or to some old reminiscence in his own mind; whereas in Cowper, it is humanity, with its foibles, its passions, its weakness, and its strength, to which the poet incessantly recurs, whatever be the professed nature of his special subject. We could almost regret that Mr. Caswall is thus limited in his range, and cannot help imagining that it must be voluntary on his own part. There must be more in his mind than he has yet shown us in any part of the present volume. Where are any traces of the author of "The Art of Pluck"? We miss any tokens that Mr. Caswall yet preserves the wit, the ingenuity, the sense of the ridiculous, and the pointed force, which have given to that clever squib a place among the classics of comic literature.

In the present volume, the best poems are those which are not distinctly religious or, as in The Masque of Mary, dramatic. The translations, which make up a separate portion by themselves, are of course less interesting than the original pieces. We cannot but think, indeed, that it is generally a mistake to publish translations of the Latin hymns of the Breviary and other similar books, unless it be as a matter of curiosity. The great majority of these hymns derive their peculiar beauty from the language in which they are cast, more than from any thing essentially poetic in their matter. As a portion of a devotional whole, they are natural and appropriate; and to the critical reader they possess an especial attractiveness from the neatness and epigrammatic propriety of their versification. But this neatness and epigrammatic propriety cannot, by the nature of the case, be transferred from one language to another; for this reason, that it is essentially a Latin neatness and propriety. The moment you change Latin for English, you simply lose the peculiarly Latin excellence, and get only English poverty in exchange. Occasionally, no doubt, as in the "Dies Ira," the old Church hymns possess an extraordinary amount of poetic, as distinguished from religious beauty of their own. But generally speaking the charm of these venerable hymns results from the religious merits of their substance, and the artistic versification with which this substance is compressed into a short series of well-sounding stanzas. If this estimate is correct, it goes far to account for the universal disappointment which those who admire the originals express when they read the very best of translations. Examine these versions critically, and side by side with the originals, and you may say, "How well they are done, how close to the Latin; the very metre, the very order of the words, is preserved, and yet the versification flows on, and the rhymes are real rhymes." But

take them up by themselves, and the impression they make is but feeble; while the mere English reader wonders that any body could go to such lengths in their praise as he knows to be common among scholars and critics.

Not

When poets write original pieces on distinctly theological or spiritual subjects, their difficulty is of another kind. It is surprising how seldom we meet with religious poetry which is neither tame nor rhetorically exaggerated. To use the modern phrase, it is the most "unreal" of all poetry. that its writers are dishonest, or that they deliberately talk cant;" but that with all men it is always difficult in religious things to know where genuine and simple religious emotion ends, and a factitious interest and excitement of the nerves begins. So many religious persons consider it a sort of duty to be consciously impressed with the overwhelming greatness and importance of spiritual things, that they are in the habit of cultivating an emotional susceptibility in their own minds, which becomes almost a portion of their character, and to which they like to give frequent expression, whether forced or natural, or to hear it given by others. And this is the snare of the religious poet. He knows the ineffable grandeur and importance of the realities of religion, and the intensity of the interest which every enlightened mind feels in them. Accordingly he is often not satisfied when he writes verse, without attempting to express in an emotional way such a correspondence on his own part with these transcendent subjects as may show his profound appreciation of their real greatness. Hence it is that in "religious poetry" there is generally as much unreality as in the pious phraseology of people who think it a duty to employ the correct conventional expressions "suitable to the occasion," whether they are inclined or not to give utterance to any such ideas at all.

The extraordinary success of Keble's Christian Year is, we suspect, to be partly accounted for by his avoiding this error. Throughout that delightful book it is remarkable how little there is which is prominently or exclusively theological, or even devotional. The doctrinal and spiritual portions are skilfully interwoven with a vast variety of natural and poetical thoughts, of which the subjects are the visible universe and the world of action and feeling. Superficial critics sometimes object to the Christian Year on this ground, that, after all, it has not much of what they call religion in it. Yet this is one of its very greatest merits, and that which makes it so sincere and real a book and so agreeable to persons thoughtful turn of mind. Its author never strives to strain his words beyond his feelings, or to make up for the indis

of a

tinctness or feebleness of his intellectual conceptions by the rhetoric of excited nerves; and hence, we cannot but think, some degree of that popularity which his poems have attained and still retain,-a popularity wholly without precedent in the literature of religious verse.

Mr. Caswall's religious poems, on the contrary, are less satisfactory than those in which the religious element is rather implied than expressed. There is hardly a poem in the book, indeed, which has not something to recommend it; but the poet is to be seen in the "Miscellaneous Pieces" more than in the "Hymns and Meditative Pieces." A few quotations from the former will give the reader an idea of the character of Mr. Caswall's mind, and of the facility with which he can play upon his instrument. We have compared him to Cowper, rather as belonging to the same class than as writing on the same subjects. In one instance, however, he has given us a little poem which might have come direct from the pen of the poet of Olney, always excepting the last three stanzas of the "moral;" which we omit, as, however true in themselves, inapplicable to the incident told in the little poem:

66 THE CAPTIVE LINNET.

This morn upon the May-tree tall
That shelters our suburban wall
A curious sight I spied,-
A linnet young, of plumage gay,
Fast to the trembling topmost spray
By strange misfortune tied.

There helpless dangling, all in vain
From his enthralling viewless chain
To loose himself he strove;
Till, spent at last, he hung as dead,
No more by brook and flowery mead
On happy wing to rove.

Then, pitying a fate so sad,
I call'd a little singing lad,

And bade him climb the tree;

With orders, at whatever cost,

Though e'en a blooming branch were lost,
To set the captive free.

With steady eye aloft he goes;

I trace him through the rustling boughs;
A joyous shout is heard;

Then, snowy white with tufts of May,
Down to my feet descends the spray,
And with the spray the bird.

I loos'd his bonds; away he flew ;
And grateful, from a neighbouring yew
Repaid me with a song;

But what, think you, I found to be
The chain that in captivity

Had held him fast so long?

A single thread of silken hair,
That, borne by zephyrs here and there,
Had settled on the spray;

Then, as he sported there, had wound
His soft and glossy neck around,
And bound him fast a prey.

MORAL.

Ye children of the world, beware!
Too oft a lock of silken hair
Has made the soul a prize;
And held it riveted to earth,
When, by the instinct of its birth,

It should have sought the skies."

The stanzas entitled "Hope and Memory" supply a specimen of another kind. It is in this happy expression of a single thought or a natural emotion that Mr. Caswall is most completely at home. The verses are more than pretty :

"There are two Beings, rich in wondrous powers,
Twin sisters, kindly wont to dwell with man:
One owns the treasures of all future hours;
The other grasps the past within her span ;-
Hope ever smiling, bright with thousand dyes
From the gay hues distill'd of golden morn;
And Memory breathing softly-soothing sighs,
Sweet as the rose, yet not without its thorn.
These two together, through life's weary way
Trip hand in hand, and scatter fairy flowers;
Together breathe around inspiring day,

And water desert earth with genial showers.
Apart so speaks a voice from yonder grave-
The power of each to bless, no more may last;
Without a future, who the past would crave?
And who a future, if denied the past?"

It is in the poems at the commencement of the second section that Mr. Caswall rises highest, and gives an earnest of a latent power and vigour, both of imagination and language, which is seldom attained by professedly religious poets. The "Vision of Waters" is a noble ode; but we prefer for extract a few lines from the "Ode to the Winds :"

"For tranquil is the Air,

In her own nature view'd;
God's wondrous instrument
Of manifold design,
Answering to many ends!
A harp invisible,

Rich with unnumber'd tones!

A magic scroll, on which the tongue of man

Writes at his will irrevocable words!

A mirror of our thoughts
By speech reflected forth!
Our life-blood's food!

A censer laden with all Nature's incen se!

A treasure-house of dew and quick'ning showers!
The fuel of all fires!

A crystal screen betwixt the sun and earth,
Blending all rays, and melting light's sharp edge!
An ocean all unseen,

This earth encircling round,

Wherein we walk, and know it not,
As men upon the bottom of the deep!
A globe imnrense,

Receptacle of Nature's divers forms,
Abode of countless mutabilities,
Itself from age to age

The same abiding still!"

All this is as spontaneous in expression as it is indicative of that habitual study of nature in all her moods without which no man can be a poet, or at least can escape beyond a very limited range of thought. We can only regret that Mr. Caswall has not extended his view more widely into the region of actual humanity, and varied his volume with a few poems of a less subjective type. That he has the gift in him we cannot but believe; and as he is evidently a man who must and will write, we hope that when we next meet him in print his range of subjects will not be so exclusively grave and strictly theological.

One word, too, by way of minute criticism. Wherever he can detect a reminiscence of other poets in his lines, it would be well to obliterate it without mercy; and at the same time to forbear any mode of treating a theme in such a manner as will lead the reader to say, that is just like so-and-so, or so-and-so. As instances of our meaning, we may name "The Easter Ship," which instantly suggests Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner;" and the stanzas called "Sunday," which send us back to "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso." "Summer's Departure," again, recalls at once Tom Moore and Isaac Watts; and the "countless smile of ocean" in another poem is too palpably the ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα of the Greek poet to pass unremarked.

99

Among the republished poems, too, we remark some alterations not always for the better. The hymn to the Infant Jesus asleep is one of the most charming little things of the kind in existence. Its sweetness, its pathos, and its tenderness only strengthen the vividness with which it paints the sacred scene before us. But what moment of submission to the genius of "commonplace,"-if "commonplace" can possess such a thing as a genius,-induced Mr. Caswall to change