oet, and in the hands of
a poet, _art_ will not be found less ornamental than nature. It is
precisely in general nature, and in stepping out of his element, that
Falconer fails; where he digresses to speak of ancient Greece, and
"such branches of learning."

In Dyer's Grongar Hill, upon which his fame rests, the very
appearance of nature herself is moralised into an artificial image:

"Thus is nature's _vesture_ wrought,
To instruct our wandering thought;
Thus she _dresses green and gay_,
To disperse our cares away."

And here also we have the telescope; the misuse of which, from
Milton, has rendered Mr. Bowles so triumphant over Mr. Campbell:--

"So we mistake the future's face,
Eyed through Hope's deluding _glass_."

And here a word en passant to Mr. Campbell:--

"As yon summits, soft and fair
Clad in colours of the air,
Which to those who journey near
Barren, brown, and rough appear,
Still we tread the same coarse way--
The present's still a cloudy day."

Is not this the original of the far-famed--

"'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue?"

To return once more to the sea. Let any one look on the long wall of
Malamocco, which curbs the Adriatic, and pronounce between the sea
and its master. Surely that Roman work (I mean _Roman_ in conception
and performance), which says to the ocean, "Thus far shalt thou come,
and no further," and is obeyed, is not less sublime and poetical than
the angry waves which vainly break beneath it.

Mr. Bowles makes the chief part of a ship's poesy depend upon the
"_wind:_" then why is a ship under sail more poetical than a hog in a
high wind? The hog is all nature, the ship is all art, "coarse
canvass," "blue bunting," and "tall poles;" both are violently acted
upon by the wind, tossed here and there, to and fro, and yet nothing
but excess of hunger could make me look upon the pig as the more
poetical of the two, and then only in the shape of a griskin.

Will Mr. Bowles tell us that the poetry of an aqueduct consist in the
_water_ which it conveys? Let him look on that of Justinian, on those
of Rome, Constantinople, Lisbon, and Elvas, or even at the remains of
that in Attica.

We are asked, "What makes the venerable towers of Westminster Abbey
more poetical, as objects, than the tower for the manufactory of
patent shot, surrounded by the same scenery?" I will answer--the
_architecture_. Turn West