that await on speculative enquiry"—an unhealthy state, not of strength but weakness—but clear and untroubled in its creative mood, and genial as the spring. Campbell has written much criticism—without any parade of philosophy; but what has Shakspeare himself said through the lips of Hamlet, Lear, Othello, or Macbeth, that Campbell does not show he understands—whether veiled in darkness or in light—as
"Airs from heaven or blasts from hell?"
"There is, however, another defect manifest in his compositions, which cannot be so readily excused. He has too frequently drawn his topics, not from the stores of his own consciousness, or from actual observations upon the realities of life, but from the learning of books; he has taken the impressions left by the writings of other men for the subject-matter of his own verse; he has been more occupied with words than things. The Pleasures of Hope—the earliest, but yet the most successful of his works—is more particularly marked, as might be expected, with this error of youthful poets." Why, if it be "an error of youthful poets," it might have been more gently urged against the originality of Campbell, who wrote the Pleasures of Hope—a wonderful achievement—when he was under twenty! He could not have had much booklearning at that age, nor much knowledge of the "realities of life," nor large "stores of his own consciousness;" but he had genius—the mens divinior. Nature had made him a poet—and in the transport, the tumult, of his "delighted spirit," he beautified all the visions that visited it, and gave vent to joy—and to the joy of grief in impassioned music, "strong as the soul of a mountain river"—like the sea fluctuating in purple light, which is oftentimes a darkness—and in its sweetest murmurs still heard to be rolling—a power at peace!
To support those charges, and they are serious ones—indeed such as, if true, would shear that noble poem of all its beams—the reviewer proceeds to quote two or three lines here and there, from the Pleasures of Hope—to criticise them—and to make a number of rash and untenable assertions of utter failure where success has been complete. The quotations should have been ample, since the charges were sweeping; and the poem should have been spoken of throughout with enthusiasm—as a youthful production—whatever may be its faults or defects—full of force and fire—flowing from an exalted imagination and an awakened heart.
"At the commencement of the piece we are presented with a succession of situations from real life, in each of which the sentiment of hope is to be displayed in operation; and although, in the course of these descriptions, many lines occur of great beauty, yet nowhere is the sentiment itself, as springing from, and involved in, the particular circumstances of the case, vividly and naturally portrayed. Here he has failed simply from not having fixed his eye with sufficient steadiness on the thing itself he meant to describe.
"The sailor who, while stemming the monotonous and interminable ocean, thinks of his distant home, and finds his spirit upheld by the hope of returning to it again, is an admirable subject for the poet. The sentiment felt is one which readily commands our sympathy, and the external circumstances with which it is associated are highly picturesque and magnificent. With these last Mr Campbell may have succeeded, but he has not been equally fortunate in presenting to us the feelings of the man. He takes his mariner to the Atlantic—
'Where Andes, giant of the western star,
With meteor-standard to the winds unfurl'd,
Looks from his throne of clouds o'er half the world.'—
He then carries him to Greenland, where
'Cold on his midnight watch the breezes blow,
From wastes that slumber in eternal snow'—
And having set him fairly again on the broad ocean, he gives an enumeration of those images of home which are supposed to engage the mind, and feed the expectation of the sailor. In this catalogue there is not one circumstance which could be selected as a manifest violation of probability; and yet the reader feels throughout that it is a collection of topics gathered from remote sources, not the result of a strong realization in the poet's mind of the feeling of the home-sick mariner."
