egoing stanzas we particularly admire the line--

"Till now in Gertrude's eyes their ninth blue summer shone."

It appears to us like the ecstatic union of natural beauty and poetic
fancy, and in its playful sublimity resembles the azure canopy mirrored
in the smiling waters, bright, liquid, serene, heavenly! A great outcry,
we know, has prevailed for some time past against poetic diction and
affected conceits, and, to a certain degree, we go along with it; but
this must not prevent us from feeling the thrill of pleasure when we see
beauty linked to beauty, like kindred flame to flame, or from applauding
the voluptuous fancy that raises and adorns the fairy fabric of thought,
that nature has begun! Pleasure is "scattered in stray-gifts o'er the
earth"--beauty streaks the "famous poet's page" in occasional lines of
inconceivable brightness; and wherever this is the case, no splenetic
censures or "jealous leer malign," no idle theories or cold indifference
should hinder us from greeting it with rapture.--There are other parts
of this poem equally delightful, in which there is a light startling as
the red-bird's wing; a perfume like that of the magnolia; a music
like the murmuring of pathless woods or of the everlasting ocean. We
conceive, however, that Mr. Campbell excels chiefly in sentiment and
imagery. The story moves slow, and is mechanically conducted, and rather
resembles a Scotch canal carried over lengthened aqueducts and with a
number of _locks_ in it, than one of those rivers that sweep in their
majestic course, broad and full, over Transatlantic plains and lose
themselves in rolling gulfs, or thunder down lofty precipices. But in
the centre, the inmost recesses of our poet's heart, the pearly dew of
sensibility is distilled and collects, like the diamond in the mine, and
the structure of his fame rests on the crystal columns of a polished
imagination. We prefer the _Gertrude_ to the _Pleasures of Hope_,
because with perhaps less brilliancy, there is more of tenderness and
natural imagery in the former. In the _Pleasures of Hope_ Mr. Campbell
had not completely emancipated himself from the trammels of the more
artificial style of poetry--from epigram, and antithesis, and hyperbole.
The best line in it, in which earthly joys are said to be--

"Like angels' visits, few and far between"--

is a borrowed one.[A] But in the Gertrude of Wyoming "we perceive a
softness coming over the heart of the author, and the