or the 'De Rerum Natura,' and superior to any of the
three in artistic finish and metaphysical truth and religious
feeling--a work ranking immediately beside the 'Paradise Lost;'
but he has, instead, shed on us a shower of plumes, as from the
wing of a fallen angel--beautiful, ethereal, scattered, and
tantalizing. Southey's poems are large without being
great--massive, without being majestic--they have rather the
bulk of an unformed chaos than the order and beauty of a
finished creation. Campbell, in many points the Virgil of his
time, has, alas! written no Georgies; his odes and lesser poems
are, 'atoms of the rainbow;' his larger, such as 'Gertrude of
Wyoming,' may be compared to those segments of the showery arch
we see in a disordered evening sky; but he has reared no
complete 'bow of God.' Moore's 'Lalla Rookh' is an elegant and
laborious composition--not a shapely building; it is put
together by skilful art, not formed by plastic power. Byron's
poems are, for the most part, disjointed but melodious groans,
like those of Ariel from the centre of the cloven pine; 'Childe
Harold' is his soliloquy when sober--'Don Juan' his soliloquy
when half-drunk; the 'Corsair' would have made a splendid
episode in an epic--but the epic, where is it? and 'Cain,' his
most creative work, though a distinct and new world, is a
bright and terrible abortion--a comet, instead of a sun. So,
too, are the leading works of poor Shelley, which resemble
Southey in size, Byron in power of language, and himself only
in spirit and imagination, in beauties and faults. Keats, like
Shelley, was arrested by death, as he was piling up enduring
and monumental works. Professor Wilson has written '_Noctes_'
innumerable; but where is his poem on a subject worthy of his
powers, or where is his _work_ on any subject whatever? Hogg
has bound together a number of beautiful ballads, by a string
of no great value, and called it the 'Queen's Wake.' Scott
himself has left no solid poem, but instead, loose, rambling,
spirited, metrical romances--the bastards of his genius--and a
great family of legitimate chubby children of novels, bearing
the image, but not reaching the full stature, of their parent's
mind. Croly's poems, like the wing of his own 'seraph kings,'
standing beside the