ness is sublimity; his only prospect, beauty; he reclines upon earth, whose every clod is a sepulchre of greatness, and he is canopied by a sky

"So cloudless, pure, and beautiful, That God alone is to be seen in heaven."

SENSIBILITY.

A rare instance of sensibility occurred in Paris not long since, in the person of a cook. He had, as he supposed, served up a dinner in the highest gastronomical perfection; his master, however, either faute de bon goût, or from caprice, criticised some of the sauces severely. To survive such dishonor was impossible; there fore Monsieur le Cuisinier stabbed himself in despair,—whether with his spit or a skewer, I have not as yet learned.

GAS ILLUMINATION.

The rosin-gas, which is now so successfully applied to the illumination of the London Institution, has just been adopted in the town of Windsor. There are several minor establishments in different parts of the country.

KAMTSCHATKA.

The Russian government has sent a skilful gardener to Kamtschatka, to instruct the inhabitants in the art of cultivating the earth to the greatest advantage. The climate of Kamtschatka is not so severe as is generally supposed; and many vegetable productions may be raised there, with proper management.

ANECDOTE.

The smell of the gas-lights at Covent-Garden Theatre has been loudly complained of, and led to the temporary closing of the theatre. We can not say that we are ourselves partial to scents of this kind, but the censurers ought to be aware that even on such points there may exist varieties of taste. A lady of very high rank, so far from finding the smell of lamps disagreeable, was wont, when in the country, to lean over the stair balusters, and, blowing out the lights, inhale, with immense satisfaction, the

effluvia of the wicks, exclaiming "Ah! this is delicious; it puts me s much in mind of the Opera House!

THE WORD "AIRT."

There is no English word synonymous with the Scotch "Airt," which must either be expressed by "point of the compass," or the general wor "direction." The word itself is originally Erse. In Welch and Cornish it is arth, or bear; whence, perhaps, Arcturus, one of the northern stars. In modern Irish it is aird, and seems to exist in the Teutonic wart, locus, a place. "What airt is the wind!" is Scots for "What direction is the wind?"

ANECDOTE OF JAMES VI.

When Buchanan was the tutor of James VI., in order to teach him to beware of granting requests too easily, he presented him with two papers to sign, which the prince at once did, without taking the trouble to read them. His astonishment may be guessed, when Buchanan showed him that he had signed a resignation of the thrones of Scotland and England to him (Buchanan) and his heirs.

ORIENTAL PREPARATION OF COFFEE.

The coffee is never roasted nor ground till about to be used, and is then considerably more burned, and reduced to a finer powder, than with us. In preparing it, a small tin vessel, holding exactly the quantity to be used (generally about a wine-glass full), is placed upon the fire, containing at the same time the coffee and sugar, all which are boiled together, poured into a little china cup, and, when the sediment has fallen to the bottom, drunk without any admixture of cream or milk.

NEW WORKS.

The Library of Religious Knowledge. To be conducted by Clergymen of the Church of England. A Number will appear every fortnight, price 6d.-Dunn's Guatemala in 1827, 8vo.-Bible Stories, 12mo.-Dr. Channing's Works, 8vo.

THIRD SERIES.]

THE state of English poetry at the present period is of a very singular nature-what Mr. Coleridge would call a psychological curiosity; and what, even by a less learned appellative, is well worthy of some examination.

It is perfectly clear that, from whatever causes, the art has ceased in a great measure to stimulate the public; that it has lost its activity among the writers; that the most distinguished of our poets have grown reluctant to re-enter the field; and that the most vigorous exertion of our most vigorous poetic minds, is "a Ballad," a "Sonnet to a Mistress's Eyebrow,"-" Lines in an Album," or "Stanzas" in some of those graceful and costly little publications, which gather the poetic flowers for our Christmas firesides, like flowers in French vases, and in which the gilding and coloring of the vase form a large constituent of the popular charm. And the singularity of all this is, that it happens, not when the mind of England is dead, but when it is signally alive;-not when a general somnolency has wrapped faculties of all kinds in kindred dumbness, but when the land is echoing from every corner with the conflict of tongues;— not when men abjure the pen of their fathers, but when millions of those "winged arrows of good and evil," are plunged in hourly inkstands; when, like the Athenians, our countrymen are perpetually seeking 56 ATHENEUM, VOL. 1, 3d series.

some new thing;" when the wheel of publication rolls round, like the wheel of day and night, from January to December, with no pause to cool its fiery axle; when all the dim and dry resources of old literature are forced into the service of new; when the libraries of the great are no more cemeteries of the souls and bodies of books, but open temples and promenades, for the worshipper of the Muse; when every man who can, or cannot, writes; and authorship has become a fourth estate in the legislature.

Yet the muse of muses droops her wing, or disdains to unfold it, but in those brief and partial flights which give us a mere glimpse of its plumage, and are done. The fact has struck other investigators; and the consultation of the "psychologists" has closed like many another, in leaving the matter more puzzled than ever.

We propose our own solution in turn, and propose it on the unequivocal grounds of the grand principle of repletion. The world were overcharged with poetry. The banquet had lasted twenty years; and the human appetite must have been of extraordinary vigor to have lasted half the time. The feast was exquisite; but there is a limit to the utmost power of indulgence. This is the first law of pleasure.

There is a corresponding law of production; that when the demand ceases, there is no prudence in accumulating the commodity.

The same course has been run by

every graceful art that has remained among us since the deluge.

England, Italy, France, Spain, all the leading European countries, have witnessed the same lapses of power in the whole family of the arts; and the only distinction of England, though an admirable one, is, that if they go down successively to the tomb, even within her vivid realms, there are periods when darkness gives them up again. In other lands, the sleeper sleeps forever.

The causes of poetry are so strongly implanted in the human heart, and so peculiarly fostered by the general education, the literary honors, and the national temperament of England, that there never has been a period in our intellectual history, for the last three hundred years, when poetry was without its fame. No traveller, in the worst of our days, could wander from our Dan to Beersheba, and say that all was barren. But the excitement that distinguished the last quarter of a century, was of an order of such unforced and flourishing luxuriance, that it clothed the wilderness like a Russian steppe in spring.

It is singular that so rich a change should be traceable to a compilation, and that compilation so trivial, as Monk Lewis's Tales of Wonder. The work is long past away-it was never of any intrinsic value—all of it that exhibited literary power had been already before the public; and the inventions of the ingenious compiler himself were made for speedy oblivion. But it struck the key-note; it was the idle wind across the Eolian harp; and where a thousand stirring gusts had passed in vain, this whisper of the air awakened all the resources of the sleeping harmony.

A long train of admirable poets came forth, whose works, exhibiting every variety of style and beauty, will live as long as the language. But it is to the author of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," that the distinction of having first embodied the popular feeling in the cause of poetry, is due. The style of his poem is that one par ex

cellence, which is made to delight the popular feeling in all its senses. The old chivalric stories of the ancestral life of England have always had a charm, from their mixture of the wild adventure, that the human heart, under all its changes, still loves; with the magnificence of princely life, and the solemnity and mystical pomp of that life of the priesthood, which, fearfully constructed to awe its own time, is to us only like the ruins of one of its own cathedrals, with all the sullenness and severe terror of the pile past away, the sun streaming through its open aisles and cells, and the seasons staining it with lovely dyes, and covering its old, grim sculptures with foliage and flowers.

The skill of the poet in English antiquity, his strong feeling of the romantic and picturesque, and the softness and fluency of his fine versification, formed on the ancient ballad, and indulging the ear and the memory together, gave the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" remarkable popularity; and at once, by its intrinsic charm-by the reputation which it conferred on its author-and by the humbler, yet by no means unexciting evidence, that poetry might become a singularly productive species of toil, the whole multitude of the lovers of fame, of the muse, and of money, were roused to the pursuit.

He

It may be alleged against our theory, that no imitation of " The Lay of the Last Minstrel" ever appeared in this world of emulous imitation, or none that attracted any peculiar name. But the enigma is solved by the fact, which has been so curiously exemplified, in another department, on a still larger scale, by the same author. suffered no man to take his discovery from him. Having got his patent signed and sealed in the court of the Nine, he put it into such unremitting activity, that no intruder could compete with the patentee. He had found the mine, and hour after hour he worked it, with a dexterity and national perseverance that gave no fellow adventurer time to break into his

lode. His success was complete; his possession was undisturbed ; and when The abandoned the labor, he left few sanguine enough to think that the remaining product was worth the trouble of its extraction.

As it is not our purpose here to offer opinions on the genius of the other great poets of our time, but to trace the striking vicissitudes of popular feeling; we pass through the long period in which poetry influenced and delighted the general mind, down to the new impulse given by the style of Byron. And even on this strange and powerful style, we shall not venture to fatigue the reader, with what must be the repetition of censures and praises heard for the thousandth time. We are now concerned only with its effects. It was made to close the poetic era yet not more from the sudden and exclusive admiration of the writer's genius, than from the nature of his productions. The fierce and sullen spirit that characterized his pen was death to all the graceful conceptions under which poetry had won our worship so long. She was no more in the lovely and fantastic youth of the muse of the "Last Minstrel," nor in the full and fine-proportioned beauty of the riper time that followed. When Byron threw open the valves of the temple, she was the Pythia on the tripod, haggard and wild, with her youth stricken into premature age, and with the words of fate and scorn burning on the lips of a being made at once proud and miserable by the conscious inspiration.

The style became instantly popular, for it told of wrong, a tale in which every judge of his own cause feels sudden sympathy; it exaggerated the delights of that life of adventure, for which all men have a lurking fondness; it talked with rapture of the power of beauty, and with enthusiasm of the resistless empire of passion: all popular with the multitude. It harangued loftily on the glories of holding human opinion in contempt, and of following the impulse of that contempt through all hazards; of

fame, as a prize to be sought through good and evil; and of enjoyment, as to be chiefly purchased by trampling down the irksome duties of common life; of crime, as finding, not simply its palliative, but its authority, in intellectual preeminence; and of that preeminence, as finding its native distinction in the magnitude, boldness, and firmness of its tread into that world of darkness, where Crime and Confusion sit twin despots on the same fiery throne. Doctrines like these must find partisans in the common corruption and insolence of spirit, that make so large a portion of living society; even if they were transmitted from the lips of children. But Byron uttered them with the power of a true poet. The sternest vigor of language was condensed into his words; the richest and sometimes the most touching illustrations diversified the sullen fervor of his poetry; and, like the story of the hearers of the Athenian orator, who were awed at a distance by the majesty of his gesture; nearer still, charmed by the melody of his voice; and nearer still, subdued by the force of his language; the great poet had grasp and captivation for all.

But

But he produced no followers; his dynasty was cut off with himself and this, for the obvious reason, that his power was urged to its extreme. He went to the farthest limit at which scorn, spleen, and the rending open of private sufferings and sensibilities, could be tolerated. In him they were endured for the sake of their presumed reality; yet even in him they had begun to be tiresome. in another, had that other possessed Lord Byron's faculty of verse, or a higher faculty still, the same strain of continual querulousness would have been burlesque, and the tragedy must have closed in laughter. The rejection of society, or by society; the sickly and bilious frame; the domestic quarrel; the insults given and received in an unlucky connexion with an alienated and strangely unconciliating kindred, were essential to Lord

Byron's authorship-were the living stimulants of his mental epicurism. They were more, they were its only food. Like the Theriaki of Constantinople, he lived solely upon doses, of which the slightest would have extinguished the career of others. He diversified surcharges of opium by surcharges of corrosive sublimate. And, like the Theriaki, his life was a dream, and that dream alternately of the magnificent and the miserable-a vision of Paradise, and of sorrow unassuaged, remorseless exile, and consuming flame.

But while the popularity of this style remained alive upon the public mind, none other could be attempted with a prospect of success. The human heart loves tragedy. The English are eminently fond of deep and fierce emotion; and after having "supped full of horrors" with the noble bard, they could not easily turn to the lighter banquet. But who could be in a condition to follow the career in which this man of misfortune and fame had so long rode at the head of English poetry?—or in what writer, however furnished with domestic evils, could the same compound of ill luck be gathered once more, with any tolerable credibility?

Thus sank into its long sleep the poetry of England. The attempts since made to awaken it, have been

made chiefly by female writers, some of whom have done the female genius honor, by the grace and purity of their pens. But after all, poetry is a masculine art, and is made for something more than the celebration of the birth of the "first rose," or the death of the "last leaf." It is a stately and superb thing, like nature itself; and rejoices in the display of great powers on a great scale. It may not be without its pleasure in the minor beauties of the glorious landscape that lies within the range of its vision: it can enjoy the coloring of flowers and the song of birds ;—but its true elevation is in the grander features and powers; in the moral storm; in the developement of those awful materials of good and ill, which lie hidden in clouds and darkness until the appointed hour; in the discovery of the mighty influences by which the whole moral atmosphere is loaded with sudden gloom, or the gloom chased away by new-born, and scarcely less awful, splendor.

There have, however, been several poems lately published, which furnish a proof that the poetic spirit is still cherished among us; and the more important proof, that there still exists a latent vigor and feeling by which, when the excitement of public celebrity shall be brought into action, striking results may be achieved.