STANZAS ON THE THREATENED INVASION, 1803.
Our bosoms we'll bare for the glorious strife,
And our oath is recorded on high,

To prevail in the cause that is dearer than life,
Or crush'd in its ruin to die!

Then rise, fellow-freemen, and stretch the right hand,
And swear to prevail in your dear native land!
"Tis the home we hold sacred is laid to our trust-
God bless the green isle of the brave!

Should a conqueror tread on our forefathers' dust,
It would rouse the old dead from their grave!
Then rise, fellow-freemen, and stretch the right hand,
And swear to prevail in your dear native land!

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ON REVISITING A SCOTTISH RIVER.

And call they this improvement? to have changed
My native CLYDE, thy once romantic shore,
Where nature's face is banish'd and estranged,
And Heaven reflected in thy wave no more:
Whose banks, that sweeten'd May-day's breath before,
Lie sere and leafless now in summer's beam,

With sooty exhalations cover'd o'er;

And for the daisied green-sward, down thy stream
Unsightly brick-lanes smoke, and clanking engines gleam.
Speak not to me of swarms the scene sustains;

One heart free tasting Nature's breath and bloom

Is worth a thousand slaves to Mammon's gains.
But whither goes that wealth, and gladd'ning whom?
See, left but life enough, and breathing-room

The hunger and the hope of life to feel,

Yon pale Mechanic bending o'er his loom,
And Childhood's self, as at Ixion's wheel,

From morn till midnight task'd to earn its little meal.
Is this improvement? where the human breed
Degenerates as they swarm and overflow,

Till Toil grows cheaper than the trodden weed,
And man competes with man, like foe with foe,
Till Death, that thins them, scarce seems public wo?
Improvement! Smiles it in the poor man's eyes,
Or blooms it on the cheek of Labor? No-

To gorge a few with Trade's precarious prize,
We banish rural life, and breathe unwholesome skies.

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ROGERS and CAMPBELL are thus described by Hazlitt: Rogers is a very lady-like poet. He is an elegant, but a feeble writer. He wraps up obvious thoughts in a glittering cover of fine words; is studiously inverted and scrupu

lously far-fetched; and his verses are poetry, chiefly because no particle, line, or syllable of them reads like prose. You can not see the thought for the ambiguity of the language, the figure for the finery, the picture for the varnish.

Campbell's Pleasures of Hope is of the same school, in which a painful attention is paid to the expression, in proportion as there is little to express, and the decomposition of prose is substituted for the composition of poetry. He too often maims and mangles his ideas before they are full formed, to form them to the Procrustes' bed of criticism; or strangles his intellectual offspring in the birth, lest they should come to an untimely end in the Edinburgh Review. No writer who thinks habitually of the critics, either to tremble at their censures or set them at defiance, can write well. In his Gertrude, the structure of the fable is too mechanical. The story is cut into the form of a parallelogram.

SECTION XV.

MARK AKENSIDE (1721-1770).

His "Pleasures of the Imagination" is deservedly celebrated. The following is an extract:

Incline to different objects: one pursues
The vast alone, the wonderful, the wild;
Another sighs for harmony, and grace,

And gentlest beauty. Hence, when lightning fires
The arch of heaven, and thunders rock the ground,
When furious whirlwinds rend the howling air,

And ocean, groaning from his lowest bed,
Heaves his tempestuous billows to the sky;
Amid the mighty uproar, while below
The nations tremble, Shakspeare looks abroad
From some high cliff, superíor, and enjoys
The elemental war; but Waller longs,
All on the margin of some flowery stream,
To spread his careless limbs, amid the cool
Of plantain shades, and to the listening deer
The tale of slighted vows, and love's disdain
Resound soft-warbling all the livelong day.

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Such and so various are the tastes of men!

OH BLESS'D OF HEAVEN! whom not the languid songs

Of Luxury, the Siren; not the bribes

Of sordid Wealth, nor all the gaudy spoils

Of pageant Honor, can seduce to leave

X

Those ever-blooming sweets, which from the store
Of Nature fair Imagination culls

To charm the enliven'd soul!"

is another author about whom a great diversity of opinion exists. He is thought to stand at the head of what has been called the Lake School of poetry, in respect to feeling, fancy, and sublimity. His original powers of imagination and expression are considered by some to be among the highest that have been known in the present age; but his undue devotion to metaphysics and German literature has rendered much of his poetry turgid in diction, and incomprehensible to all but those initiated into his abstruse views. Many of his numerous prose compositions are equally obscure. What he says himself of one of his poems, will be considered by most intelligent readers as applicable to large portions of not a few of his other writings :

"Your poem must eternal be-
Dear, sir, it can not fail,
For 'tis incomprehensible,

And without head or tail."

Professor Frost seems to have not misrepresented Mr. C. in the sketch that follows:

"The chief fault of Coleridge's poetry lies in the style, which has been justly objected to on account of its obscurity, general turgidness of diction, and a profusion of newcoined double epithets. With regard to its obscurity he says, in the preface to a late edition of his poems, that where he appears unintelligible, 'the deficiency is in the reader.' This is nothing more nor less than to suppose his readers endowed with the powers of divination; for we defy any one who is not in the confidence of the author upon this subject to solve the riddle which is appended as a conclusion to Christabel. He might as well attribute a deficiency of capacity to a beholder of his countenance who should fail, in its workings, to discover the exact emotions of his mind; for Mr. Coleridge has afforded no clearer clew to the generality of his poetical arcana.”

The notoriety which Coleridge has attained will justify the author in extending this notice, by quoting from the splendid criticism of Professor Wilson, who seems to have been a great admirer of Coleridge, notwithstanding his obscurities. Indeed, he seems to represent these as not detracting from the glory of his idol :

"The sun, you know, does not always show his orb even in the daytime; and people are often ignorant of his place in the firmament. But he keeps shining away at his leisure, as you would know were he to suffer eclipse. Perhaps he-the sun-is at no other time a more delightful luminary than when he is pleased to dispense his influence through a general haze or mist-softening all the day till meridian is almost like the afternoon, and the grove anticipating gloaming (gloom), bursts into dance and minstrelsy' ere the god go down into the sea. Clouds, too, become him wellwhether thin, and fleecy, and braided, or piled up all round about him, castle-wise and cathedral fashion, to say nothing of temples and other metropolitan structures; nor is it reasonable to find fault with him, when, as naked as the hour he was born, 'he flames on the forehead of the morning sky.' The grandeur, too, of his appearance on setting has become quite proverbial. Now in all this he resembles Coleridge. It is easy to talk-not very difficult to speechify-hard to speak; but to discourse' is a gift rarely bestowed by Heaven on mortal man. Coleridge has it in perfection. While he is discoursing, the world loses all its commonplaces, and you and your wife imagine yourselves Adam and Eve listening to the affable archangel Raphael in the garden of Eden. You would no more dream of wishing him to be mute for a while, than you would a river that 'imposes silence with a stilly sound.' Whether you understand two consecutive sentences we shall not stop too curiously to inquire; but you do something better, you feel the whole just like any other divine music; and 'tis your own fault if you do not

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'A wiser and a better man arise to-morrow's morn.' "Nor are we now using any exaggeration; for if you will but think how unutterably dull are all the ordinary sayings and doings of this life, spent as it is with ordinary people, you may imagine how, in sweet delirium, you may be robbed of yourself by a seraphic tongue that has fed, since first it

lisped, on 'honey dews,' and by lips that have 'breathed the air of Paradise,' and learned a seraphic language, which, all the while that it is English, is as grand as Greek, and as soft as Italian. We only know this, that Coleridge is the alchemist that in his crucible melts down hours to moments-and lo! diamonds sprinkled on a plate of gold."

"What a world would this be were all its inhabitants to fiddle like Paganini, discourse like Coleridge, and do every thing else in a style of equal perfection? But, pray, how does the man write poetry with a pen upon paper, who thus is perpetually pouring it from his inspired lips? Read the Ancient Mariner, the Nightingale, and Genevieve. In the first, you shudder at the superstition of the sea; in the second, you slumber in the melodies of the woods; in the third, earth is like heaven."

The following EPIGRAMS are not difficult to be understood and appreciated; they display genuine wit: "There comes from Avaro's grave

A deadly stench-why, sure, they have
Immured his soul within his grave!"

"Sly Beelzebub took all occasions
To try Job's constancy and patience.
He took his honor, took his health;
He took his children, took his wealth
His servants, oxen, horses, cows,

But cunning Satan did not take his spouse.

"But Heaven, that brings out good from evil,
And loves to disappoint the devil,

Had predetermined to restore

Twofold all he had before;

His servants, horses, oxen, cows

Short-sighted devil, not to take his spouse!"

"Last Monday all the papers said,

That Mr.

was dead;

Why, then, what said the city?

The tenth part sadly shook their heads,
And shaking, sigh'd, and sighing, said,

'Pity, indeed, 'tis pity!'

"But when the said report was found
A rumor wholly without ground,
Why, then, what said the city?
The other nine parts shook their heads,
Repeating what the tenth had said-
Pity, indeed, 'tis pity!""