ver, the precious metals in general, and all gems? We answer for him —on their rarity, and their rarity on their cost, and their cost on the labour necessary to dig them from the mine, or from the "dark unfathomed caves of ocean." But in a country where it is customary to throw pearls before swine, as it seems to have been in Assyria, there is a necessary rise in the beauty of husks. Bad, therefore, as Mr Atherstone's poetry is, his Political Economy is a great deal worse; yet he is not entirely wrong either; for, in such countries as Assyria, kings and subjects alike are, just like Mr Atherstone, and most other men of immature minds, like children, vastly taken with glitter and with tinsel. It was so, no doubt, in Assyria of old, as it is now in Ashantee. What a poor, bare, pitiful, most unpoetical country must Great Britain seem in Mr Atherstone's eyes! In some districts it is, indeed, thank Heaven, "gay and flowery" enough; but except a few Sovereigns now and then, (bless them! we never see their sweet jaundiced faces without singing a verse of God save the King,) one may travel from Dan to Beersheba, that is, from Cornwall to Kirkwall, without knowing the colour of gold. One sees nothing but ships and tunnels, and rail-roads and steamengines, the dock at Portsmouth and the breakwater at Plymouth, the Suspension bridge across the Menai, the Caledonian Canal, and such petty villages as London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and so forth,-places altogether unworthy of Mr Atherstone's notice, and other admirers of Nineveh.

Not that we despise the city Nineveh-we only wish she had a better poet. Who could look, without some emotion of admiration and reverence, on those splendid and majestic monarchies of old! The stately flourishing of ancient empire, the innumerable multitudes gathered under one dominion, the overflowing and exhaustless wealth of their wonderful cities, the fair perfection of their beautiful arts, all the assembled delights of cultured life sheltered in the bosom of vast political power, and power itself apparelled in its Oriental gorgeousness of sovereignty, with its retinue of satraps and vassal-kings, and the mingled myriads

of its hosts that in their march seem moving nations! Yet it is all a reverence of illusion. There is strength dissolving in luxury and fear; there are laws falling into forgetfulness; and evils springing up for which there is no cure or control; there is the tyranny of the strong, and the groans of the weak; there is guilt that calls for vengeance, and decay that prepares its approach. The same memorials that have preserved to us the knowledge of these mighty growths of human empire, do also record at times, amidst the story of warring nations and triumphant kings, intimations and prophetic words, sayings of wise men who have judged aright the doom of their country, and have lifted up their voice in vain warning to their generation, of the delusion of their seeming greatness, of their presumptuous crimes, and the coming day of retribution. The day of retribution and of desolation has come, and other nations yet unspoiled, strong in their purer life, bold in their liberty, men of the desert, the forest, and the mountains, have broken in upon the mighty empire, have withered its hosts, and wrecked its magnificence, and shattered its thrones, and planted a nobler race to hold the domi.nion of the soil. The regions these of poetry; but a poetry of highest intellect and imagination; not singsong, where

"Pure description holds the place of sense,"

and chanted to the accompaniment of a tinkling cymbal.

But not only has Mr Atherstone utterly failed in doing any thing like justice to his subject-in its general conception and execution-but, from the specimens we have given, it must be obvious to all, that he is essentially a weak and ineffective thinker. His mind has no grasp in any one of its faculties. His very perception of external things seems faint and confused-and therefore necessarily so is his conception. He contemplates not the outer world with that steadfast power of eye which holds all its shews in fascination, as it were, before the glittering orb in which sits the poet's soul. He is at the mercy of those visual fluctuations over which he ought to have a magician's

might. He obeys where he ought to command-and he can create nothing. Never was there a man so sedentarily addicted to the composition of verse, and not without a certain share of talent, so destitute of "The vision and the faculty divine."

Were you to read this poem aloud on condition of being put to death on the occurrence of the first passage at which a good judge should involuntarily exclaim, "Fine-that is fine indeed!" you would grow bolder and bolder as you recited, and by the middle of the First Book become assured of a long life. Not a single thrill ever shoots along your nerves -the crown of your scalp never waxes cold-no creeping of the skin -no crawling of the flesh-but a disposition ere long invariable to yawn -and finally a dropping of the volume from your hand, the sound of which on the carpet is insufficient to scare away tired nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep.

His perception and his conception being thus so very dull, what can be expected from his imagination? Define the "faculty divine" as you will, or do not define it at all, its exercise at all times implies some modification wrought by the mind on the objects submitted to its power. External nature, when looked on by a poetical imagination in its transforming and imbueing mood, undergoes to feeling and thought a series of beautiful changes of character similar to those it suffers from the gradual efflux of light from the dawning orient-the pale lustre of meridian day-the "shadowy shine" of the decaying west. Thus poetry is to the external world-sun moon and stars; and as there is the capacity of being made to see nature thus illumined or darkened, thus softened or sublimed, in almost all human beings, the poet beautifies to his brethren the whole world of their inhabitation -sea-sky-air-earth and heaven. How have Spenser, Milton, Shakspeare, Thomson, Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Burns, glorified dead insensate matter, by breathing spirit into it,-their own divine spirit enshrined there in groves, rivers, lakes, glens, and mountains-blamelessly to be worshipped for evermore! The High Priests

VOL. XXVII. NO. CLXII.

Test Mr Atherstone's mind by the similes, or metaphors, or figures which it produces, and you will see at once that he is no poet. There constantly occur to him all the obvious and unavoidable images most familiar to the most commonplace poetasters, and by them vainly believed to be poetical; whereas they are all proofs, not of the prose, but of the prosiness of unawakened human life drawling along the dull every-day world, unaware, stare as it may, of all that is really worthy of love and wonder within the sphere of the senses. Nor do these stale images ever seem to arise before him under any working of his own mind. Were that the case, they might possibly sometimes possess some beauty-for that which is native has a certain charm, and is generally appropriate. But Mr Atherstone has been at the pains to form a collection of what he deems the flowers of poetry; and from that bouquet he lavishes about the scattered and scentless blooms at nightfall worthless as weeds. Never once by any accident does a new image find its way into his fancy which seems instinctively to abhor all that is original in the fancies of other men, women, and children; and to store up in a dark lumber-room all the old rubbish of furniture with which an unbounded plagiary could supply himself at sales and auctions, where damaged goods go for the veriest trifle in cash. In proof of this, take thirty of his similes, each of which, when we endeavour to recollect the time we first heard it, makes us, alas ! old, old, old men!

"How like a star she fell and passed away." "Her lusty sons like summer-morning gay.'

"In vesture joyous as the clouds of morn." "Like shadows have the mighty pass'd away."

M

"An arrowy cloud, that like a hail-storm beat."

To the compositions of a man so familiar, so hand-in-glove with commonplaces, so wedded to the trivial as these shoals of similes shew Mr Atherstone to be, it would be vain to look for one single beauty of any sort peculiarly his own-one single expression pregnant with native or original thought or emotion. There are none such in the Fall of Nineveh -except perhaps one-and so far from being a beauty, it is, we think, an absurdity of no mean magnitude. "O'er his golden crest a snowy plume, Lofty and ample, like some haughty dame, Bent proudly as he trod."

Only think of a man going into battle with a woman on his head!

not riding stride-legs on his shoulders-which might be possible-but standing tip-toe on his crest, as if about to dance a pas seul!

How it happens that one man cannot open his mouth without uttering Poetry, and another cannot shut his mouth so as to prevent an issue of Prose, we know not; but so it iswith Wordsworth and with Atherstone. Wordsworth tells you to look at a particular tree, and while he speaks, you become like himself -a Druid. That one oak becomes the shrine of some fair or fearful superstition-not for worlds would you dare to touch its leaves with unhallowed hands, be they laden with dew or blood. The old forest groans, or is glad, at the presence of mighty Pan. You forget that there is such an instrument as an axe, and feel as if the glimmer or the gloom of the woods had been inviolate through all the ages of time. You know then what the bard meant, when, in the Excursion, he said that the religion of his grey-haired wanderer was the religion of the woods." The great God of Nature is felt to have his temple in that shadowy solitude; the stillness sanctifies your 'Noisy hours seem spirit; life's " moments in the being of the eternal silence."

Mr Atherstone bids you look at a tree, and you immediately begin calculating how many cubic feet of timber in its bole and branches; how many ton of bark it may send to the tan-yard-what a cawing of rooks there will be when it is felled; and what a world of wains and employ. We will speak of kneewaggons its removal will bring into timbers, ribs, planks, flag-staffs, and masts-all excellent things in their way, nor yet in certain hands unpoetical-but in his, prosaic in the extreme; for he shall describe the whole concern in the spirit of a timber-merchant, engaged in a speculative contract with the Navy a joint-stock company Board, or about to build a mill.

Two things are certain; one, that some souls, almost from birth, see into the heart of Nature, the mighty mother, on whose bosom they have fed and slept, and hung delighted; another, that they, by the fiat of fate

mysterious agency-have been suf

fered to finish their self-education in solemn and sacred places, in that school where all is silent, save the spheres, and where there is but one gracious and benign Teacher; no fierce and feeble ushers; neither tyrants nor fags; and all the years one holiday. Thus instructed in eye and ear, in sense and in soul, the pupil becomes, in good time, a priest-a poet-and all his songs are true to the shrine at whose altar they were inspired; his words are embodied meanings, spiritualities vocalized; he plays upon the sunbeams as on a many-stringed instrument; the creation is a harp that to his lightest touch gives forth" still sad music," or to the hand of him inspired it responds in a thunder-crash. He remembers not the time when he first learned the gamut; but what glorious solos does he now play! and, when kindred spirits are met together, what celestial concertos! There is 66 more meaning than meets the ear" in that expression of Milton's about Shak speare

"Fancy's child, Warbling his native wood-notes wild." That assemblage of words seems simple, but it is at the same time sublime. We hear the song of a solitary nightingale, "when all the heavens are mute." How sweet, yet how strong-how simple, yet how rich— how pensive, yet how impassioned how merry, yet how melancholyhow airy, yet how profound-how like a voice from heaven, yet how cleaving to earth-as it rises and falls, how spiritual, yet how thrilled through a mortal frame: while it breathes life; and as it ceases not, the silence is-death. There seems a struggle between mortality and immortality in that midnight hymn, ascending from terrestrial shades to the eternal skies!

All good poets and painters must thus have communed with their hearts, and been still-or with the still heart of Nature communing with them her humble disciples. Some scholars are allowed to finish their education; but the majority are too soon taken from that school, and sent to far different seminaries,where, too forgetful of the blessed study and play-ground among the woods and by the rivers, they are proud to take their degrees! Others, again, never saw such a school at all-they

know not even of its existence. Yet will they prate and prattle about the lore that could be learned there only; and lead one long life of libels on Nature and her elements, who takes vengeance upon them, by sending sore throats and pulmonary complaints among the poetasters, who go, sooner or later, coughing and wheezing into unhonoured and forgotten graves. On such favourite children as Wordsworth, again, Nature breathes and blows benignly; and we have often seen him walking in a shower without being visibly wet, while coaches have wheeled past with their crew of prosaics all soaked to the skin. If, in a gloomy day, there be a shower of sunshine going, it is sure to settle upon his head; and when the silence is getting too severe, some gloomy but gracious cloud is always at hand with its thunder, to regale the Bard with a flight of echoes.

We

But to return to Nineveh. should characterize the language the diction of this unhappy bookas a coarse, loosely-woven web of words-warp and woof of whiteybrown wool-tamboured with clusters of fantastic figures and flowers in red and purple silk of the most glaring colours-bad prose embossed with worse poetry. Of all true poets the diction is, by very inspiration, divine. The words seem alive and winged, like bees round the lips of Plato-like birds, many-tongued, yet all harmonious in the grove that rings with linnets in its coppices, thrushes on its tree-tops, and larks far and wide and high up in its cloudless firmament-like the hymns of a hundred flowing and falling waters, rills, streams, rivers, torrents, lakes, and cataracts, each with its several echo, till music seems interfused with all nature. The versification of Milton and Wordsworth, is it not often grand as the music of Handel's Messiah, or Haydn's Creation! For, besides the unconscious inspiration of genius breathing itself forth again in harmonies, in the strains of all poets you feel the meditative mastery of the highest and profoundestart. Exquisite adaptations-finest proportions-risings and fallings graceful and majestic-ebbings and flowings sea-like and sublime-fluctuations of feeling, that in their faintest movements we know will not fail or fade entirely away out