The scenery of the Frith of Forth was in full view from the house; the time was summer, and the weather peculiarly balmy and beautiful. I was a young, shrinking, bashful creature: my poems were out but a few days; and it was neck or nothing with me, whether I should go down to the gulf of utter neglect or not; although, with all my bashfulness, I had then a much better opinion of myself and my powers than I have at this moment. Your dear father praised my work, and quoted the lines

'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,' &c.,

looking at the very hills that had suggested the thought! Well, I thought to myself (for, as I have said, I was at that time enormously vain), there is some taste in this world, and I shall get on in it; and my heart is warmed to the name of Kemble ever since. We are, alas! very selfish; and there was a vivid picture of that little party in my mind, when I went with an ardent heart to join in the thunders of applause that welcomed your gifted relative, who is to be the queen of our stage." It is hardly necessary to add that the lady to whom he referred was Miss Fanny Kemble.

The original manuscript of The Pleasures of Hope is in existence, in good preservation, in the autograph of the poet. It formerly belonged to the late Dr. Murray, Professor of Oriental Languages, and was at the time of Campbell's death in the possession of Mr. Patrick Maxwell, a literary gentleman of Edinburgh. The MS. consists of about forty or fifty paragraphs, extending over some twenty pages, and containing above four hundred lines. At the end of the poem is The Irish Harper's Lament for his Dog, word for word as it is now printed under the title of The Harper.

From this manuscript the following extract, shortly after the poet's death, was inserted in the Edinburgh Advertiser, with Mr. Maxwell's permission, as a literary curiosity:

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION TO THE " PLEASURES OF HOPE."
Seven lingering moons have crossed the starry line
Since Beauty's form or Nature's face divine
Had power the sombre of my soul to turn, -
Had power to wake my strings and bid them burn.
The charm dissolves! What Genius bade me go

To search the unfathomed mine of human woe

The wrongs of man to man, of elime to clime,
Since Nature yoked the fiery steeds of Time ;-
The tales of death since cold on Eden's plain
The beauteous mother clasped her Abel slain;
Ambitious guilt -- since Carthage wept her doom;
The Patriot's fate since Brutus fell with Rome ?
The charm dissolves! My kindling fancy dreams
Of brighter forms inspired by gentler themes;
Joy and her rosy flowers attract my view,
And Mirth can please, or Music charm anew;
And Hope, the harbinger of golden hours,
The light of life, the fire of Fancy's powers,
Returns again I lift my trembling gaze,
And bless the smiling guest of other days.

So when the Northern in the lonely gloom,
Where Hecla's fires the Polar night illume,
Hails the glad summer to his Lulean shores,
And, bowed to earth, his circling suns adores.

So when Cimmerian darkness wakes the dead,
And hideous Nightmare haunts the curtained bed,
And scowls her wild eye on the maddening brain,
What speechless horrors thrill the slumbering swain,
When shapeless fiends inhale his tortured breath,
Immure him living in the vaults of death;
Or lead him lonely through the charnelled aisles,
The roaring floods, the dark and swampy vales!
When rocked by winds he wanders on the deep,
Climbs the tall spire, or scales the beetling steep,

His life-blood freezing to the central urn,
No voice can call for aid, no limb can turn,
Till eastern shoot the harbinger of day,
And Night and all her spectres fade away!

If then some wandering huntsman of the morn
Wind from the hill his murmuring bugle horn,
The shrill sweet music wakes the slumberer's ear,
And melts his blood, and bursts the bands of fear;
The vision fades - the shepherd lifts his eye,
And views the lark that carols to the sky.

Many of the passages in the original draft are the same as they stand in the printed poem; others have been retouched, and others entirely suppressed. The whole poem, indeed, was much amplified

and altered; and the poet was aided in the process of revision by the severe and judicious criticism of Dr. Anderson, to whom he was indebted for many kind offices, which he recognized by dedicating to him the first volume of his poems.

"The rapture of April, 1799," says a writer in the Quarterly Review, "on the first appearance of The Pleasures of Hope, was very natural. Burns had lately died. Cowper was sunk in hopeless insanity, soon to be released. Their vivid examples had not sufficed to abolish the drowsy prestige of Hayley. Of the great constellation that has since illuminated us, but few of the more potent stars had ascended above the horizon. Crabbe, under a domestic sorrow of which Campbell was destined to participate, had fallen into a dejected inactivity, and was all but forgotten. Rogers had some years earlier published The Pleasures of Memory, to which The Pleasures of Hope owed more than the suggestion of a title; but that genial effusion only promised the consummate graces since displayed, though too parsimoniously, by its now venerable author. Wordsworth and Coleridge had sent forth Lyrical Ballads, some of them exquisitely beautiful, and in the aggregate most deeply influential; but these were as yet, and for a long while after, appreciated only within a narrow circle; no one misunderstood and undervalued them more than did Campbell himself. Southey had produced nothing that survives in much vitality. Moore was at college, or at Anacreon. Byron had not yet lain dreaming under the elm of Harrow, nor Wilson listened to the sweet bells of Magdalen tower.' The moment was fortunate, and the applause more creditable to the public than advantageous (in the upshot) to the new poet."

THE sale of his poem had improved Campbell's finances; and with a little money in his pocket he was always buoyant and sanguine. He determined to travel, Goldsmith fashion, on the continent. His

career had been decided. It was to be that of a man of letters; and in this view it was important for him to become acquainted with the literature and literary men of Germany. On his route he was to be joined by his friend Richardson, and together they were to produce a volume of travels, that was to go far towards paying their expenses. Then he was engaged on a poem styled The Queen of the North, in which he was to celebrate the glories and independence of Scotland. Of this poem he had already composed several fragments, and had contracted for its illustration with Mr. Williams, whom he describes as an artist of first-rate genius in his profession of a landscape painter. Fortunately, too, he had formed a connection, through some of his whig friends, with Perry, the liberal and gentlemanly editor of the Morning Chronicle, of London, for whose columns he was employed as a correspondent. The projected poem and the volume of travels both failed, and his only substantial resources in Germany proved to be Perry and The Pleasures of Hope.

In June, 1800, in company with his brother Daniel, who intended to establish himself on the continent as a manufacturer, the young poet embarked at Leith for Hamburg. His prudence had overcome his anxiety to visit London and its celebrities; and he consoled himself for losing the sight of Godwin, Mackintosh, Mrs. Siddons and his friend Thomson, by the reflection that he should see Schiller and Goethe, the banks of the Rhine and the mistress of Werter.

"Besides, upon reflection," as he records himself, in a letter of that period," I see the propriety of making my first appearance in London to the best advantage. At present I am a raw Scotch lad, and, in a London company of wits and geniuses, would make but a dull figure with my northern brogue and braw Scotch boos.' I am not satisfied with my quantum of literature, but intend to write a few more books before I make my débût in London. In reality, my fixed intention, on returning from Germany, is to set up a course of lectures upon the Belles Lettres. I had some thoughts of lecturing in Edinburgh, but cannot think of remaining any longer in one place.

"If London should not offer encouragement, I mean to try Dublin. I think this a respectable profession, as the showman of the bear and monkey said, when he gave his name to the commissioners of the income tax, as an itinerant lecturer on Natural History."

Campbell met a kind reception among the British residents at

Hamburg, where he resided nine or ten weeks to acquire some knowledge of the language and country, before proceeding to the interior. "I have seen the great Klopstock," he wrote, soon after his arrival, to John Richardson," and given him a copy of the third edition;" and the "mild, civil old man "returned the compliment by letters of introduction to his friends in other parts of Germany. With Klopstock he conversed only in Latin, a language which enabled him to make his way very well with the French and Germans, and still better when he fell in with the Hungarians.

-

From Hamburg he proceeded to Ratisbon, on the Danube, - the ancient capital of Bavaria, - where he arrived three days before it was taken by the French. The scenery of his route he describes in a letter to Dr. Anderson, in prose, which even his best poetry hardly surpasses. The incidents of war, which he witnessed, he paints with equal brilliancy and effect; and if any one of his contemporaries has achieved anything better in the same style, it was surely not at the age of two and twenty, or in a sketch designed only for the eye of private friendship. He writes, on the 10th of August, 1800, from Ratisbon:

"What are the expectations of politicians now with regard to peace? Everything here is whisper, surmise, and suspense. If war breaks out, the bridge over the Danube is expected to be blown up! You may guess what a devil of a splutter twenty-four large arches will make,-flying miles high in the air, and coming down like falling planets to crush the town! Joking apart, - and indeed the event will be no joke, — Ratisbon will be shivered to atoms; and, as no premonition is expected, the inhabitants may be buried under the ruins. But, in spite of all conjectures to the contrary, I think peace is not far off.

"My journey to Ratisbon was tedious, but not unpleasant. The general constituents of German scenery are corn-fields, many leagues in extent, and dark tracts of forest equally extensive. Of this the eye soon becomes tired; but in a few favored spots there is such an union of wildness, variety, richness and beauty, as cannot be looked upon without lively emotions of pleasure and surprise. We entered the valley of Heitsch, on the frontier of Bavaria, late in the evening, after the sun had set behind the hills of Saxony. A winding road through a long woody plain leads to this retreat. It