gling.' For its sylvan gaiety, 'bathing in leafy greenness,' and full of the sap and savour of 'the jolly Spring,' this pastoral deserves a place, somewhere half-hidden, between Leigh Hunt and Keats. It has more sincerity than the one and less rich ardour than the other, but it shows us the approved wit in a new and not less delightful aspect. Some of the poems in his collected 'Poetical Works' are remarkable in other ways, sometimes lightly humorous, sometimes full of strange meditation, like the 'Address to a Mummy,' sometimes, as in 'The Murderer's Confession,' as grotesquely horrible as Hood.

CAMPBELL shares with Longfellow the position of the favourite poet in elementary schools, where verse is learnt by heart as an exercise. There his good poems and his bad poems are equally appreciated: 'Lord Ullin's Daughter' neither more nor less than 'Hohenlinden,' and 'The Harper' than the 'Battle of the Baltic.' In his own lifetime Byron could say, meaning what he said: 'We are all wrong except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell.' It could be said, without apparent extravagance, by Campbell's not too considerate biographer, Cyrus Redding, that one of his long poems, 'Gertrude of Wyoming,' combines in itself the best characteristics of the classic and romantic styles, in that just medium which forms the truest principle for modern poetry'; and of the other equally famous long poem, "The Pleasures of Hope,' that it belonged to 'that species of poetical composition which can alone be expected to attain in the eyes of true taste a classical and healthy longevity.' He was blamed for his too conscious and

1· (1) The Pleasures of Hope, 1799. (2) Gertrude of Wyoming, 1809. (3) O'Connor's Child, 1810. (4) Theodoric, 1824. (5) Miscellaneous Poems, 1824. (6) The Pilgrim of Glencoe, 1842.

too deliberate art, for 'the smell of the lamp' which clung about his verse. To-day his audience is found on the lower benches of day-schools; that audience has been faithful to him for at least two generations; but it has never heard of 'Gertrude of Wyoming' or of 'The Pleasures of Hope,' in which Campbell's contemporaries saw 'intimations' for him 'of immortality.'

The problem is curious, and there are complications in it; for, while all the bookish and ambitious verse has been forgotten, some of the simple verse which has remained popular is not less worthless, while some of it, a very little, has qualities more or less unique in English poetry. How are we to explain these compromises and caprices of posterity?

Campbell lived his whole life at a great distance from reality, always believing what he wanted to believe and denying what he did not want to believe. He was not a dreamer who could transpose the worlds and be content in either; he was fitful, essentially unreal, a faint-hearted evader of reality. In a conversation which might have come direct out of 'The Egoist,' he is seen defending Mrs. Siddons against a criticism whose justice he does not actually dispute, by saying pettishly: 'I won't admit her want of excellence in anything. She is an old friend of mine.' Himself a persistent critic of his own work, he forgave no other critic, and refused to correct an error which had been discovered by any one but himself. He despised his own 'Hohenlinden,' which he called a 'damned drum and trumpet thing,' and only printed to please Scott. The famous false rhyme in the last stanza 'sepulchre' for what should be sounded 'sepulchry? -he neither admitted nor denied, neither blamed nor defended. We see him wondering whether such a word as 'sepulchry' ever existed, half wishing that it did, yet refusing to adopt it, and concluding weakly that the word as it is 'reads well alone, if we forget that there should be a concinnity with the preceding lines.' He was fastidious without taste, full of alarmed susceptibility; so that

when he was editing Colburn's 'New Monthly' he disliked his best contributor, the one who brought him most that was new, Hazlitt, and was with difficulty persuaded to accept the epical essay on the prize-fight.

The truth is that Campbell was a sentimental egoist, the Sir Willoughby Patterne of poets. His incapability of realising things as they are, until the realisation was forced upon him by some crisis, explains that unreality, that vague rosy tinge, which we find in almost all of his poetry which professes to deal with actual life. In life, as in poetry, the real force of things was not to be wholly evaded. There is a story told of how a stranger repeated to him the words of an old Welsh bard: 'My wife is dead, my son is mad, my harp is unstrung,' and how Campbell burst into tears, for the burden of the triad might have been his own. These profound distresses, it is true, he never met fairly. He tried to forget them, in what his biographers call 'convivial company,' in change of abode, even in unnecessary hack-work. He regarded, we are told, 'poetical composition as a labour,' and the inclination for it 'came upon him only at rare intervals.' It may be that 'his slowness of composition was,' as he says of Carew, 'evidently that sort of care in the poet which saves trouble to his reader.' But not only did he write with labour; poetry was never to him a means of self-expression.

It was the age when poets set themselves tasks in verse, and to Campbell as a young man Rogers' 'Pleasures of Memory,' itself descended from Akenside's 'Pleasures of Imagination,' presented itself as a model of what should be attempted. He found it easy, in 'The Pleasures of Hope,' to surpass his models, but, though one of its lines is continually on our lips to-day,

"T is distance lends enchantment to the view,'

the smooth meandering of verse, with its Micawber-like cheerfulness, becomes drearier and more dismal as we read; and when we have reached

'Come, bright Improvement, on the car of Time,

And rule the spacious world from clime to clime,'

we begin to wonder by what cottage-side poetry has gone to live in the land. With Wordsworth, perhaps, whose 'Lyrical Ballads' have just been published, to the derision of a polite public which applauds 'The Pleasures of Hope!'

Tastes change, they say, and tastes do change, though taste does not. But there is one touchstone which may be applied, apart from all technical qualities, all rules of metre or fashions of speech, whenever verse has a plain thing to say. The verse which takes what has already been finely and adequately said in prose, and makes of it something inferior in mere directness and expressiveness of statement, cannot be good verse. This is what Campbell found in the Bible: 'And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept and as he went, thus he said: "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" And this is what Campbell made of it in 'The Pleasures of Hope':

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'My Absalom!" the voice of Nature cried,
"O that for thee thy father could have died!
For bloody was the deed, and rashly done,
That slew my Absalom!

- my son! my son!""

In this poem one seems to catch the last gasp of the eighteenth century; in 'Gertrude of Wyoming,' published ten years later, we are in the century of 'Childe Harold' and the romantic tales. 'Gertrude' is a tepid romance, such as schoolgirls may dream after reading books of improving travel; a thing all feminine and foppish, written by the man, 'dressed sprucely,' whom Byron calls up for us: 'A blue coat becomes him-so does his new wig.' The blue coat and the new wig are never far away from these Pennsylvanian forests, with their panthers, palm-trees, and flamingoes of the tropics. Unreality is in every languid line.

'So finished he the rhyme (howe'er uncouth)
That true to nature's fervid feelings ran
(And song is but the eloquence of truth)'

says Campbell, vaguely; and I suppose he believed himself to have been 'true to nature's fervid feelings' in his record of the respectable loves of Gertrude and Waldegrave. 'Never insensible to female beauty,' says the commentator, Cyrus Redding, 'and fond of the society of women, it was singular that Campbell, the poet of sentiment and imagery, should have written little or nothing breathing of ardent affection.' Campbell's was, in his own affected phrase,

'The heart that vibrates to a feeling tone';

and here as elsewhere one can imagine him to have been genuinely touched by what, in his way of telling it, fails to touch us. When people read 'Gertrude of Wyoming' they had acquired a taste for poetical narratives; since Rousseau, the virtues of forest folk were esteemed; and the poem, no doubt, responded to some occasion in the public mind. I have tried to find a single line of genuine poetry in its thin trickle of verse, but I have found none. There is in it a little more of what used to be called 'fancy' than in the much later, wholly unsuccessful 'Theodoric'; but it is not appreciably nearer to poetry. The pearly dew of sensibility,' which Hazlitt discovered in its recesses, has not, as he thought it would, 'distilled and collected, like the diamond in the mine'; nor does 'the structure of his fame,' according to the singular metaphor, 'rest on the crystal columns of a polished imagination.' Yet other props and embellishments must be knocked away from the structure of Campbell's fame before we can distinguish what is really permanent in it. There is, first of all, the series of romantic ballads. In 'Lord Ullin's Daughter' and the rest Campbell writes with a methodical building up of circumstantial emotion which in the end becomes ludicrous, from its 'more than usual order.' Few escape absurdity, but