GENIUS OF RACINE.

As if instinct with living spirit grew,

Rolling its verdant gulfs of every hue.

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Walpole finds in the swan an emblem of Racine: "The colouring of the swan is pure; his attitudes are graceful; he never displeases you when sailing on his proper element. His feet are ugly; his walk not natural. He can soar, but it is with difficulty. Still, the impression a swan leaves is that of grace. So does Racine." Gray placed him next to Shakspere; and Mr. Hallam thinks that in one passage, where they have both taken the same idea from Plutarch, the French poet has excelled his English brother:

Certainly the single line of Racine embodies a larger spirit than we find in Shakspere's four verses. With regard to grace, no comparison can be allowed. The style of Racine is faultless. Excessive art gives artlessness.

Walpole's habits of thought and study contracted his critical vision. What he did see he saw clearly. But a small circle bounded his view. We find him here ridiculing Thomson. He proposed a parallel for the Seasons and Pleasures of Imagination in the Kings of Hearts and Diamonds; dressed in robes of gaudy patches that do not unite, and only differing from the Knaves by the length of their trains. Akenside may fight his own battles; but think of a man of elegance-who set the fashion in tastepresuming to insult one of the truest poets who ever struck a lyre! Every day adds new strength to the judgment of Pope, that the

Y

faculty of understanding a poem is not less a gift than that of writing it.

However, literary history keeps Walpole in countenance. People have neither eyes nor ears for talents they are without. Crabbe, who was domesticated with Burke in the splendour of his genius and fame-sauntering with him through the garden, or resting upon stiles-had treasured up no sayings of his wonderful friend. That conversation, which excited the alarm and quickened the indolence of Johnson, melted like snow from the memory of the poet. Barrow had no sympathy with Dryden, and Shenstone could not discover the humour of Cervantes. But a more extraordinary instance of a taste paralysed on one side occurs in the Epistle of Collins to Sir Thomas Hanmer, upon his edition of Shakspere. He refuses him any power of depicting womanly character. The soft touch of Fletcher might lay bloom on the cheek of beauty; but Shakspere's pencil was suited only to imbrown coarser manhood:

Of softer mould the gentle Fletcher came,

The next in order, as the next in name;

With pleased attention, midst his scenes we find
Each glowing thought that warms the female mind;
His every strain the Smiles and Graces own,

But stronger Shakspere felt for man alone.

What is Walpole's sneer at Thomson to this? And who will hereafter complain of critical insensibility, or twisted eyesight? The author of the Odes to the Passions and Evening was blind and deaf to Miranda, Imogen, Constance, Juliet, Desdemona, Katherine, and the long gallery of Nature's beauties.

One poet there was whom Walpole could comprehend and admire with all his heart-Dr. Darwin. He told Hannah More that the Botanic Garden was an admirable poem, abounding in similes, "beautiful, fine, and sometimes sublime." The Triumph

DARWIN'S POETRY LIKE BREUGHEL'S PICTURES.

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of Flora he considered to be "enchantingly imagined;" and the description of the creation of the world out of chaos, to be the grandest passage in any author or language! Thomson is a king of diamonds, with a train; and Darwin is the brother and companion of Milton. I am not running down the Lichfield Claudian. In his own way he is surprising. In a certain theatrical splendour of impersonation, such as the man escaping from a house on fire

Pale Danger glides along the falling roof

he may be compared with Mason. His descriptions of the infant on the mother's breast, the army of Cambyses in the desert, and Love riding on the lion, are worthy of being remembered with Gray. He is astonishingly happy in occasional epithets, as when he speaks of the bristling plumes of the eagle. And who may excel the following piece of insect-life?—

Stay thy soft murmuring waters, gentle rill;

Hush, whispering winds; ye rustling leaves, be still;
Rest, silver butterflies, your quivering wings;

Alight, ye beetles, from your airy rings;

Ye painted moths, your gold-eyed plumage furl,
Bow your wide horns, your spiral trunks uncurl;
Glitter, ye glow-worms, on your mossy beds;
Descend, ye spiders, on your lengthen'd threads;
Glide here, ye horned snails, with varnish'd shells;
Ye bee-nymphs, listen in your waxen cells.

I may say of Darwin, in the language of one of his friends, even more grandiloquent than himself, though shrewd and clever withal; his poetry "is a string of poetical brilliants; but the eye will be apt to want the interstitial black velvet to give effect to their lustre." And now that the gossip of his flatterers about the "softness of Claude," the "sublimity of Salvator," &c., is forgotten, criticism may fairly give him his due. Cary compared the Botanic Garden to a picture by Breughel-flower or velvet

Breughel, as he was called. And the resemblance is obvious. If Darwin had painted a Madonna and Child, he would have put them, as Breughel did, in a garland of flowers. James Montgomery writes: "His productions are undistinguished by sentiment or pathos. He presents nothing but pageants to the eye, and leaves nothing to the imagination; every point and object being made out in noon-day clearness, when the sun is nearly vertical, and the shadow is most contracted."

He worked after a bad pattern. Akenside was his favourite; and the reader feels that oppression of light which Gray apprehended in his own splendid fragment on Education and Government. Where all is finished and all shines, the general effect fails.

JULY 26TH.

THE longer we live among books and men, the less we ought to be surprised by anything we read or hear. But this morning my caution was quite overturned by a philosopher and a poet. Thus writes Sir Thomas Browne :-" Another misery there is in affection, that whom we truly love like ourselves we forget their looks, nor can our memory retain the idea of their faces; and it is no wonder, for they are ourselves, and our affection makes their looks our own." And this is the commentary of Mr. Coleridge:-"A thought I have often had, and once expressed it in a line. The fact is certain." Strange delusion! The words should be reversed. Rather say:-We forget our own faces in the faces of those whom we love. We disappear in them-have no living, breathing existence, apart from theirs. Our recollection is not limited to the features, the shape of the countenance, the complexion. Nothing has faded. The colour of the eyes in the

THE SEAT UNDER TREES.

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changefulness of pleasure, sadness, health, or pain, lives before us, as if Titian, or Lely, had kept watching them with a pencil. No canvas absorbs colours, like memory. It makes everything minister to itself. A field-path, a seat under trees, a garden-bed, a particular flower, recal the posture, the look, even the glow of sunset, or fainter moonshine, that tinged the cheek or hair of a dear companion in

said, in after life, that the face of the young girl whom he so passionately loved, used to shine down upon the lonely deck as he stood at the wheel, steering the ship through the tempest. Amid foam and lightning, or the dreadfuller storms of his own troubled spirit, there was she-rebuking, cheering, and blessing him.