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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
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