keep hovering,
Nor my thread wish to spin o'er again:
But my face in the glass I'll serenely survey,
And with smiles count each wrinkle and furrow;
As this old worn-out stuff, which is threadbare to-day
May become everlasting to-morrow.

-- COLLINS.

165.

Life! I know not what thou art,
But know that thou and I must part;
And when, or how, or where we met
I own to me's a secret yet.

Life! we've been long together
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear--
Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear;
--Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time;
Say not Good Night,--but in some brighter clime
Bid me Good Morning.

A L. BARBAULD.

FOURTH BOOK.

SUMMARY.

It proves sufficiently the lavish wealth of our own age in Poetry, that
the pieces which, without conscious departure from the standard of
Excellence, render this Book by far the longest, were with very few
exceptions composed during the first thirty years the nineteenth
century. Exhaustive reasons can hardly be given for the strangely sudden
appearance of individual genius: but none, in the Editor's judgment, can
be less adequate than that which assigns the splendid national
achievements of our recent poetry, to an impulse from the frantic
follies and criminal wars that at the time disgraced the least
essentially civilised of our foreign neighbours. The first French
Revolution was rather, in his opinion, one result, and in itself by no
means the most important, of that far wider and greater spirit which
through enquiry and doubt, through pain and triumph, sweeps mankind
round the circles of its gradual development: and it is to this that we
must trace the literature of modern Europe. But, without more detailed
discussion on the motive causes of Scott, Wordsworth, Campbell, Keats,
and Shelley, we may observe that these Poets, with others, carried to
further perfection the later tendencies of the Century preceding, in
simplicity of narrative, reverence for human Passion and Character in
every sphere, and impassioned love of Nature:--that, whilst maintaining
on the whole the advances in art made since the Restoration, they
renewed the half-forgotten melody and depth of tone which marked the
best Elizabethan writers:--that, lastly, to what was thus inherited they
added a richness i