Heaves up huge Abyla on Afric's sand,
Crowns with high Calpe Europe's salient strand,
Crests with opposing towers the splendid scene,
And pours from urns immense the sea between.
Loud o'er her whirling flood Charybdis roars,
Affrighted Scylla bellows round her shores,
Vesuvio groans through all his echoing caves,
And Etna thunders o'er the insurgent waves.'

From the address to the Gnomes, or earth-nymphs, which occupies the second canto, we will extract our author's explanation, or theory, of "the fine forms on Portland's mystic vase"-the beautiful and world-renowned vase lately so wantonly injured :—

"Here, by fallen columns and disjoined arcades,
On mouldering stones, beneath deciduous shades,
Sits human-kind, in hieroglyphic state,

Serious, and pondering on their changeful fate;
While, with inverted torch and swimming eyes,
Sinks the fair shade of mortal life, and dies.

There, the pale ghost through death's wide portal bends
His timid feet, the dusky steep descends :
With smiles assuasive love divine invites,
Guides on broad wing, with torch-uplifted lights;
Immortal life, her hand extending, courts
The lingering form, his tottering step supports;
Leads on to Pluto's realms the dreary way,
And gives him trembling to Elysian day.
Beneath, in sacred robes the priestess dressed,
The coif close-hooded, and the fluttering vest,
With pointed finger guides the initiate youth,
Unweaves the many-coloured veil of truth,
Drives the profane from mystery's bolted door,
And silence guards the Eleusinian lore."

As a specimen of Darwin's skill in the description of material phenomena in verse, we will give the passage on weaving and spinning, including Arkwright's then novel invention of mechanical cotton-spinning, from the second canto of the Loves of the Plants :

Inventress of the woof, fair Linab flings

The flying shuttle through the dancing strings;
Inlays the broidered weft with flowery dyes;
Quick beat the reeds, the pedals fall and rise;
Slow from the beam the lengths of warp unwind,
And dance and nod the massy weights behind.
Taught by her labours, from the fertile soil
Immortal Isis clothed the banks of Nile;
And fair Arachne with her rival loom
Found undeserved a melancholy doom.
Five sister nymphs with dewy fingers twine
The beamy flax, and stretch the fibre-line;
Quick eddying threads from rapid spindles reel,
Or whirl with beating foot the dizzy wheel.
Charm'd round the busy fair five shepherds press,
Praise the nice texture of their snowy dress,
Admire the artists, and the art approve,
And tell with honeyed words the tale of love.
So now, where Derwent rolls his dusky floods
Through vaulted mountains, and a night of woods,
The nymph Gossypiad treads the velvet sod,
And warms with rosy smiles the watery god;
His ponderous oars to slender spindles turns,
And pours o'er massy wheels his foamy urns;
With playful charms her hoary lover wins,
And wields his trident, while the monarch spins.
First, with nice eye emerging Naiads cull
From leathery pods the vegetable wool;
With wiry teeth revolving cards release

The tangled knots, and smooth the ravelled fleece;
Next moves the iron hand with fingers fine,
Combs the wide card, and forms the eternal line;
Slow, with soft lips, the whirling can acquires
The tender skeins, and wraps in rising spires;
With quickened pace successive rollers move,
And these retain, and those extend the rove;
Then fly the spokes, the rapid axles glow,

And slowly circumvolves the labouring wheel below.

b From the Latin name for flax, linum.

The plant Linum, in the Linnæan system, has five males and five females in each flower.

From Gossypium, the cotton plant.

In all this, however, it must be confessed, there is more of ingenuity than of poetry. The excess of emphasis, and overcrowding of all the artifices and licences of the poetical style, into which Darwin runs, would, if there were nothing else, betray the process of hard hammering, and, as it were, manual force and dexterity, by which he fabricated his verse; but his theory of poetry, as we have intimated above, was also radically vicious. Take the single figure of impersonation, in which he deals so largely. We shall all admit that there are bounds to the employment of this figure. Its effect is to represent a mere thing or idea as a living and individual being. But this can only be done with any poetical result in cases in which there is a natural disposition in the general mind, when in a state of excitement, to view the matter in that light. Sometimes such a tendency is checked by certain constituents or accessories of the object of too inherently mean or trivial a character, or too distinctly obtruding its real nature upon the senses or the imagination, to allow of its being thus metamorphosed and exalted; but it is enough that there should merely be nothing in it or about it to respond to the exertion of the poet's skill. Throughout all nature, moral and material, there must be the proper sort of worth in the substance wrought upon, as well as in the instrument, or no worthy effect will be produced. The steel that strikes fire from the flint will strike none from the brick. husbandry can raise a harvest on a sandy sea-beach. The best teaching will not illuminate a blockhead, nor the kindest help be of any enduring service to the man who can do nothing for himself. So in the treatment of a subject poetically; it cannot be done unless there be

No

poetry in the subject, as well as in the writer. No poetical power or skill, for example, could give any grandeur or solemnity to the prosopopoeia either of a wheelbarrow, or of the art of making wheelbarrows. It would merely turn out something utterly flat and dead, if it did not prove ridiculous. It would resemble an attempt to compound gunpowder out of sulphur and common earth. The great constituent elements of the poetical in the nature of things are few in number. Whatever can be made to flash a new combination, or other exciting image, upon the fancy admits of poetical treatment and embellishment in an inferior degree; but all high poetry has its source in passion,--in veneration, in love, in terror, in hatred, in revenge, or some other of those strong emotions that, as it were, transport the mind out of and above itself, and give it to see as with a new intelligence and with other organs. But such emotions are not to be excited by such phenomena, whether of art or nature, as those with which Darwin's poetry principally deals. Many of the processes of mechanics, of chemistry, of vegetation, which he describes, are in the highest degree curious and interesting, philosophically or scientifically considered; but that is quite a different thing from being poetically interesting or exciting. We may almost say that the one quality is directly opposed to and destructive of the other. Poetry and science are two rival and hostile powers. The latter is continually employed in encroaching upon and subjugating to itself the dominion of the former, which, however, is happily infinite in extent, so that, no matter how much of it may be thus wrested away, it never can suffer any real diminution. Whenever any thing has been perfectly reduced to matter

of science, its poetical character is extinguished: it ceases to appeal to any passion or affection. What was veneration or terror, religion or superstition, becomes now satisfied and unimpassioned intelligence. Imagination is dethroned there, its creative power abolished and destroyed, its transforming illumination made impossible. Even mere wonder, the lowest of all the imaginative states of mind, ceases when the scientific comprehension is complete; for, of course, when understood, no one thing is really more wonderful than another, any more than it is essentially more majestic;—the blue sky is but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours "-its golden fires, the ever-circling squadrons of the host of heaven, the suns and planets of a million systems, but another form or development of some such humble and commonplace incident as the rising of the dust from the high-road on a windy day, or of the smoke any day from a kitchen chimney. The tendency of science is to reduce and level; the tendency of poetry is to magnify and exalt. Each, therefore, has its proper and peculiar ground; they cannot act in concert, and upon the same ground: in other words, it is impossible to treat any subject at once scientifically and poetically. This is what Darwin has attempted, or professes, to do; but in truth the spirit of his poetry is scientific, and only the form poetical. His verses are profusely decorated with similitudes and other poetical figures and forms of speech; but both the manner in which he views his subject, and his subject itself, are anti-poetical. His poetry appeals to none of what may be called our original and universal sympathies. It addresses itself, not to our hearts as moulded and inspired by nature and by those common influences

c 3