1, Ode 13.

This, though not unexceptionable, and particularly in the last verse,
has yet a tenderness and spirit utterly wanting in Mason.

What from my power would Sappho claim?
Who scorns thy flame?
What wayward boy
Disdains to yield thee joy for joy?
Soon shall he court the bliss he flies;
Soon beg the boon he now denies,
And, hastening back to love and thee,
Repay the wrong with extacy.

In the Pygmalion, a lyrical scene, he has made an effort equally vain,
to represent the impassioned eloquence of Jean Jaques Rousseau.

In his shorter poems, there is too frequent a recurrence of the same
machinery, and that, such as it needed but little invention to create.
Either the poet himself, or some other person, is introduced, musing by
a stream or lake, or in a forest, when the appearance of some celestial
visitant, muse, spirit, or angel, suddenly awakens his attention.

Soft gleams of lustre tremble through the grove,
And sacred airs of minstrelsy divine
Are harp'd around, and flutt'ring pinions move.
Ah, hark! a voice, to which the vocal rill,
The lark's extatic harmony is rude;
Distant it swells with many a holy trill,
Now breaks wide warbling from yon orient cloud.

_Elegy_ 2.

And,

But hark! methinks I hear her hallow'd tongue!
In distant trills it echoes o'er the tide;
Now meets mine ear with warbles wildly free,
As swells the lark's meridian extacy.

_Ode_ vi.

After the extatic notes have been heard, all vanishes away like some
figure in the clouds, which

Even with a thought,
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.

His abstractions are often exalted into cherubs and seraphs. It is the
"cherub Beauty sits on Nature's rustic shrine;" "heaven-descended
Charity;" "Constancy, heaven-born queen;" Liberty, "heaven-descending
queen." Take away from him these aerial beings and their harps, and you
will rob him of his best treasures.

He holds nearly the same place among our poets, that Peters does among
our painters. He too is best known by--

The angel's floating pomp, the seraph's glowing grace;

and he too, instead of that gravity and depth of tone which might seem
most accordant to his subjects, treats them with a lightness of pencil
that is not far removed from flimsiness.

In the thirteenth Ode, on the late Duchess of Devonshire, the only lady
of distinguished rank to whom the poets of modern times h