to describe the celebrated
buildings and sculptures of antiquity, he seems to confess that _they_
are the poetical text, his the rhetorical comment. Still it is a work
of splendid talent, though, as a whole, not of the highest poetical
excellence. Juvenal is, perhaps, the only ancient author who
habitually substitutes declamation for poetry.[23]

[22] We would here mention Rogers's _Italy_, if such a
cursory notice could convey our high opinion of its merit.

[23] The difference between oratory and poetry is well
illustrated by a passage in a recent tragedy.

_Col._ Joined! by what tie?

_Rien._ By hatred--
By danger--the two hands that tightest grasp
Each other--the two cords that soonest knit
A fast and stubborn tie; your true love knot
Is nothing to it. Faugh! the supple touch
Of pliant interest, or the dust of time,
Or the pin-point of temper, loose or rot
Or snap love's silken band. Fear and old hate,
They are sure weavers--they work for the storm,
The whirlwind, and the rocking surge; their knot
Endures till death.

The idea is good, and if expressed in a line or two, might
have been poetry--spread out into nine or ten lines, it
yields but a languid and ostentatious declamation.

The _philosophy of mind_ may equally be made subservient to poetry, as
the philosophy of nature. It is a common fault to mistake a mere
knowledge of the heart for poetical talent. Our greatest masters have
known better;--they have subjected metaphysics to their art. In
_Hamlet_, _Macbeth_, _Richard_, and _Othello_, the philosophy of mind
is but the material of the poet. These personages are ideal; they are
effects of the contact of a given internal character with given
outward circumstances, the results of combined conditions determining
(so to say) a moral curve of original and inimitable properties.
Philosophy is exhibited in the same subserviency to poetry in many
parts of Crabbe's _Tales of the Hall_. In the writings of this author
there is much to offend a refined taste; but at least in the work in
question there is much of a highly poetical cast. It is a
representation of the action and re-action of two minds upon each
other and upon the world around them. Two brothers of different
characters and fortunes, and strangers to each other, meet. Their
habits of mind, the formation of those habits by e