and Turkish craft, which were obliged to «<cut and run»> before the wind, from their unsafe anchorage, some for Tenedos, some for other isles, some for the main, and some it might be for eternity. The sight of these little scudding vessels, darting over the foam in the twilight, now appearing and now disappearing between the waves in the cloud of night, with their peculiarly white sails (the Levant sails not being of « coarse canvas,» but of white cotton), skimming along as quickly, but less safely than the sea-mews which hovered over them; their evident distress, their reduction to fluttering specks in the distance, their crowded succession, their littleness, as contending with the giant element, which made our stout forty-four's teak timbers (she was built in India), creak again; their aspect and their motion, all struck

its own poetry upon the waters, and heightens theirs. I do not deny, that the waves and winds,» and above all << the sun,» are highly poetical; we know it to our cost, by the many descriptions of them in verse: but if the waves bore only the foam upon their bosoms, if the winds wafted only the sea-weed to the shore, if the sun shone neither upon pyramids, nor tleets, nor fortresses, would its beams be equally poetical? I think not: the poetry is at least reciprocal. Take away the ship of the line» «swinging round» the «calm water,» and the calm water becomes a somewhat monotonous thing to look at, particularly if not transparently clear; witness the thousands who pass by without looking on it at all. What was it attracted the thousands to the launch? they might have seen the poetical «calm water,» at Wapping, or in the « London Dock,» or in the Pad-me as something far more «poetical» than the mere dington Canal, or in a horse-pond, or in a slop-basin, or in any other vase. They might have heard the poetical winds howling through the chinks of a pig-stye, or the garret window; they might have seen the sun shining on a footman's livery, or on a brass warming-pan; but could the calm water,» or the « wind, or the «< sun,» make all, or any of these «poetical?» I think not. Mr Bowles admits « the ship» to be poetical, but only from those accessaries: now if they confer poetry so as to make one thing poetical, they would make other things poetical; the more so, as Mr Bowles calls a ship of the line»> without them, that is to say, its « masts and sails and streamers,» « blue bunting,» and « coarse canvas,» and « tall poles.» So they are; and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and flesh is grass, and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much poesy.

Did Mr Bowles ever gaze upon the sea? I presume that he has, at least upon a sea-piece. Did any painter ever paint the sea only, without the addition of a ship, boat, wreck, or some such adjunct? Is the sea itself a more attractive, a more moral, a more poetical object with or without a vessel, breaking its vast but fatiguing monotony? Is a storm more poetical without a ship? or, in the poem of the Shipwreck, is it the storm or the ship which most interests? both much undoubtedly; but without the vessel, what should we care for the tempest? It would sink into mere descriptive poetry, which in itself was never esteem'd a high order of that art.

broad, brawling, shipless sea, and the sullen winds, could possibly have been without them.

The Euxine is a noble sea to look upon, and the port of Constantinople the most beautiful of harbours, and yet I cannot but think that the twenty sail of the line, some of one hundred and forty guns, rendered it more «poetical» by day in the sun, and by night perhaps still more, for the Turks illuminate their vessels of war in a manner the most picturesque, and yet all this is artificial. As for the Euxine, I stood upon the Symplegades-I stood by the broken altar still exposed to the winds upon one of them-I felt all the «poetry» of the situation, as I repeated the first lines of Medea; but would not that «poetry» have been heightened by the Argo? It was so even by the appearance of any merchant vessel arriving from Odessa. But Mr Bowles says, why bring your ship off the stocks?» for no reason that I know, except that ships are built to be launched. The water, etc. undoubtedly HEIGHTENS the poetical associations, but it does not make them; and the ship amply repays the obligation they aid each other; the water is more poetical with the ship-the ship less so without the water. But even a ship, laid up in dock, is a grand and poetical sight. Even an old boat, keel upwards, wrecked upon the barren sand, is a «poetical » object (and Wordsworth, who made a poem about a washing-tub and a blind boy, may tell you so as well as 1); whilst a long extent of sand and unbroken water, I look upon myself as entitled to talk of naval mat-without the boat, would be as like dull prose as any ters, at least to poets-with the exception of Walter pamphlet lately published. Scott, Moore, and Southey, perhaps (who have been voyagers), I have swam more miles than all the rest of them together now living ever sailed, and have lived for months and months on ship-board; and during the whole period of my life abroad, have scarcely ever passed a month out of sight of the ocean: besides being brought up from two years till ten on the brink of it. I recollect, when anchored off Cape Sigeum, in 1810, in an English frigate, a violent squall coming on at sunset, so violent as to make us imagine that the ship would part cable, or drive from her anchorage. Mr Hobhouse and myself, and some officers, had been up the Dardanelles to Abydos, and were just returned in time. The aspect of a storm in the Archipelago is as poetical as need be, the sea being particularly short, dashing, and dangerous, and the navigation intricate and broken by the isles and currents. Cape Sigeum, the tumuli of the Troad, Lemnos, Tenedos, all added to the associations of the time. But what seemed the most «poetical» of all at the moment, were the numbers (about two hundred) of Greek

What makes the poetry in the image of the «marble waste of Tadmor,» or Grainger's « Ode to Solitude,»> so much admired by Johnson? Is it the «marble,» or the « waste,» the artificial or the natural object. The

waste» is like all other wastes; but the « marble» of Palmyra makes the poetry of the passage as of the place.

But

The beautiful but barren Hymettus, the whole coast of Attica, her hills and mountains, Pentelicus, Anchesmus, Philopappus, etc. etc., are in themselves poetical, and would be so if the name of Athens, of Athenians, and her very ruins, were swept from the earth. am I to be told that the «nature» of Attica would be more poetical without the art of the Acropolis? of the Temple of Theseus? and of the still all Greek and glorious monuments of her exquisitely artificial genius? Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the Parthenon, or the rock on which it stands? The COLUMNS of Cape Colonna, or the Cape itself? The rocks at the foot of it, or the recollection that Falconer's

arts. In landscape painting, the great artist does not
give you a literal copy of a country, but he invents and
composes one. Nature, in her actual aspect, does not
furnish him with such existing scenes as he requires.
Even where he presents you with some famous city, or
celebrated scene from mountain or other nature, it
must be taken from some particular point of view, and
with such ligist, and shade, and distance, etc. as serve
not only to heighten its beauties, but to shadow its de-
formities. The poetry of nature alone, exactly as she
appears, it not sufficient to bear him out. The
of his painting is not the portrait of the sky of nature;
it is a composition of different skies, observed at diffe-
rent times, and not the whole copied from any particu-
lar day. And why? Because Nature is not lavish of
her beauties; they are widely scattered, and occasionally
displayed, to be selected with care, and gathered with
difficulty.

pare his beloved's nose to a «tower» on account of its length, but of its symmetry; and, making allowance for eastern hyperbole and the difficulty of finding a discreet image for a female nose in nature, it is perhaps as good a figure as any other.

Art is not inferior to nature for poetical purposes. What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial syminetry of their position and movements. A Highlandvery skyer's plaid, a Mussulman's turban, and a Roman toga, are more poetical than the tattooed or untattooed buttocks of a New Sandwich savage, although they were described by William Wordsworth himself like the «< idiot in his glory.»

Of sculpture I have just spoken. It is the great scope of the sculptor to heighten nature into heroic beauty, i. e. in plain English, to surpass his model. When Canova forms a statue, he takes a limb from one, a hand from another, a feature from a third, and a shape, it may be, from a fourth, probably at the same time improving upon all, as the Greek of old did in embodying his Venus.

Ask a portrait painter to describe his agonies in accommodating the faces with which Nature and his sitters have crowded his painting-room to the principles of his art; with the exception of perhaps ten faces in as many millions, there is not one which he can venture to give without shading much and adding more. Nature, exactly, simply, barely nature, will make no great artist of any kind, and least of all a poet-the most artificial, perhaps, of all artists in his very essence. With regard to natural imagery, the poets are obliged to take some of their best illustrations from art. You say that << a fountain is as clear or clearer than glass,» to express its beauty

O fons Bandusia, splendidior vito!.

I have seen as many mountains as most men, and more fleets than the generality of landsmen: and, to my mind, a large convoy with a few sail of the line to conduct them, is as noble and as poetical a prospect as all that inanimate nature can produce. I prefer the « mast of some great ammiral,» with all its tackle, to the Scotch fir or the Alpine tannen: and think that more poetry has been made out of it. In what does the infinite superiority of << Falconer's Shipwreck,» over all other shipwrecks, consist? In his admirable application of the terms of his art; in a poet-sailor's description of the sailor's fate. These very terms, by his application, make the strength and reality of his poem. Why? because he was a poet, and in the hands of a poet art will not be found less ornamental than nature. It is precisely in general nature, and in stepping out of his element, that Falconer fails; where he digresses to speak of ancient Greece, and << such branches of learning.»>

In Dyer's Grongar Hill, upon which his fame rests, the very appearance of Nature herself is moralised into an artificial image:

Thus is Nature's verture wrought,
To instruct our wandering thought;
Thus she dresses green and gay.
To disperse our cares away..

And here also we have the telescope, the mis-use of

In the speech of Mark Antony, the body of Cæsar is which, from Milton, has rendered Mr Bowles so triumphdisplayed, but so also is his mantle :

ant over Mr Campbell.

So we mistake the future's face,
Eyed through Hope's deluding glass..

And here a word, en passant, to Mr Campbell:
As yon summits, soft and fair,
Clad in colours of the air,
Which, to those who journey near,
Barren brown, and rough appear,
Still we tread the same coarse way-
The present's still a cloudy day..

If the poet had said that Cassius had run his fist through
the rent of the mantle, it would have had more of Mr
Bowles's « nature» to help it; but the artificial dagger is
more poetical than any natural hand without it. In the
sublime of sacred poetry, «Who is this that cometh
from Edom? with dyed garments from Bozrah?» Would Is not this the original of the far-famed

a the comer» be poetical without his « dyed garments?»
which strike and startle the spectator, and identify the
approaching object.

The mother of Sisera is represented listening for the wheels of his chariot.» Solomon, in his Song, compares the nose of his beloved to « a tower,» which to us appears an eastern exaggeration. If he had said, that her stature was like that of a « tower,» it would have been as poetical as if he had compared her to a tree.

The virtuous Marcia towers above her sex,

is an instance of an artificial image to express a moral superiority. But Solomon, it is probable, did not com

'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, And robes the mountain in its azure buel

To return once more to the sea. Let any one look on the long wall of Malamocco, which curbs the Adriatic, and pronounce between the sea and its master. Surely that Roman work (I mean Roman in conception and performance), which says to the ocean, « thus far shalt thou come, and no further,» and is obeyed, is not less sublime and poetical than the angry waves which vainly break beneath it.

Mr Bowles makes the chief part of a ship's poesy depend on the « wind:» then why is a ship under sail more