such lines as the following:--one of the characters, an old
invalid, wishes to end his days under

"Some hamlet shade, to yield his sickly form
Health in the breeze, and shelter in the storm."

Now the antithesis here totally fails: for it is the breeze, and not the
tree, or as it is quaintly expressed, _hamlet shade_, that affords
health, though it is the tree that affords shelter in or from the storm.
Instances of the same sort of _curiosa infelicitas_ are not rare in this
author. His verses on the Battle of Hohenlinden have considerable spirit
and animation. His Gertrude of Wyoming is his principal performance. It
is a kind of historical paraphrase of Mr. Wordsworth's poem of Ruth. It
shews little power, or power enervated by extreme fastidiousness. It is

"------Of outward show
Elaborate; of inward less exact."

There are painters who trust more to the setting of their pictures than
to the truth of the likeness. Mr. Campbell always seems to me to be
thinking how his poetry will look when it comes to be hot-pressed on
superfine wove paper, to have a disproportionate eye to points and
commas, and dread of errors of the press. He is so afraid of doing
wrong, of making the smallest mistake, that he does little or nothing.
Lest he should wander irretrievably from the right path, he stands
still. He writes according to established etiquette. He offers the Muses
no violence. If he lights upon a good thought, he immediately drops it
for fear of spoiling a good thing. When he launches a sentiment that you
think will float him triumphantly for once to the bottom of the stanza,
he stops short at the end of the first or second line, and stands
shivering on the brink of beauty, afraid to trust himself to the
fathomless abyss. _Tutus nimium, timidusque procellarum_. His very
circumspection betrays him. The poet, as well as the woman, that
deliberates, is undone. He is much like a man whose heart fails him just
as he is going up in a balloon, and who breaks his neck by flinging
himself out of it when it is too late. Mr. Campbell too often maims and
mangles his ideas before they are full formed, to fit them to the
Procustes' bed of criticism; or strangles his intellectual offspring in
the birth, lest they should come to an untimely end in the Edinburgh
Review. He plays the hypercritic on himself, and starves his genius to
death from a needless apprehension of a plethora. No write