hold that poetic genius is as truly a distinct gift as a mathematical, a pictorial, or a musical genius-though it is more central than any other, is dependent for its capacity on the scale of the intellect, and takes its colouring from the individual temper and affections. We hold that the poetic power in its essence, the pure poetic spirit, is as distinct an element in the microcosm of the soul, as fire in the system of nature-as distinct a principle as electricity; that it may be described generally as the power of beholding and presenting objects to the mind in pleasurable forms, and corresponds to the beautiful as science to truth, religion and morals to spirituality and goodness. The object of the sublime poetry of the Bible is doubtless to convey truth, not to excite pleasure; but the object of the form in which it conveys divine truths was doubtless pleasure; it raises us above the senses by means of them.

We further believe that this peculiar power of using and addressing the imagination common to all men, this power of beholding and bodying forth in pleasurable forms, and of presenting the loveliest and happiest attitude of things,' has a special connexion with physical temperament, and is peculiarly stimulated by that condition of body which belongs to youth when it is adult rather than adolescent, or what is called, in reference to corporeal advantages, the prime of life. It will be generally admitted that a youthful vividness of sensation, which the predominance of the reflective and speculative faculties tends to suppress, with the sense of novelty and freshness in all objects with which the mind converses, promotes imaginative energy. Poetic power prolongs youth for the poet, even while his head is prematurely grey; but, perhaps, it is only from impressions carried forward by memory and association of ideas, that any man is able to write poetically in the autumn and winter of his age. Some appear to suppose that every true poet, so he retains a sound mind in a sound body, may continue producing as long as he lives, and the better the older he grows, because as he grows older he becomes wiser and abler. We are rather inclined to believe that the poetic principle has, in each individual to whom it belongs, a certain quantity from the first; that it runs a certain course or cycle and is then exhausted; and that, as many a plant, when its flower has budded, bloomed, and perished, remains erect and flourishing, full of leafy honours, with stem stronger and foliage more affluent than when it was in full blow, so is it with the intellect of man, of which poetry is the soft and fragrant blossom; a green old age it may well have, but only in anomalous cases a florid one. And as the blooming of a plant may be hastened or retarded by circumstances, so the expansion of

of poetic growths after they have come into the bud, and even the formation of the bud itself, may be kept back and reserved without being destroyed.

These suggestions are applicable to the productions of that great poet, the late blooming of whose poetic faculty has ever been considered out of the ordinary course. Milton was engaged upon Paradise Lost from his forty-seventh till his fifty-eighth year inclusively. The fourth book-a richer strain of verse upon the whole, we think, than any other that can be named to us-has much in common with his youthful poetry, and would probably have been written as early as the great works of Lucretius and Dante, as the Orlando Furioso, the Faery Queen, and Shakspeare's finest plays, had not affairs of Church and State occupied the poet's time and absorbed his attention. We have proof indeed that he had contemplated the Fall of Man poetically, and composed something towards his great work, before he left Cambridge. We are told by naturalists that butterflies, if they become parents and help to perpetuate their race, have but a short life in the well-dressed stage of their existence; but that if by accident they remain unmated during the sunny season, they may survive a whole winter, then come forth, and, after performing the part for which wings were given them, fall like withered blossoms when the fruit is prepared. So this aërial Psyche, the soul within the soul, if by circumstances prevented from accomplishing its whole 'bright business' early, may live through a cold ungenial season of statemanship, or of political strife and polemical controversy— at length when the air is calm and the sun shines may glitter forth to fulfil its splendid mission, then expire. When Milton had expended the reserved portion of youthful heat, his style changed; the latter books of Paradise Lost, the Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes are fine works in their way, but contain few relics of the verdure and the bloom, and all the mighty ravishment' of this great poet's spring. The descriptions of Hell and of Paradise are full of inward fire, glowing unsuppressed amid the staid and solemn pomp by which the poem is characterized. To descend to a lower, yet in our opinion not low example of the reservation of youthful energy-The Borough and the striking ballad of Sir Eustace Grey were written by Crabbe when he was past fifty, after a pause in his poetic life of twenty years. His next work, The Tales of the Hall, exhibits a change of style; it deals more with reflection, less with strong emotion, than the former. His last compositions are comparatively feeble.* The genius of

* We see no reason to suppose that the really remarkable fragments in the posthumous volumes of Crabbe were works of his advanced age;-the very best of them, "The World of Dreams, bears strong internal evidence of the Sir Eustace Grey period. Crabbe

Crabbe would probably have gone through these changes at an earlier period, had he not been diverted from poetry during the middle of life, and might have fallen into the sere and yellow leaf before the author was an old man, as Lord Byron's did very evidently when he had scarcely ceased to be a young one.

This inquiry into the relation between poetic products and the age of producers not improperly introduces a brief notice of a new work from what has been called the school of Sensation rather than Reflection;' since to poetry of this class the thoughts which have been thrown out on the reference of the poetical to the youthful in our nature will apply pre-eminently; and we have heard the head of a higher school remark, that the productions of these writers have an especial charm for the young, though they do not satisfy all the demands of older minds. The late Mr. A. Hallam well described the character of these writers, when he said: 'so vivid was the delight attending the simple exertions of eye and ear, that it became mingled more and more with their trains of active thought, and tended to absorb their whole being into the energy of sense.' A certain portion of the poetry of Coleridge seems to have been the link between this school and that of Wordsworth; for though elsewhere he shows himself the 'thoughtful poet, eloquent for truth,' yet in the Circassian Love Chaunt,''Love,' and Kubla Khan,' he set the example of that style of poetry, afterwards extended so far in the hands of Shelley, which describes moods and feelings interpreted by sense rather than thoughts and actions, which interchanges the attributes of the external and internal worlds, now investing the human spirit with a drapery of the forms and colours of nature, now informing nature with the sensations and emotions of man. By comparing the Skylark' of Shelley with Mr. Wordsworth's two poems on the same bird, the reader will perceive the characteristic difference which we desire to point out; in the elder example, though outward nature is presented and the senses are called in aid of the poet, yet moral thinking forms the centre of the piece; in the later, vivid painting, fine expression, and the melody of verse are devoted to the illustration of natural feeling, which, though modified by its co-existence with the spiritual and rational, has its seat in a lower part of the soul. Shelley's 'Sensitive Plant' may be cited as a representative of this class of productions. He indeed had ambitious aims; he described the actions and passions of men, and sought to recommend, by the attractions of his splendid verse, the visions of an active but not perfectly sane intellect. Still it was in poetry of the former character that he had the most success; the men and women in the Revolt of Islam' have scarce more life in them than the snow figures

figures with which, in Southey's beautiful fiction, the father of Leila peopled her solitude; they are all of the Frankenstein brood; the story is incongruous and unnatural, and the philosophy, being, as we hold it, most bewildered, and at best like sweet bells out of tune, never formed an effective alliance with his poetry; while that which was true in his spirit, the poetic power, the mirror of the beautiful, seems to be ever winning him away from the chimeras which an impatient and too resisting spirit engendered in his understanding.

Mr. Tennyson,' says Mr. A. Hallam, with his earlier performances before him, belongs decidedly to the class we have described as the poets of sensation.' Mariana in the Moated Grange,' the wild ballad of Oriana, the verses on the Sleeping Beauty, The Dying Swan,' and others of his first publications in the same style, raised him at once into high favour with the disciples of the picturesque and sensational school. But the volumes put forth in 1842 contained a fresh set of poems, for the most part in a new vein; and from that date the circle of his admirers became a much wider one.

He has acquired greater popularity than his predecessor; the admiration of Shelley is almost confined to poets or students of poetry, who find in his works interesting studies of the poetical aspect of things; but the brilliant odes and songs of the living writer arrest the attention of those who cannot go far in a pure poetic atmosphere; his ballads and idylls delight numbers who wish but to find in any poem they take in hand a moral lesson or a tale of the heart, in an ornate and compendious form; his gayer movement and lighter touch please many who would be scared by the grave impetuosity of Shelley. Mr. Tennyson, however, stands on higher ground than has just been indicated as the main ground of his popularity; he has imagination which the true lovers of poetry can alone fully feel, and a command of diction finer and deeper than is needed for any but their satisfaction; he excels Shelley in liveliness and variety, in the power of portraying ideal personages, enduing them with life and bringing out their characteristics in easy and delightful narrative; he has hardly equalled his predecessor, in the opinion of that writer's admirers, in force of imagination and clearness of expression, and, with respect to sustained dignity and refinement, he certainly falls below him. It is high praise to say that he has sometimes equalled him in the music of verse. The power of music in Shelley's Spenserian stanza, which in its full rich ringing melody appears to combine the sound of flutes and soft recorders with that of liquid musical glasses, has been surpassed by no poet of the present age. In the art of numbers, however, Mr. Tennyson cannot be held equal to Shelley; he is

often

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often successful in the adaptation of metres and modulation of words and cadences to the swell and fall of the feelings expressed;' but at other times his irregular measures are devoid of harmony, and mock the eye with the show of a fine varied lyrical movement, while the ear can make nothing of them or nothing to the purpose. Want of melody was a main fault of his Hesperides,' the exclusion of which from later editions we have heard regretted; we for our part are content to lose sight of the sisters three,' and 'the golden apple that hangs over the sea,' and to let the red-combed dragon' slumber undisturbed, picturesque as they are, unless the threefold music' to which the blossom bloweth and the sap floweth' can be brought into better tune. Among this author's admirers there is (as we have already hinted) no small difference of opinion as to the relative merit of his productions; some, who take little delight in the poetry of the sensational school, as such, think highly of his advances in the region of speculative thought, and value his poems for the warm reflection of the age and striking images of human life which they present; others think that the Morte d'Arthur,' the Two Voices,' Love and Duty,' even Dora' and Ulysses,' would appear less effective were they not read in the glow of feeling excited by his more Titianic productions, and look upon the 'Gardener's Daughter' and 'Lord Burleigh' as the best poems in his second volume. It is said, indeed, that Lockesley Hall,' one of his most popular pieces, unites both kinds of power, combining vivid imagery and passionate feeling with the energies of reflection. But by impartial critics, we suspect, this very poem would be cited as evidence that his power lies in depicting moods and feelings rather than in describing trains of reflection, and that when he addresses the intellect his style wants that distinctness and forceful simplicity, which is so necessary to the effective enunciation of thought. That one who has undergone a blight of the affections, and feels as if sudden winter had passed upon his being in all that concerns the heart, should seek a second spring of gladsome emotion in the stir and movement of public events and the interests of social existence, and should at last perceive the vanity of any such attempt to supersede the individual and personal, and to be happy in spite of nature, yet in a mere worldly and natural way-is a thought as old as The Excursion;' for such is the history of the Solitary's mind, told toward the end of the third book, before and after the lines

'Thus was I reconverted to the world;

Society became my glittering bride,
And airy hopes my children.'-

and it is curious to compare Mr. Tennyson's rapid discursion

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on