intense grief; and the critics, ignorant of the action of mind, and more ready to make a show of their own acuteness and taste, than to learn humbly of this greatest of philosophers, have set it down to his ignorance of rules, and fondness for conceits.

Besides, Mr. Pollok's particulars, when taken singly, too often fail of the intended effect, from want of peculiarity—that which gives individuality. Now, one may go on forever multiplying particulars, but while each has this air of generality, he will not only come short of his object, but also produce weariness. Take as a favorable specimen of our author, his character of Lord Byron. Surely, no thoughtful man can read it without being made more thoughtful. It contains many exceptions to our remarks, and many fine reflections, yet before getting through it we catch ourselves casting an eye forward to see where it will end; while reading it, we wish it was not quite so long; when we have finished, we wish again that it had not been so long: we leave it with self-dissatisfaction that we were not more affected by what we cannot but allow to be good, and wish we could admire it more than we do. The truth is, that with all there is to praise in it, it lacks the absorbing power.

It is not alone the want of that peculiar poetic vitality, upon which we have said so much, nor the lengthening out of particulars, and the dwelling too long upon a subject, that weakens the effect. Notwithstanding all the merits of this work, the language gives it a certain heaviness. We have said that there is no want of plainness in Mr. Pollok, that he never writes without meaning, and that we take his thoughts fully and at once. But his style is not poetic. We do not mean that it is not sufficiently ornamented. Ornamental terms are well nigh used up; and the poet nowadays must trust almost solely to the happy combination of the simplest words. No poet, however great he may be, will ever appear in that Asiatic gorgeousness in which Milton robed himself, his costly drapery lying full and rich, fold over fold. But the simple terms of our language never can grow old. Taking endless changes of combination, they will ever have in them the complexion, life, and vigor of the thoughts and feelings that gave them birth.

This brings us round again to the same cause with that of the former mentioned defects of our author-a want of the poetic temperament in all its warmth and vitality. We have acquitted him of a certain kind of fashionable wordiness; but we cannot of another kind. He abounds in epithets; and these too often of a character so general, that they might almost as well be applied to any other object, as to that with which they are connected. This remark belongs in a degree, and as far as can be consistently with an intelligible expression of strong thought, to his style generally. Select any of Shakspeare's better passages, and try to take out the smallest word from one of them; so closely is his work joined together, so

exactly proportioned and fitted is each part to each, and each to the whole, that should you attempt to remove one-timber, the building would come tumbling down upon your heads. There is, we think, a commonness in Mr. Pollok's style; there certainly is diffusenessa want of tenseness. He may be called a strong` man; but his bulkiness gives him a somewhat heavy movement. The same bone and muscle and nerve in a smaller and more compact frame would show action and energy. He should not be harshly censured for this; for nature formed him so. And you might as well attempt to make a colorist of a painter who wants an eye for color, as to cure such a defect. Language, though it is something more, is the poet's only color.

Mr. Pollok cannot be so easily excused in another particulara fault which is hardly to be accounted for in a man of his good sense and independent thinking-we mean in his imitations. In the first two books we met with so much of Milton's structure of sentences, and so many of his favorite terms of expression, that we had no expectation of finding Mr. Pollok so manly and profound a thinker as he turns out to be. He works himself pretty free of this fault, as he gets used to his labor; though occasional imitations occur, and these so close, that you cannot but smile now and then, even in the most serious passages.

He sometimes affects certain words; these, however, are few; such as,

"The frothy orator who busked his tales."

"His lures, with baits that pleased the senses, busked."

"How happily

Plays yonder child that busks the mimic babe."

We have," eldest hell," "eldest energy," "eldest skill," and often the old word, "whiles." The sentences frequently end with an adjective brought feebly in to fill up the measure. Violence is sometimes mistaken for strength; and where he attempts sarcasm, after the manner of Cowper, unlike Cowper, he not seldom misses his aim. In Young's bad taste, he occasionally introduces conceits into the more serious passages; and we find him aiming at impression by repeating an emphatic word; which is little better than trick in oratory, and very bad in poetry.

Having seen Mr. Pollok most extravagantly and indiscriminately praised, we have dwelt the longer upon his faults and deficiences; being aware that nothing so endangers a man's just reputation as excessive commendation. Our author has already reaped some of the natural consequences of this conduct in his admirers; and we know of no surer way to secure to him his fair deserts, than by giving up freely all which we are not satisfied he is entitled to.

His main defects were probably radical, and such as would have gone with him through life, though he had lived to be old.

Time and culture may improve what a man hath, but cannot give him what nature has denied him.

After all, let us be neither too positive nor too sweeping in our judgement. There are other passages, besides some which we shall quote, which are strictly poetic; and we have never intended to apply this epithet loosely, or with indulgence. The Poem is virtually without machinery; and so great a work will almost of necessity go sluggishly without it. Had a more dramatic form been given to it, qualities might, perhaps, have been developed, in which we have all along supposed the author to be wanting, and more vividness, energy, and closeness have been imparted to his whole work. If he had in him the power of conceiving a character of sufficient individuality, and of possessing himself fully of it, the character, as always happens in such a case, would have taken possession of him in turn, and have spoken through him, as though he had been its mere organ. There is much of loose writing, and illogical use of terms, in the tales of the great novelist of the day; but these will be found out of his dialogue, and never in it.

Mr. Pollok also chose blank verse. This tasks a man more than any other form of writing, and least of all forms endures diffuseness.

Taking these difficulties into consideration, and recollecting that a man never can put forth all his strength when he has a misgiving at heart that what he is undertaking may be beyond his strength, no one can say how much greater poetic power Mr. Pollok might have shown, had he undertaken a work requiring less. He appears to have been a truly religious man; and it may be that the very awfulness of his subject subdued rather than aroused all his energies; that he felt himself a mere mortal, setting his foot upon holy ground.

His mind was in a striking degree meditative. He must have devoted to wise and enlarged meditation no small portion of those early years, which are spent by others in little else than acquiring knowledge. His work is not a mixture of youthful crudities and clever thoughts, but is remarkably characterized by maturity of thinking. He writes like an old observer of men, one who had looked long enough upon the world to have seen just what all its glosses are worth. He was not to be deceived into a false estimate of human nature, either by the pride of his own heart, or by short and disconnected views of the hearts of others. He not only had penetration sufficient to perceive wherein lay the errors of the philosophy of former times, but he had independence and clearsightedness enough to look quite through the fallacies of his own day, and to see, moreover, that most of the boasted discoveries in what is styled the philosophy of religion, were little better than old errors in new dresses; that many of the schemes, so vaunted of for their originality, were but modified forms of those

which moved in the twilight, when the old revelation was set upon nigh all the world, and the sun of righteousness was not risen to bless it,-schemes, which floated in that light to darken it when it did at length arise, and which would overshadow it now, were not God more than man.

There are men who have a certain acuteness at detecting a fallacy, and an activity and clearness of intellect, which work very well within a particular sphere; but who want a largeness of thought to enable them to follow out the many and far-reaching relations of a great scheme, and to comprehend it as a whole. Mr. Pollok had such a comprehensive mind, and he brought the exercise of it to the greatest of all subjects-the relation of man to his God, and to a future state. He appears to have wrought with it, clear of the perversion of human vanity, and with a most sincere and humble reliance upon his Maker for aid. We believe his prayer in the last book came from a fervent heart, and that it was one which often went up from him during his labor.

"Jehovah! breath upon my soul; my heart

Enlarge; my faith increase; increase my hope;
My thoughts exalt; my fancy sanctify,
And all my passions, that I near thy throne
May venture, unreproved."

He seems to have been led to this theme from a holy love of it; and to have been sustained by the hope that he was laboring in the cause of God, and for his fellow-men. Notwithstanding what we have said of his deficiences, we trust his labor will not be in vain. The holy cast of thought which pervades his work from beginning to end, the striking manner in which he sets forth man's fall from holiness, and the evil of sin, not only as it is discovered in our acts, but in its perversions of our reason, and in its pollution of the secret springs of our hearts, and in our littleness and folly, compared with that grandeur and wisdom to which God ordained us-these, and all he has written, make the book an excellent monitor to go to, when we are getting lightminded, or growing into too good a conceit of ourselves, from comparing ourselves with others, or from hearing eulogies upon human nature, when we should have been listening to admonitions upon our sins, and fearful warnings against their dangers. There is, likewise, so much clear strong thinking in the book, that a serious plain sense man will find it so in accordance with his own mind as to awaken sympathy, and give it a hold upon his attention. Above all, that comprehensive view of God's government, to which we have alluded, adds to this work a double value in these days of bold assumptions, grounded on careless and imperfect notions of the nature of sin, and partial and half-way reasonings upon the character and providence of God, days of daring doubt, too, as to the fearful woes pronounced against sin, because, forsooth, they sort not with our no

tions of benevolence. Would that he, who thus speculates, would remember the words of Baxter, that "self-discovery is not the least part of illumination;" then might his eyes be opened to what he is, and what he should have been; then might he "perceive, that it is not possible for the best of men, much less for the wicked, to be competent judges of the desert of sin;" then might he understand that benevolence itself may require what had before so shocked his perverted reason, and be ready to say to himself, in the language of the same beautiful writer, "Alas, we are all both blind and partial. You can never know fully the desert of sin, till you fully know the evil of sin and you can never fully know the evil of sin, till you fully know the excellency of the soul which it deformeth, and the excellency of the holiness which it doth obliterate; and the reason and excellency of the glory which it violateth; and the excellency of the glory which it doth despise ; and the excellency of the office of reason which it treadeth down; no, nor till you know the infinite excellency, almightiness and holiness of that God against whom it is committed. When you fully know all these, you shall fully know the desert of sin." Believe the word, then, and be humble in thy present ignorance;

In the mean time ponder the words of our author:

"Not God, but their own sin,

Condemns them. What could be done, as thou hast heard,
Has been already done; all has been tried,

That wisdom infinite, or boundless grace,
Working together could devise; and all

Has failed. Why now succeed? Though God should stoop,
Inviting still, and send his only Son

To offer grace in hell, the pride, that first
Refused, would still refuse; the unbelief,
Still unbelieving, would deride, and mock;
Nay more, refuse, deride, and mock; for sin,
Increasing still, and growing, day and night,
Into the essence of the soul, become

All sin, makes what in time seemed probable,--
Seemed probable, since God invited them,-
For ever now impossible. Thus they,

According to the eternal laws which bind

All creatures, bind the Uncreated One,

Though we name not the sentence of the Judge,-
Must daily grow in sin and punishment,
Made by themselves their necessary lot,
Unchangeable to all eternity."

And again;

"The form thou saw'st was Virtue, ever fair.
Virtue, like God, whose excellent majesty,
Whose glory virtue is, is omnipresent.
No being, once created rational,

Accountable, endowed with moral sense,