of human misery, which even these might never visit —the desolation of heart in him must have seemed that spot. The most experienced in the symptoms of that fearful distemper under which he laboured could not have anticipated more than the bare possibility of one so lost being restored to precarious sanity by the happiest efforts of human skill, under the blessing of God. Had Dr. Johnson— at that time the Apollo of literature, whose oracles were both less ambiguous and less fallible than the Pythian responses of old— been admitted to the sight of our captive, roving, as by instinct, through the grounds that enclosed his quiet prison—
Arms hanging idly down, hands clasp'd below,"
brooding over bosom-sorrows not to be told, refusing comfort or hope from every created source, and from religion itself deriving nothing but despair: had Dr. Johnson seen him thus; and had the good angel of the poor unknown spoken aloud in the critic's ear, and cried, "Behold the man whose mind, by its ascendance over the minds of contemporaries, shall purify the public taste, and restore British song from its half-century of captivity and degradation, in French fetters, to its inherited freedom. Behold the man who shall be the father of a new generation of bards, worthy of their native language and their native land; —the man, who shall exhibit, in his uncompromising verse, a style so pure, so simple, and severe, that intellectual excellence alone shall compel admiration, even from those who hate the poet's themes because they hate the gospel. The mourner, the maniac before your eyes, shall do this; and he shall do more, he shall redeem the character of religious poetry from the reproach which, in the presumption of mis-
