productions of one of this school, who posesses, moreover, from local and national associations, a peculiar claim to our notice.

The poems of Wilson have now been so long before the public, that we need not minutely analyze the separate merits of each. We shall attempt to describe, as far as we have succeeded in apprehending, the general features of his poetical character, illustrated by such specimens as may serve to display them; and this with a desire to discover beauties rather than to reprove faults. The latter is an easy, but ungracious exercise of the critical functions, and only to be called forth in defence of the interests of good taste, and for the vindication of true excellence from incompetent pretension. And since we are persuaded at heart that Wilson is a true poet, we think it a far more important duty to point out wherein he excels, than to peer curiously into his defects. We remember the unwillingness of a great master of our mystery, paucis offendi maculis, and are not ambitious of the post of bourreau de Parnasse, an office needful at times, but not therefore the less disgusting and opprobrious. We had rather be employed in adorning the brows of those who have deserved well of the Republic, than in "wielding the knout ;" an odious charge, which, strange as it may appear, is nevertheless openly and complacently professed by some of our critical brethren. Imagination is the intellectual, and love the moral spring of Wilson's genius; an imagination pure, delicate, and utterly impatient of restraint; far-soaring, and incapable of being tied or tired: a love of outward nature, deepening into passion; and of living beings, in which passion appears almost extinguished by reverence or contemplation: a love, in tenderness resembling that of woman, for all that is placid and beautiful and unspotted. His mind is ever on the wing amidst the cloud-land of phantasy; if it touch upon realities, it is in order to invest them with a veil of airy conceptions, beneath which their peculiar outlines disappear; and, in descending to human themes, his imagination invokes in their place shadows of sinless and angelic loveliness, too exquisite and visionary for the atmosphere of earth. He views every thing through a medium tinged with hues and shades, which conceal whatever of mean or common might offend his sensitive perception; it is a prism through which the object is beheld, changed, indeed, from its proper shape, but dyed with the fairest colours of the rainbow. His companions are an ever-varying phantasmagoria of distant pictures; every scene he visits, every sound he perceives, suggests to his mind some mysterious type of the far-off world in which his mind rejoices to dwell; and, by a singular property of this endowment, while, to his eye, inanimate objects become gifted with life, he looks upon living man as upon the shadow of a stately representation, beautiful, Guidesque, and vapoury. To this latter peculiarity we shall have occasion hereafter to advert. As an example of his gift of impersonating an insensitive thing, and endowing it with a spiritual life, we select the ensuing lines :

"And lo! upon the murmuring waves

A glorious shape appearing,

A broad-wing'd vessel, through the shower
Of glimmering lustre steering!

As if the beauteous ship enjoyed

The beauty of the sea,

She lifteth up her stately head,

And saileth joyfully.

A lovely path before her lies,
A lovely path behind;

She sails amid the loveliness
Like a thing with heart and mind.

Fit pilgrim, through a scene so fair,
Slowly she beareth on;

A glorious phantom of the deep,

Risen up to meet the moon.

The moon bids her tenderest radiance fall

On her wavy streamer and snow-white wings;

And the quiet voice of the rocking sea

To cheer the gliding vision sings.

Oh! ne'er did sky and water blend

In such a holy sleep,

Or bathe in brighter quietude

A roamer of the deep.

So far the peaceful soul of Heaven
Hath settled on the sea,

It seems as if this weight of calm
Were from eternity.

O world of waters! the steadfast earth
Ne'er lay entranced like thee!"

Isle of Palms, Canto I.

The scene, the object described in these lines, it may be said, naturally seem to call for this mode of representation; they did so, and therefore were chosen by the poet, at whose will lay the events he should depict :— And was ever anything more vision-like and airy?

But let us turn to a subject of a different kind ;-the visit of a rustic company to certain anglers who had pitched their tent, for a Sabbath day's rest, at the edge of a retired mountain lake. Peasants, old and young, have assembled from all the neighbouring hills to gaze upon the unwonted spectacle of strangers,-by whom they are welcomed and entertained. A pleasant group! which many a skilful hand would have described with the quaint and truthful pencil of a Berghem or a Watteau. But our poet touches it with his wand,—the rude outlines disappear, and lo! the scene is changed to Arcady. These are no peasant girls :

"Well did the roses blooming on their cheek,
And eyes of laughing light, that glistened fair
Beneath the artless ringlets of their hair,
Each maiden's health and purity bespeak.
Following the impulse of their simple will,
No thought had they to give or take offence;
Glad were their bosoms, yet sedate and still,
And fearless in the strength of innocence.
Oft as, in accents mild, we strangers spoke
To these sweet maidens, an unconscious smile,
Like sudden sunshine, o'er their faces broke,
And with it struggling blushes mixed the while.
And oft as mirth and glee went laughing round,
Breathed in this maiden's ear, some harmless jest
Would make her, for one moment, on the ground
Her eyes let fall, as wishing from the rest

To hide the sudden throb that beat within her breast.
Oh! not in vain have purest poets told,
In elegies and hymns that ne'er shall die,

How, in the fields of famous Arcady,
Lived simple shepherds in the Age of Gold!

They fabled not, in peopling rural shades

With all most beautiful in heart and frame;

Where, without guile, swains wooed their happy maids,
And Love was Friendship with a gentler name.

Such songs in truth and nature had their birth:

Their source was lofty, and their aim was pure;

And still, in many a favoured spot of earth,
The virtues that awoke their voice endure!
Bear witness, thou, O wild and beauteous dell,
To whom my gladdened heart devotes this strain!
-O! long may all who in thy bosom dwell
Nature's primeval innocence retain,

Nor e'er may lawless foot thy sanctity profane !
Sweet maids! my wandering heart returns to you,
And well the blush of joy, the courteous air,
Words unrestrained, and open looks, declare
That fancy's day-dreams have not been untrue.
It was, indeed, a beauteous thing to see
The virgin, while her bashful visage smiled,
As if she were a mother, on her knee
Take up, with many a kiss, the asking child.
And well, I ween, she played the mother's part;
For as she bended o'er the infant fair,
A mystic joy seemed stirring at her heart,
A yearning fondness, and a silent prayer!
Nor did such gentle maiden long refuse

To cheer our spirits with some favourite strain,
Some simple ballad, framed by rustic muse,
Of one who died for love, or, led by gain,

Sailed, in a mighty ship, to lands beyond the main."

As another instance of this lovely art of transmutation, this alchymy taught by Fancy and Love, we would refer to a delightful poem, the "Children's Dance." Remember, they are mountain and village children, assembled at a rustic dancing-master's ball; a theme which, from our own opportunities of observation, we should have pronounced unyielding to a poet of less quick-winged fancy. But read the poem, (we can only extract two beautiful verses, forming a fair picture,) and you are no tonger in the hamlet of a Cumberland dale, but in the very court of Titania herself :

"Like sunbeams glancing o'er a meadow field,
From side to side the airy spirits swim.
What keen and kindling rapture shines revealed
Around their eyes, and moves in every limb!
See! how they twine their flexile arms so slim,
In graceful arches o'er their hanging hair,
Whose ringlets for a while their eyes bedim.
The music stops-they stand like statues there,-
Then, parting, glide away on noiseless steps of air.
And now a ready hand hath round them thrown
A flowing garland, for their beauteous queen,
Wreathed by her playmates; roses newly blown,
White clustering 'mid the ivy's vivid green.
Enfolded thus in innocence, they lean

Their silky heads in inclination dear,

Their blent locks fluttering through the space between.
And do they not, advancing thus, appear

Like angels sent by Spring to usher in the year?"

The Children's Dance.

Throughout the greater part of the "Isle of Palms," this wild and floating imagination presides over the tale, and has guided the descriptions no less than the incidents. The ship in which the lovers are embarked goes down at sea. A poet of sterner temper would have dwelt upon this grand and moving incident, so as to gather a more profound human interest around the personages of the narrative. Thus did Wieland in his unrivalled Oberon; thus did Byron in Don Juan:---Wilson passess over the calamity with a few remote expressions; intent upon

wafting the two rescued voyagers across a bright and waveless sea, to their Ocean Elysium, where his fancy may roam at will, and assemble around them the groves and flowers of a land fairer than the gardens of the Hesperides. You feel that the shipwreck is no calamity. The reader is already in the land of the genii, and only entertains a gracious curiosity to know whether the voyagers are to be borne through air, or over sea, on wing, or in golden pinnace, "fairy-fraught," to the haven of their bliss. As for the perished vessel and her crew, were they not brave fictions of a dream? The whole is the Tale of visions, lulling and peopled with fair shadows, and sung to a far-off music, which is strange and sweet; but its events are independent of space and time, and the other conditions of actual being. With its personages we can neither weep nor rejoice. They are denizens of cloud-land, to which human passions cannot ascend.

To this capricious sovereignty of his imagination we are indebted for Wilson's exquisite poem on the old tradition of "Bessy Bell and Mary Grey," which is perhaps the most perfect of all his compositions. It is a strain as wild, yet soothing, as the music of an Eolian harp; and, like it, is doubtful and mysterious, beneath a seeming tone of simplicity. The visionary character of the theme was just suited to arouse his sensitive fancy; and he has embodied it with a mingled solemnity and lightness which remind us of Hogg's "Kilmeny." It is impossible to recur to the joys or mourning of Earth while listening to this strain; it breathes throughout a spiritual calm, which seems borrowed from some mysterious land unto which laughter and tears are equally unknown. And in what a fine dim close the song faints into silence!

"As on the orphans hold their way,
Through the stillness of the dying day,

Fairies might they seem, who are returning,
At the end of some allotted time,
Unto their own immortal clime!

Each bearing, in its lovely hand,

Some small memorial of the land

Where they, like common human frames,

And called by gentle Christian names,
Full long had been sojourning!

Some little fair insensate thing,

Relic of that wild visiting!

Bird, that beneath a brighter spring

Of its own vanished earth will sing;

Those harmless creatures that will glide
O'er faery vales in earthly snow,
And from the faery river's flow
Come forth more purely beautified.

Now, with a wild and mournful song,

The fair procession moves along;
While, by that tune so sweet,
The little flock, delighted, press
Around the singers' feet.

Up, up, the gentle slope they wind,
Leaving the laughing flowers behind

That seem to court their stay.

One moment on the top they stand,
At the wild unfolding vale's command,
-Then down into that faery land,
Dream-like, they sink away!"

In passing from these imaginative conceptions or moods of observation, to comment upon Wilson's remarkable and characteristic devotion to the

worship of inanimate nature, we find, with some regret, that our extracts illustrative of the degree to which he is imbued with this fine attribute must be in every respect insufficient. His is a love which penetrates his entire existence, and colours more or less every creation of his thought; it is, therefore, impossible to display by insulated passages the presence of an influence so all-pervading and continual. The compelled brevity of such fragments as we can afford, is, moreover, a serious wrong to his descriptions; which run onwards like the song of a bird, poured from the love and gladness of the heart, with no forethought as to limit or duration; indeed, the cordial joy which he finds in his subject, and the copious flow of his numbers, lead him, at times, into a prolixity which becomes tedious. Like all true lovers, he can dwell with manifold iteration on the same welcome theme-the charms of his gracious mistress; while the mere by-stander would content himself with a few brief significant touches, which, on the whole, perhaps, afford as correct a repre sentation; but it appeals chiefly to the intellectual perceptions,-the other finds its way to the heart. The best of Wilson's landscape pictures are on a canvass too broad for our exhibition; of the cabinet subjects, the number is also so great, that we have been compelled tirer au hazard.

"O! wildest bridge by human hand e'er framed,
If so thou mayst be named;

Thou! who for many a year hast stood,
Clothed with the deep-green moss of age,
As if thy tremulous length were living wood,
Sprung from the bank on either side,-
Despising, with a careless pride,
The tumults of the wintry flood,
And hill-born tempest's rage.

Each flower upon thy moss I know,

Or think I know; like things they seem

Fair and unchanged, of a returning dream!
While underneath, the peaceful flow

Of the smooth river to my heart

Brings back the thoughts that long ago

I felt, when forced to part

From the deep calm of Nature's reign,
To walk the world's loud scenes again.
And let us with that river glide
Around yon hillock's verdant side:
And lo! a gleam of sweet surprise,
Like sudden sunshine, warms thine eyes.
White as the Spring's unmelted snow,
That lives though winter storms be o'er,
A cot beneath the mountain's brow
Smiles through its shading sycamore.
The silence of the morning air
Persuades our hearts to enter there.
In dreams all quiet things we love;
And sure no star that lies above,
Cradled in clouds that also sleep,
Enjoys a calm more hush'd and deep,
Than doth this slumbering cell.
Yea! like a star it looketh down,
In pleasure from its mountain-throne,
On its own little dell."

Isle of Palms, Canto IV. As a companion, here is a portrait from the life, characterized by its grace and freedom of outline. The reader will perceive, however, that it is no work of the Rembrandt or Velasquez school of representa.