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That burst unheeded from the beating breast;
The teazing restlessness that neither books,
Nor flowers that breathe perfumes, nor music's voice,
Can lull to sleep: the oft-recurring image
Of that dear form, still floating in our view,,
That the veil'd eyelids cannot shut from sight:-
When he is present-then the anxious fears
Lest pleased attention should betray itself,
Or fearful consciousness should draw a blush
From maiden modesty, and give it pain :-
All these are signs that mark out my disease,
The bitter longings of concealed love,

That gains more strength by preying on itself.

The best criterion by which we could form a judgment of the merits of Clitheroe's tragedies, would be to compare these extracts with Mr. Lamb's specimens of the dramatic writers contemporary with Shakspeare. I am much mistaken if there be any passages among them all to be compared in poetic beauty to those which I have just quoted; with the exception indeed of those exquisitely beautiful passages from Ford, which, compared with the general level of the tragedies from which they are extracted, may be said to shine like jewels in an Ethiop's ear.

In the tragedy of Crichton, the author has somewhat deviated from strict historic truth, in giving to the Duke of Mantua one daughter instead of two, neither of whom was called Ippolita ; and a second son, on whom he has bestowed the name of Lo

renzo.

I purpose shortly to send you extracts from each of the other five tragedies; and, what may perhaps be still more curious, from the author's own memoirs.

W. W.

SONNET TO THE NIGHTINGALE.

Oh, unseen haunter of the greenwood bowers,
Thy voice is like the last voice of the spring,
Breathing of love fulfill'd, and blossoming,
Of fragrance, and blue skies, and vanish'd showers.
Thou chauntest over the sweet births of flowers,
Like nurse or patient mother, who doth sing
O'er cradled child her song unwearying,
Ever the sweetest thro' the evening hours.
Oh! solitary bird, albeit not sad,

Thy voice is less allied to joy than sorrow;
Less prophet than remembrancer, thy scope
Embraceth yesterday but ne'er to-morrow;
Yet, tho' pale Memory be seldom glad,
A truer, fonder friend is she than Hope.

B.

LECTURES ON POETRY, BY T. CAMPBELL.

Continued from Page 15.

LECTURE 1. PART 2.

In concluding the former part of this Lecture, I remarked, that the term Poetry, in its extensive and philosophical meaning, applies to prose fictions, when they delight the imagination. But I endeavoured to discriminate the delight of the imagination, from that mere curiosity in the stir of existence, the gratification of which is the object of the great mass of novels. Fancied events and characters are not poetry, unless they present conceptions of Nature heightened above common-place, skilfully selected and originally combined. It is true, that fiction makes an approach to poetry, the moment that it represents scenes and incidents, and characters, with a story or drama possessing harmony of design; but the approach will be very distant, if a spirit be not also infused into the imitation of life, that shall make it seem like a magic vision of the original. The imagination can not be said to be exercised, unless we are transported beyond reality.

I have also said, that Comedy, though it often conveniently dispenses with verse, is allied to poetry in its nature. There is no doubt that our comic emotions are less eminently poetical than those of our serious sensibility, and that the sense of ridicule rather humbles, than flatters, the pride of humanity. But ridicule is nevertheless a boldly fanciful power, and one that transports us out of all mediocrity of sensation. Nor is it unconnected with our perceptions of moral truth. The exaggerating medium through which it exhibits human follies, may not be compared, indeed, to the magnifying telescope, that makes us acquainted with the glories of heaven, but to the microscope, that amuses us with the plumage and panoply of the half-visible tribes of creation. It detects all the fluttering vanities in "that little busy world, the heart of man." It possesses and carries us away in a torrent of gay enthusiasm, A total insensibility to the comic, though not a proof, is rather a suspicious symptom of the other imaginative faculties being obtuse. And there have been more absurd distinctions made by theorists, than that of Lucian's philosopher, when he discriminates man from ass by his risibility—ὡς άνθρωπος μεν γελαστικός, ενος δὲ οὐ γελαστικον,*

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The consummate characters of comedy are great ideal conceptions, master-pieces of imagination, though their familiar mirth may make them seem our humble acquaintances. It is true that we hear, every day, of particular persons having been the real originals exactly delineated by the most humourous authors. But in proportion to the genius of such moral painters, we may venture to deny the possibility of their having copied individual portraits. Some eccentric person may have been generally in the mind of a writer at the time of his sketching an exquisite character, but only as a rallying point to the innumerable original traits of his imagination. Who would ask where Shakspeare found his Falstaff, except in the mine of his own invention?

At the same time, whilst the abstracting and combining powers of the imagination have entered into the invention of such characters, they appear to be individuals. Consummate art makes us forget that they have been invented, and gives them the free and familiar air of reality. The bulk of fiction-writers, unable to create imaginary beings of this description, take a shorter road towards individuality, by adopting individuals ready-made; and copy or caricature human nature, as it has the misfortune to fall in their way. Their readers feel some difference of effect, but are not always quite clear as to the cause of their being better pleased with ideal than accidental imitation. They have been assured of some village, or town, or family, where the most ideal comic characters, to a certainty, lived long before and after they were so kind as to visit the brain of the genius that pourtrayed them; and mistaking hints for prototypes, they associate the idea of lively character-painting with the copying of a live man. The commonest novel shows them some feigned name, under which there is no more of human nature described, than what exactly tallies with the slander or ridicule attached to the neighbour whose intended likeness they recognise; and they are apt to imagine, that Le Sage and Cervantes had recourse to the same expedients.

We are rarely presented, in verse, with the same garrulous common-place fiction as in prose. The bad novelist is familiarly, the bad poet is loftily, tiresome. And, is indifferent verse, it may then be asked, more tolerable than the mediocrity of prose? No, it is a great deal worse. This circumstance, however, is an indirect argument in favour of verse. We must be pleased with it highly, or not at all. It is a noble instrument, on which imperfect execution is insupportable. The prose describer of life may, without disappointing us, abstain from any attempt to raise us above the ordinary sensations of life; and he, for the most part, only wearies us by its insipid dialogues. But the bad versifier disgusts us by adopting the token of an enthusiasm which he

either feels not, or can not express, and by giving the emphasis of numbers to thoughts destitute of originality. The deepest bathos of expression is therefore to be found in verse, and for the same reason also its highest beauty.

In addition to harmony, the poet gives his language a degree of selection and refinement, which is not required in any species of composition, the primary object of which is not to delight the imagination. Cowper himself, who, with all the delicacy of his genius, dreaded the harmony of verse interfering with his inspiration, in the same manner as the old Presbyterians feared that correct psalmody might disturb their devotions, has nevertheless advised poets to use "words exquisitely chosen." We shall, no doubt, misapply the principle of selection to poetry, if we suppose that there is a certain privileged class of words which are at all times to be exclusively chosen by the composer, and another class which he is bound, under every circumstance, to reject. The whole world of words ought to be at his command. But it is desirable that poetical expression should bring the least possible interference of mean or discordant associations; and in proportion as language aims at inspiring beautiful or elevated trains of thought, the attention of the mind is more and more awakened to the effect of words, and to the minutest collateral hints which they give to the associating faculty. In the intercourse of life, men's minds, quickened by passions and interests, acquire a considerable promptitude in choosing expressions which unite perspicuity to the understanding, with power and delicacy in touching or sparing our associations. And hence the poet should watch the utterance of individuals in their critical and impassioned moments. But he must not imitate the unpurified and accidental style of their discourse; for they have neither time, taste, nor circumstances, to make that style consistent with a high tone of the imagination.* The objects of Nature are assembled in poetry with ideal beauty, and in like manner, its language has a beauty beyond contingent reality. Still, an ideally beautified diction may be adapted to the lowest as well as the highest characters of existence. The resemblance of life is not lost in its ameliorated diction; nor are the peasants of † Home and Sophocles less natural, when they speak so as not to lower the tone of tragedy, than if they suggested the grossest ideas of clown

* Dionysius, of Halicarnassus, shows us how hostile the opinion of ancient criticism was to mean or trivial expression in poetry. Simplicity, however, is not to be confounded with that colloquial trivialness which the ancients meant by the term Aoyoda. Dionysius expressly ranks this among the faults of poetic language, when he says, Μηδεις δε ὑπολαμβανετω με άγνοειν ότι κακια ποιήματος ή Λογοείδεια δοκει τις είναι.

Viz. in the tragedies of Douglass and Œdipus Tyrannus.

ish rusticity. In imagination, we view existence with a pure and unlimited sympathy, over which those accidental circumstances which damp our enthusiasm in the real world, have no control. Emancipated, in the pure region of poetry, from those checks on the impulses to feeling which distract us in real life, we give ourselves up to emotions that exhaust expression without being felt to exhaust themselves. They appear as if they justified our interminable enjoyment of them, and as if they were a light raying from our being upon infinity. But this is not our ordinary impression of life: its discourse is therefore, for the most part, adapted to a very moderated state of feeling, and its cast. of phraseology is often constructed so as rather to conceal passion, than to convey it. It is marked by forms of courtesy and ceremony, by general expressions, and by many colloquial familiarities, which, if introduced into the language of imagination, could be by no effort of the mind dissociated from vulgar ideas. Even when men's thoughts are put into studied compositions which treat of the higher utilities of life, their general style will still be, in some degree, different from that of the poet; for, though they deal, like him, with moral truth, they deal with it in a more logical and literal manner. At times such prose writers will unquestionably be poetical, as ail eloquence is allied to poetry; but they must cease to be closely argumentative, or instructive, in sober facts, if the character of their diction be uniformly imaginative. The only conceivable case in which a writer's general object in composition will justify such selected and supported beauty of diction as the poet's, is when he uniformly addresses the imagination in unmeasured language. In such a work, the style will undoubtedly approach very near to that of poetry. And yet I can not help imagining, that when measure is dropped, the character of composition will always naturally decline into a less exquisite choice of expression, than when the composer's mind teems with thoughts that "voluntarily move harmonious numbers*." For, when expression flows within the clear limits of harmony, its increased emphasis to the ear, and distinctness to the memory and conception, must expose the beauty and propriety of every word and phrase in a more trying light to our associations, than if we met them in unmeasured language. And there is many a clause which we should pass over quietly in a prose sentence, even addressed to the imagination, which would strike us as redundant, or insipid, in the form of metre.

Accordingly, in all languages, the character of measured and unmeasured composition has been different, both in boldness and refinement of expression. Peculiar licences have been granted to

* Milton.

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