the ocean spray,
Bore gallant knight and cavalier

From fields that glowed with crimson near:
The cymbal's tone and trumpet's blast
Pealed as the steel-clad warriors past;
And the wild clarion's fitful swell
Rose on the air, where erst the zell *
And Moorish horn rung loud and free,
O'er mount and lake, o'er vale and sea.
On, on they swept, the red cross gleamed,
And waving plume and banner streamed;
Till pausing in triumphal state
Beneath the captive city's gate,
They planted on the tower-capped wall
The sacred emblem of its fall.

'Room for the conqueror! room!'

And crowds went forth to hear their doom.
The faltering step of age was there,

The furrowed brow and silver hair;
And childhood's light and joyous form,
That heeded not the coming storm.
Stern warriors moved in silence by,
With flushing cheek and downcast eye;
And youths and maidens swept along,
Amid that crowd a graceful throng:
There many a weeping mother prest
Her infant closer to her breast,
And ever on the troubled air
Went up the tones of wild despair,
As mournful as the sear leaf's sigh,

When autumn dirges fill the sky.

'Oh, wo! for our country; wo, wo to the day
When the Spaniard came down in his battle array:
The red hoof of war followed fast on his track,
Our armies were driven like dry leaves back;
Our children must rest in the captive's grave,
And the sword of the despot hang over our brave.

'Wo! wo! for our city, the valiant and free;
What now is thy strength and thy glory to thee?
The spoiler has cast o'er thy ramparts a chain,
And thy warriors sleep on the wide trampled plain.
Alas! for thy greatness, thy beauty and fame!
The home of our fathers will live but in name.'

They reached the Alcazaba's steep,

Those throngs on throngs in phalanx deep;

And paused to hear the fiat dread,

Less like the living than the dead,

So stamped each pallid cheek and eye

With the signet seal of misery.

*AN instrument of martial music among the Moors.