such a poem could be founded upon the event. The title, Fragments, implies also a renunciation of all claim to whatever merit may arise from the artifices of connection and transition. This will be considered as matter of very serious reproach, by those who adopt the maxim of French criticism, that difficulty conquered is the chief triumph of talent-who, to be consistent with themselves, ought to consider the most minute expedient of art as superior to the noblest exertions of genius.

To examine the general question of epic machinery, on an occasion like the present, would be impertinent. It is natural that the Fragments should give a specimen of the marvellous as well as of the other constituents of epic fiction. We may however observe, that it is neither the intention nor the tendency of poetical machinery, to supersede second causes-to fetter the will-and to make human creatures appear as the mere instruments of Destiny. It is introduced, to satisfy that insatiable demand for a nature more exalted than that which we know by experience-which creates all poetry-and which is most active in its highest species, and in its most perfect productions. It is not to account for the thoughts and feelings, that the superhuman agents are brought down upon earth. It is rather for the contrary purpose, of lifting them into a mysterious dignity beyond the cognizance of reason. There is a material difference between the acts which superior beings perform and the sentiments which they inspire. It is true, that when a God fights against men, there can be no uncertainty or anxiety, and consequently no interest, about the event,—unless indeed in the rude theology of Homer, where Minerva may animate the Greeks, while Mars excites the Trojans. But it is quite otherwise with these divine persons inspiring passion, or represented as agents in the great phenomena of nature. Venus and Mars inspire love or valour. They give a noble origin and a dignified character to these sentiments. But the sentiments themselves act according to the laws of our nature; and their celestial source has no tendency to impair their power over human sympathy. No event, which has not too much modern vulgarity to be susceptible of alliance with poetry, can be incapable of being ennobled by that eminently poetical art which ascribes it either to the supreme will, or to the agency of beings who are greater than human. The wisdom of Columbus is neither less venerable, nor less his own, because it is supposed to flow more directly than that of other wise men, from the inspiration of Heaven. The mutiny of his seamen is not less interesting or formidable, because the poet traces it to the suggestion of those malignant spirits, in whom the imagination, independent of all theological doctrines, is naturally prone to personify and embody the causes of evil.

Unless, indeed, the marvellous be a part of the popular creed at the period of the action, the reader of a subsequent age will refuse to sympathise with it. His poetical faith is founded in sympathy with the poetical personages. What they believed during their lives, he suffers to enter his imagination during the moment of enthusiasm in which he adopts their feelings. Still more objectionable is a marvellous, neither believed by the reader nor by the hero;-like a great part of the machinery of the Henriade and the Lusiad, which indeed is not only absolutely ineffective, but rather disennobles heroic fiction, by association with light and frivolous ideas. Allegorical persons (if the expression be allowed) are only in the way to become agents. The abstraction has received a faint outline of form but it has not yet acquired those individual marks,

and characteristic peculiarities, which render it a really existing being. Beauty and love gradually form themselves into Venus and Cupid. To employ them in the intermediate stage through which they must pass in the course of their tranformation from abstractions into deities, is an inartificial and uninteresting expedient. On the other hand, the more sublime parts of our own religion, and more especially those which are common to all religion, are too awful and too philosophical for poetical effect. If we except Paradise Lost, where all is supernatural, and where the ancestors of the human race are not strictly human beings, it must be owned that no successful attempt has been made to ally a human action with the sublimer principles of the Christian theology. Some opinions, which may perhaps, without irreverence, be said to be rather appendages to the Christian system, than essential parts of it, are in that sort of intertermediate state which fits them for the purposes of poetry;-sufficiently exalted to ennoble those human actions with which they are blendedand not so exactly defined, nor so deeply revered, as to be inconsistent with the liberty of imagination. The guardian angels, in the project of Dryden, had the inconvenience of having never taken any deep root in popular belief. The agency of evil spirits, firmly believed in the age of Columbus, seems to afford the only species of machinery which can be introduced into his voyage. With the truth of facts poetry can have no concern; but the truth of manners is necessary to its persons—and its marvellous must be such as these persons believed. If the minute investigations of the notes to this poem had related to historical details, they would have been insignificant; but they are intended to justify the human and the supernatural parts of it, by an appeal to the manners and to the opinions of the age.

Having premised these general observations, it is now only necessary to quote some of these fragments, that the reader, if he adopt the above principles, may have the means of applying them to this poem.

The proposition-The first appearance of the ships, and the tradewindin the first canto, appear to us to be passages which, in beauty of conception and execution, it is not easy to equal.

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Say who first pass'd the portals of the West,
And the great Secret of the Deep possess'd;
Who first the standard of his Faith unfurl'd
On the dread confines of an unknown World;
Sung ere his coming-and by Heaven design'd
To lift the veil that cover'd half mankind!

'Twas night. The Moon o'er the wide wave disclosed
Her awful face; and Nature's self reposed;

When, slowly rising in the azure sky,

Three white sails shone-but to no mortal eye,—

Entering a boundless sea. In slumber cast,

The very ship-boy, on the dizzy mast,

Half breathed his orisons! Alone unchanged,

Calmly, beneath, the great Commander ranged,

Thoughtful, not sad. Thy will be done!' he cried!.

He spoke, and, at his call, a mighty Wind,

Not like the fitful blast, with fury blind,
But deep, majestic, in its destined course,
Rush'd with unerring, unrelenting force,

From the bright East. Tides duly ebb'd and flow'd;

Stars rose and set; and new horizons glow'd:
Yet still it blew! As with primeval sway,
Still did its ample spirit, night and day,
Move on the waters!"

In the following verses a grand picture is exhibited with the simplicity which becomes it :

"Yet who but He undaunted could explore

A world of waves-a sea without a shore,
Trackless, and vast, and wild, as that reveal'd
When round the Ark the birds of tempest wheel'd;
When all was still in the destroying hour-

No trace of man! no vestige of his power!" *

The character of Columbus can scarcely be presented in a light more venerable than in the opening lines of the fifth Canto:

"War and the Great in War let others sing,
Havoc and spoil, and tears and triumphing;
The morning-march that flashes to the sun,
The feast of vultures when the day is done:
And the strange tale of many slain for one!
I sing a Man, amidst his sufferings here,
Who watch'd and served in humbleness and fear;
Gentle to others, to himself severe.

....

Still unsubdued by Danger's varying form,
Still, as unconscious of the coming storm,
He look'd elate! His beard, his mien sublime,
Shadow'd by Age-by Age before the time,
From many a sorrow borne in many a clime,
Moved every heart.""

The beauty of the verses which describe the first sight of the New World, has been universally acknowledged. But they have been somewhat hastily supposed to represent the same event as occurring at different times -in the evening, and at midnight. It is obvious, however, that the repugnance is only in the imagination of the critic. Evening is described as the hour of vespers; and midnight, as the moment when a light is discovered on the unknown shore. Nothing is more natural, than that the evening which was to precede so important a night, should be painted by the poet :

"Twice in the zenith blazed the orb of light;

No shade, all sun, insufferably bright!
Then the long line found rest-in coral groves
Silent and dark, where the sea-lion roves :-
And all on deck, kindling to life again,
Sent forth their anxious spirits o'er the main.

But whence, as wafted from Elysium, whence
These perfumes, strangers to the raptured sense?
These boughs of gold, and fruits of heavenly hue,
Tinging with vermeil light the billows blue?
And say, oh say, (how blest the eye that spied,
The hand that snatch'd it sparkling in the tide)
Whose cunning carved this vegetable bowl,
Symbol of social rites, and intercourse of soul?

Such to their grateful ear the gush of springs,
Who course the ostrich, as away she wings;

By a coincidence which must have been accidental, the same original conception presented itself to a writer of the first order of genius. "Cette superbe mer, sur laquelle l'homme jamais ne peut imprimer sa trace. Si les vaisseaux sillonnent un moment les ondes, la vague vient effacef cette légère marque de servitude, et la mer reparait telle qu'elle fut au premier jour de sa création " -Corinne, i. 30.

In another passage of the same celebrated work is a thought which, by a coincidence equally casual, is the basis of one of the noblest stanzas of English lyric poetry. "Et n'est-ce pas en effet l'air natal pour un Anglais qu'un vaisseau au milieu de la mer ?"-Corinne, ii. 299.

Britannia needs no bulwark,

No towers along the steep;

Her march is on the mountain wave,

Her home is on the deep.-Campbell's Mar. of Engl.

Sons of the desert! who delight to dwell
'Mid kneeling camels round the sacred well.
The sails were furl'd: with many a melting close;
Solemn and slow the evening anthem rose,
Rose to the Virgin. 'Twas the hour of day,
When setting suns o'er summer seas display
A path of glory, opening in the west
To golden climes, and islands of the blest;
And human voices, on the silent air,
Went o'er the waves in songs of gladness there!
Chosen of Men! 'twas thine, at noon of night,
First from the prow to hail the glimmering light.
PEDRO RODRIGO! there, methought, it shone!
There in the west! and now, alas, 'tis gone!-
"Twas all a dream! we gaze and gaze in vain!
-But mark and speak not, there it comes again!
It moves!-what form unseen, what being there
With torch-like lustre fires the murky air?
His instincts, passions, say, how like our own?
Oh! when will day reveal a world unknown?'

The whole vision which concludes the poem, is eminently beautiful. But it is needless to prolong our extracts from a volume, which must long ago have been in the hands of every reader of this Review. The extracts

already given will show, that it always has consummate elegance, and often unaffected grandeur. The author is not one of those poets who is flat for a hundred lines, in order to heighten the apparent elevation of one more fortunate verse. He does not conduct his readers over a desert, to betray them into the temper in which they bestow the charms of Paradise on a few trees and a fountain in a green spot.

Perhaps there is no volume in our language of which it can be so truly said, as of the present, that it is equally exempt from the frailties of negligence and the vices of affectation. The exquisite polish of style is indeed more admired by the artist than by the people. The gentle and elegant pleasure which it imparts, can only be felt by a calm reason, an exercised taste, and a mind free from turbulent passions. But these beauties of execution can exist only in combination with much of the primary beauties of thought and feeling. Without a considerable portion of them, the works of the greatest genius must perish; and poets of the first rank 'depend on them for no small part of the perpetuity of their fame. They are permanent beauties. In poetry, though not in eloquence, it is less to rouse the passions of a moment, than to satisfy the taste of all ages.

In estimating the poetical rank of Mr. Rogers, it must not be forgotten that popularity never can arise from elegance alone. The vices of a poem may render it popular; and virtues of a faint character may be sufficient to preserve a languishing and cold reputation. But to be both popular poets and classical writers, is the rare lot of those few who are released from all solicitude about their literary fame. It often happens to successful writers, that the lustre of their first productions throws a temporary cloud over some of those which follow. Of all literary misfortunes, this is the most easily endured, and the most speedily repaired. It is generally no more than a momentary illusion produced by disappointed admiration, which expected more from the talents of the admired writer than any talents could perform.

Mr. Rogers has long passed that period of probation, during which it may be excusable to feel some painful solicitude about the reception of every new work. Whatever may be the rank assigned hereafter to his writings, when

VOL. I.

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compared to each other, the writer has most certainly taken his place among the classical poets of his country.*

THE BEAUTIES OF SHAKSPEARE.+

Many persons are very sensible of the effect of fine poetry on their feelings, who do not well know how to refer these feelings to their causes; and it is always a delightful thing to be made to see clearly the sources from which our delight has proceeded-and to trace back the mingled stream that has flowed upon our hearts, to the remoter fountains from which it has been gathered; and when this is done with warmth as well as precision, and embodied in an eloquent description of the beauty which is explained, it forms one of the most attractive, and not the least instructive, of literary exercises. In all works of merit, however, and especially in all works of original genius, there are a thousand retiring and less obtrusive graces, which escape hasty and superficial observers, and only give out their beauties to fond and patient contemplation a thousand slight and harmonising touches, the merit and the effect of which are equally imperceptible to vulgar eyes; and a thousand indications of the continual presence of that poetical spirit, which can only be recognised by those who are in some measure under its influence, and have prepared themselves to receive it, by worshipping meekly at the shrines which it inhabits.

In the exposition of these is room enough for originality, and more room than Mr. Hazlitt has yet filled. In many points, however, he has acquitted himself excellently;-partly in the developement of the principal characters with which Shakspeare has peopled the fancies of all English readers but principally, we think, in the delicate sensibility with which he has traced, and the natural eloquence with which he has pointed out their familiarity with beautiful forms and images that eternal recurrence to what is sweet or majestic in the simple aspects of nature that indestructible love of flowers and odours, and dews and clear waters and soft airs and sounds, and bright skies, and woodland solitudes, and moonlight bowers, which are the material elements of poetry-and that fine sense of their undefinable relation to mental emotion, which is its essence and vivifying soul—and which, in the midst of Shakspeare's most busy and atrocious scenes, falls like gleams of sunshine on rocks and ruins contrasting with all that is rugged and repulsive, and reminding us of the existence of purer and brighter elements which he alone has poured out from the richness of his own mind, without effort or restraint, and contrived to intermingle with the play of all the passions and the vulgar course of this world's affairs, without deserting for an instant the proper business of the scene, or appearing to pause or digress from love of ornament or need of repose; he alone. who, when the object requires it, is always keen and worldly and practical --and who yet, without changing his hand, or stopping his course, scatters around him, as he goes, all sounds and shapes of sweetness and conjures up landscapes of immortal fragrance and freshness, and peoples them with spirits of glorious aspect and attractive grace and is a thousand times more

--

* See a review of Rogers's poem of Human Life, Vol. xxxi. p. 325.

+ Characters of Shakspeare's Plays. By William Hazlitt. Vol. xxviii. p. 472. August, 1817.