The object of his first adventure is at length disco- | drift," "hanging upon the rainbow's rim," having his vered in a "brown-backed sturgeon," who

Like the heaven-shot javelin
Springs above the waters blue,
And, instant as the star-fall light
Plunges him in the deep again,
But leaves an arch of silver bright,
The rainbow of the moony main.
From this rainbow our Ouphe succeeds in catching,
by means of his colen-bell cup, a "droplet of the spark-
ling dew." One half of his task is accordingly done-

"brow adorned with all the jewels of the sky," "sitting
within the Pleiad ring," "resting upon Orion's belt,"
"riding upon the lightning's gleam," "dancing upon
the orbed moon," and "swimming within the milky
way."

Lady, he cries, I have sworn to-night
On the word of a fairy knight

To do my sentence task aright.

The queen, therefore, contents herself with bidding the Fay an affectionate farewell-having first directed His wings are pure, for the gem is won. him carefully to that particular portion of the sky On his return to land, the ripples divide before him, where a star is about to fall. He reaches this point while the water-spirits, so rancorous before, are obse-in safety, and in despite of the "fiends of the cloud" quiously attentive to his comfort. Having tarried a who "bellow very loud," succeeds finally in catching a moment on the beach to breathe a prayer, he "spreads "glimmering spark" with which he returns triumphanthis wings of gilded blue" and takes his way to the elfinly to Fairy-land. The poem closes with an Io Paan court-there resting until the cricket, at two in the chaunted by the elves in honor of these glorious admorning, rouses him up for the second portion of his penance.

His equipments are now an "acorn helmet," a "thistle-down plume," a corslet of the "wild-bee's" skin, a cloak of the "wings of butterflies," a shield of the "shell of the lady-bug," for lance "the sting of a wasp," for sword a "blade of grass," for horse "a fire-fly," and for spurs a couple of "cockle seed." Thus coutred,

ventures.

It is more than probable that from among ten readers of the Culprit Fay, nine would immediately pronounce it a poem betokening the most extraordinary powers of imagination, and of these nine, perhaps five or six, poets themselves, and fully impressed with the truth of what we have already assumed, that Ideality is indeed the ac-soul of the Poetic Sentiment, would feel embarrassed between a half-consciousness that they ought to admire the production, and a wonder that they do not. This embarrassment would then arise from an indistinct conception of the results in which Ideality is rendered Culprit Fay, but the greater part of it is utterly destitute mist" is cast around him-" storm, darkness, sleet and shade" assail him-"shadowy hands" twitch at his character of the poem will, we think, be sufficiently unany evidence of imagination whatever. The general bridle-rein—“ flame-shot tongues" play around him-derstood by any one who may have taken the trouble "fiendish eyes" glare upon him—and

Away like a glance of thought he flies

To skim the heavens and follow far

The fiery trail of the rocket-star.

In the Heavens he has new dangers to encounter.manifest. Of these results some few are seen in the The “shapes of air" have begun their work-a “drizzly

Yells of rage and shrieks of fear Come screaming on his startled ear. Still our adventurer is nothing daunted.

He thrusts before, and he strikes behind, Till he pierces the cloudy bodies through

And gashes the shadowy limbs of wind, and the Elfin makes no stop, until he reaches the "bank of the milky way." He there checks his courser, and watches "for the glimpse of the planet shoot." While thus engaged, however, an unexpected adventure befalls him. He is approached by a company of the "sylphs of Heaven attired in sunset's crimson pall." They dance around him, and "skip before him on the plain." One receiving his "wasp-sting lance," and another taking his bridle-rein,

With warblings wild they lead him on,

To where, through clouds of amber seen,
Studded with stars resplendent shone
The palace of the sylphid queen.

of

to read our foregoing compendium of the narrative. It will be there seen that what is so frequently termed the imaginative power of this story, lies especially-we should have rather said is thought to lie-in the passages we have quoted, or in others of a precisely similar nature. These passages embody, principally, mere specifications of qualities, of habiliments, of punishments, of occupations, of circumstances &c, which the poet has believed in unison with the size, firstly, and secondly with the nature of his Fairies. To all which may be added specifications of other animal existences (such as the toad, the beetle, the lance-fly, the fire-fly and the like) supposed also to be in accordance. An example will best illustrate our meaning upon this point—we take it from page 20.

He put his acorn helmet on ;

It was plumed of the silk of the thistle down:
The corslet plate that guarded his breast
Was once the wild bee's golden vest;
His cloak of a thousand mingled dyes,
Was formed of the wings of butterflies;
His shield was the shell of a lady-bug queen,
Studs of gold on a ground of green;*

A glowing description of the queen's beauty follows; and as the form of an earthly Fay had never been seen before in the bowers of light, she is represented as And the quivering lance which he brandished bright falling desperately in love at first sight with our adven- Was the sting of a wasp he had slain in fight. turous Ouphe. He returns the compliment in some We shall now be understood. Were any of the admirers measure, of course; but, although "his heart bent fit-of the Culprit Fay asked their opinion of these lines, fully," the "earthly form imprinted there" was a secu- they would most probably speak in high terms of the rity against a too vivid impression. He declines, con- imagination they display. Yet let the most stolid and sequently, the invitation of the queen to remain with her and amuse himself by "lying within the fleecy

* Chesnut color, or more slack,
Gold upon a ground of black.

Ben Jonson.

His blue-bell helmet, we have heard,

Was plumed with the down of the humming-bird,
The corslet on his bosom bold

Was once the locust's coat of gold,

His cloak, of a thousand mingled hues,

Was the velvet violet, wet with dews,

His target was the crescent shell

Of the small sea Sidrophel,

And a glittering beam from a maiden's eye
Was the lance which he proudly wav'd on high.

The truth is, that the only requisite for writing verses of this nature, ad libitum, is a tolerable acquaintance with the qualities of the objects to be detailed, and a very moderate endowment of the faculty of Comparison-which is the chief constituent of Fancy or the powers of combination. A thousand such lines may be composed without exercising in the least degree the Poetic Sentiment, which is Ideality, Imagination, or the creative ability. And, as we have before said, the greater portion of the Culprit Fay is occupied with these, or similar things, and upon such, depends very nearly, if not altogether, its reputation. We select another example from page 25.

the most confessedly unpoetical of these admirers only a supposition as we have before endeavored to show, try the experiment, and he will find, possibly to his ex- not altogether paradoxical. Most assuredly we think treme surprise, that he himself will have no difficulty not. In the case of a great majority of readers the whatever in substituting for the equipments of the Fairy, only sentiment aroused by compositions of this order as assigned by the poet, other equipments equally com- is a species of vague wonder at the writer's ingenuity, fortable, no doubt, and equally in unison with the pre- and it is this indeterminate sense of wonder which conceived size, character, and other qualities of the passes but too frequently current for the proper influequipped. Why we could accoutre him as well our- ence of the Poetic power. For our own parts we plead selves-let us see. guilty to a predominant sense of the ludicrous while occupied in the perusal of the poem before us-a sense whose promptings we sincerely and honestly endeavored to quell, perhaps not altogether successfully, while penning our compend of the narrative. That a feeling of this nature is utterly at war with the Poetic Sentiment, will not be disputed by those who comprehend the character of the sentiment itself. This character is finely shadowed out in that popular although vague idea so prevalent throughout all time, that a species of melancholy is inseparably connected with the higher manifestations of the beautiful. But with the numerous and seriously-adduced incongruities of the Culprit Fay, we find it generally impossible to connect other ideas than those of the ridiculous. We are bidden, in the first place, and in a tone of sentiment and language adapted to the loftiest breathings of the Muse, to imagine a race of Fairies in the vicinity of West Point. We are told, with a grave air, of their camp, of their king, and especially of their sentry, who is a woodtick. We are informed that an Ouphe of about an inch in height has committed a deadly sin in falling in love with a mortal maiden, who may, very possibly, be six feet in her stockings. The consequence to the Ouphe is-what? Why, that he has "dyed his wings,""broken his elfin chain," and "quenched his flame-wood lamp." And he is therefore sentenced to what? To catch a spark from the tail of a falling star, and a drop of water from the belly of a sturgeon. What are his equipments for the first adventure? An acorn helmet, a thistle-down plume, a butterfly cloak, a lady-bug shield, cockle-seed spurs, and a fire-fly horse. How does he ride to the second? On the back of a bull-frog. What are his opponents in the one? "Drizzly mists," "sulphur and smoke," "shadowy hands" and "flame-shot tongues." What in the other? "Mailed shrimps," "prickly prongs," "blood-red leeches," "jellied quarls,' stony Here again the faculty of Comparison is alone excrstar fishes," "lancing squabs" and "soldier crabs." Is cised, and no mind possessing the faculty in any ordi- that all? No-Although only an inch high he is in nary degree would find a difficulty in substituting for imminent danger of seduction from a "sylphid queen," the materials employed by the poet other materials dressed in a mantle of "rolled purple," "tied with equally as good. But viewed as mere efforts of the threads of dawning gold," "buttoned with a sparkling Fancy and without reference to Ideality, the lines just star," and sitting under a rainbow with "beamlet eyes" quoted are much worse than those which were taken and a countenance of "lily roon." In our account of from page 20. A congruity was observable in the all this matter we have had reference to the book-and accoutrements of the Ouphe, and we had no trouble to the book alone. It will be difficult to prove us guilty in forming a distinct conception of his appearance when in any degree of distortion or exaggeration. Yet such so accoutred. But the most vivid powers of Comparison are the puerilities we daily find ourselves called upon can attach no definitive idea to even "the loveliest form to admire, as among the loftiest efforts of the human of light," when habited in a mantle of "rolled purple mind, and which not to assign a rank with the proud tied with threads of dawn and buttoned with a star," | trophies of the matured and vigorous genius of England, and sitting at the same time under a rainbow with is to prove ourselves at once a fool, a maligner, and "beamlet" eyes and a visage of "lily roon." no patriot.*

But oh! how fair the shape that lay
Beneath a rainbow bending bright,

She seem'd to the entranced Fay

The loveliest of the forms of light;
Her mantle was the purple rolled
At twilight in the west afar;

'Twas tied with threads of dawning gold,
And button'd with a sparkling star.

Her face was like the lily roon

That veils the vestal planet's hue;

Her eyes, two beamlets from the moon

Set floating in the welkin blue.

Her hair is like the sunny beam,

And the diamond gems which round it gleam
Are the pure drops of dewy even,
That ne'er have left their native heaven.

But if these things evince no Ideality in their author, do they not excite it in others?-if so, we must conclude, that without being himself imbued with the Poetic Sentiment, he has still succeeded in writing a fine poem

99866

A review of Drake's poems, emanating from one of our proudest Universities, does not scruple to make use of the fol

lowing language in relation to the Culprit Fay. "It is, to say the least, an elegant production, the purest specimen of Ideality

As an instance of what may be termed the sublimely | ridiculous we quote the following lines from page 17.

With sweeping tail and quivering fin,
Through the wave the sturgeon flew,
And like the heaven-shot javelin,
He sprung above the waters blue.
Instant as the star-fall light,

He plunged into the deep again,
But left an arch of silver bright
The rainbow of the moony main.
It was a strange and lovely sight
To see the puny goblin there;
He seemed an angel form of light
With azure wing and sunny hair,
Throned on a cloud of purple fair
Circled with blue and edged with white
And sitting at the fall of even
Beneath the bow of summer heaven.

The Fairy's frame was slight; yon fibrous cloud
That catches but the palest tinge of even,
And which the straining eye can hardly seize
When melting into eastern twilight's shadow,
Were scarce so thin, so slight; but the fair star
That gems the glittering coronet of morn,
Sheds not a light so mild, so powerful,

As that which, bursting from the Fairy's form,
Spread a purpureal halo round the scene,
Yet with an undulating motion,

Swayed to her outline gracefully.

In these exquisite lines the Faculty of mere Comparison is but little exercised—that of Idcality in a wonderful degree. It is probable that in a similar case the poet we are now reviewing would have formed the face of the Fairy of the "fibrous cloud," her arms of the "pale tinge of even," her eyes of the "fair stars," and her body of the "twilight shadow." Having so done, his admirers would have congratulated him upon his imagi

The verses here italicized, if considered without their context, have a certain air of dignity, elegance, and chas-nation, not taking the trouble to think that they themselves could at any moment imagine a Fairy of materials tity of thought. If however we apply the context, we are immediately overwhelmed with the grotesque. It Their mistake would be precisely analogous to that of equally as good, and conveying an equally distinct idea. is impossible to read without laughing, such expressions as "It was a strange and lovely sight"-"He seemed many a schoolboy who admires the imagination disan angel form of light"-"And sitting at the fall of played in Jack the Giant-Killer, and is finally rejoiced even, beneath the bow of summer heaven" to a Fairy-the author, since the monsters destroyed by Jack are at discovering his own imagination to surpass that of a goblin-an Ouphe-half an inch high, dressed in an acorn helmet and butterfly-cloak, and sitting on the water in a muscle-shell, with a "brown-backed sturgeon" turning somersets over his head.

In a world where evil is a mere consequence of good, and good a mere consequence of evil-in short where all of which we have any conception is good or bad only by comparison-we have never yet been fully able to appreciate the validity of that decision which would debar the critic from enforcing upon his readers the merits or demerits of a work by placing it in juxta-position with another. It seems to us that an adage based in the purest ignorance has had more to do with this popular feeling than any just reason founded upon common sense. Thinking thus, we shall have no scruple in illustrating our opinion in regard to what is not Ideality or the Poetic Power, by an example of what is. We have already given the description of the Sylphid Queen in the Culprit Fay. In the Queen Mab of Shelley a Fairy

we have ever met with, sustaining in each incident a most bewitching interest. Its very title is enough," &c. &c. We quote these expressions as a fair specimen of the general unphilosophical and adulatory tenor of our criticism.

* As examples of entire poems of the purest ideality, we would cite the Prometheus Vinctus of Eschylus, the Inferno of Dante, Cervantes' Destruction of Numantia, the Comus of Milton, Pope's Rape of the Lock, Burns' Tam O'Shanter, the Auncient Mariner, the Christabel, and the Kubla Khan of Coleridge; and most especially the Sensitive Plant of Shelley, and the Nightingale of Keats. We have seen American poems evincing the faculty in the highest degree.

trouble in imagining some of one hundred and forty. It only about forty feet in height, and he himself has no will be seen that the Fairy of Shelley is not a mere compound of incongruous natural objects, inartificially put together, and unaccompanied by any moral sentiment— but a being, in the illustration of whose nature some physical elements are used collaterally as adjuncts, while the main conception springs immediately or thus apparently springs, from the brain of the poet, enveloped in the moral sentiments of grace, of color, of motion-of the beautiful, of the mystical, of the august-in short

of the ideal.*

It is by no means our intention to deny that in the Cul

prit Fay are passages of a different order from those to
which we have objected-passages evincing a degree of
imagination not to be discovered in the plot, conception,
or general execution of the poem. The opening stanza
will afford us a tolerable example.

'Tis the middle watch of a summer's night-
The earth is dark, but the heavens are bright

Naught is seen in the vault on high

But the moon, and the stars, and the cloudless sky,
And the flood which rolls its milky hue

A river of light on the welkin blue.

The moon looks down on old Cronest,

She mellows the shades of his shaggy breast,

And seems his huge grey form to throw

In a silver cone on the wave below;
His sides are broken by spots of shade,
By the walnut bough and the cedar made,
And through their clustering branches dark
Glimmers and dies the fire-fly's spark-
Like starry twinkles that momently break
Through the rifts of the gathering tempest rack.

There is Ideality in these lines-but except in the case of the words italicized-it is Ideality not of a high order. We have it is true, a collection of natural ob

* Among things, which not only in our opinion, but in the opinion of far wiser and better men, are to be ranked with the mere prettinesses of the Muse, are the positive similes so abundant in the writings of antiquity, and so much insisted upon by the critics of the reign of Queen Anne.

This poem contains also lines of far greater poetie power than any to be found in the Culprit Fay. For example

jects, each individually of great beauty, and, if actually thor would have succeeded better in prose romance than seen as in nature, capable of exciting in any mind, through in poetry, but that his attention would have naturally the means of the Poetic Sentiment more or less inherent fallen into the former direction, had the Destroyer only in all, a certain sense of the beautiful. But to view such spared him a little longer. natural objects as they exist, and to behold them through the medium of words, are different things. Let us pursue the idea that such a collection as we have here will produce, of necessity, the Poetic Sentiment, and we may as well make up our minds to believe that a catalogue of such expressions as moon, sky, trees, rivers, mountains &c, shall be capable of exciting it,—it is merely an extension of the principle. But in the line "the earth is dark, but the heavens are bright" besides the simple mention of the "dark earth" and the "bright heaven," we have, directly, the moral sentiment of the brightness of the sky compensating for the darkness of the earth-and thus, indirectly, of the happiness of a future state compensating for the miseries of a present. All this is effected by the simple introduction of the word but between the "dark heaven" and the "bright earth"-this introduction, however, was prompted by the Poetic Sentiment, and by the Poetic Sentiment alone. The case is analogous in the expression "glimmers and dies," where the imagination is exalted by the moral sentiment of beauty heightened in dissolution.

In one or two shorter passages of the Culprit Fay the poet will recognize the purely ideal, and be able at a glance to distinguish it from that baser alloy upon which we have descanted. We give them without farther

comment.

The winds are whist, and the owl is still
The bat in the shelvy rock is hid
And naught is heard on the lonely hill
But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill
Of the gauze-winged katy-did;
And the plaint of the wailing whippoorwill
Who mourns unseen, and ceaseless sings
Ever a note of wail and wo-
Up to the vaulted firmament
His path the fire-fly courser bent,
And at every gallop on the wind
He flung a glittering spark behind.

He blessed the force of the charmed line,
And he banned the water-goblins' spite,
For he saw around in the sweet moonshine,
Their little wee faces above the brine,
Giggling and laughing with all their might
At the piteous hap of the Fairy wight.

The poem "To a Friend" consists of fourteen Spenserian stanzas. They are fine spirited verses, and probably were not supposed by their author to be more. Stanza the fourth, although beginning nobly, concludes with that very common exemplification of the bathos, the illustrating natural objects of beauty or grandeur by reference to the tinsel of artificiality.

Oh! for a seat on Appalachia's brow,
That I might scan the glorious prospects round,
Wild waving woods, and rolling floods below,
Smooth level glades and fields with grain embrowned,
High heaving hills, with tufted forests crowned,
Rearing their tall tops to the heaven's blue dome,
And emerald isles, like banners green unwound,
Floating along the lake, while round them roam
Bright helms of billowy blue, and plumes of dancing foam.

The stars have lit in heaven their lamps of gold,
The viewless dew falls lightly on the world;
The gentle air that softly sweeps the leaves
A strain of faint unearthly music weaves:
As when the harp of heaven remotely plays,
Or cygnets wail-or song of sorrowing fays
That float amid the moonshine glimmerings pale,
On wings of woven air in some enchanted vale.*
Niagara is objectionable in many respects, and in
none more so than in its frequent inversions of language,
and the artificial character of its versification. The
invocation,

Roar, raging torrent! and thou, mighty river,
Pour thy white foam on the valley below!
Frown ye dark mountains, &c.

is ludicrous—and nothing more. In general, all such
invocations have an air of the burlesque. In the pre-
sent instance we may fancy the majestic Niagara re-
plying, "Most assuredly I will roar, whether, worm!
thou tellest me or not."

The American Flag commences with a collection of those bald conceits, which we have already shown to have no dependence whatever upon the Poetic Power -springing altogether from Comparison.

When Freedom from her mountain height
Unfurled her standard to the air,
She tore the azure robe of night

And set the stars of glory there.
She mingled with its gorgeous dyes
The milky baldric of the skies,
And striped its pure celestial white
With streakings of the morning light;
Then from his mansion in the sun
She called her eagle bearer down
And gave into his mighty hand

The symbol of her chosen land.

Let us reduce all this to plain English, and we have-
what? Why, a flag, consisting of the " azure robe of
night,"
," "set with stars of glory," interspersed with
"streaks of morning light," relieved with a few pieces
of "the milky way," and the whole carried by an
eagle bearer," that is to say, an eagle ensign, who
bears aloft this "symbol of our chosen land” in his
"mighty hand," by which we are to understand his claw.
In the second stanza, the "thunder-drum of Heaven"
is bathetic and grotesque in the highest degree-a com-
mingling of the most sublime music of Heaven with the
most utterly contemptible and common-place of Earth.
The two concluding verses are in a better spirit, and
might almost be supposed to be from a different hand.
The images contained in the lines,

When Death careering on the gale
Sweeps darkly round the bellied sail,
And frighted waves rush wildly back,
Before the broadside's reeling rack,

are of the highest order of Ideality. The deficiencies

The expression "woven air," much insisted upon by the

In the Extracts from Leon, are passages not often sur-friends of Drake, seems to be accredited to him as original. It

passed in vigor of passionate thought and expression and which induce us to believe not only that their au

is to be found in many English writers-and can be traced back
to Apuleius who calls fine drapery ventum textilem.
VOL. II.-43*

are consequently disappointed when the stanza pro-are the defects and not the beauties of Don Juan. They