bring me the news of the death of my father and mother." His Lordship will say, the mail-coach is an artificial object. Yet we think the interest here was not founded upon that circumstance. There was a finer and deeper link of affection that did not depend on the red painted pannels, or the dyed garments of the coachman and guard. At least it strikes us so.

This is not an easy subject to illustrate, and it is still more difficult to define. Yet we shall attempt something of the sort. 1. Natural objects are common and obvious, and are imbued with an habitual and universal interest, without being vulgar. Familiarity in them does not breed contempt, as it does in the works of man. They form an ideal class; their repeated impression on the mind, in so many different circumstances, grows up into a sentiment. The reason is, that we refer them generally and collectively to ourselves, as links and mementos of our various being; whereas, we refer the works of art respectively to those by whom they are made or to whom they belong. This distracts the mind in looking at them, and gives a petty and unpoetical character to what we feel relating to them. When the works of art become poetical, it is when they are emancipated from this state of "circumscription and confine," by some circumstance that sets aside the idea of property and individual distinction. The sound of village bells,

-The poor man's only music,*

excites as lively an interest in the mind as the warbling of a thrush the sight of a village spire presents nothing discordant with the surrounding scenery.

2. Natural objects are more akin to poetry and the imagination, partly because they are not our own handy-work, but start up spontaneously, like a visionary creation, of their own accord, without our knowledge or connivance—

The earth hath hubbles, as the water hath,

And these are of them ;—

and farther, they have this advantage over the works of art, that the latter either fall short of their pre-conceived intention,

* Coleridge.

and excite our disgust and disappointment by their defects; or, if they completely answer their end, they then leave nothing to the imagination, and so excite little or no romantic interest. that way. A Count Rumford stove, or a Dutch oven, are useful for the purposes of warmth or culinary dispatch. Gray's purring favourite would find great comfort in warming its nose before the one, or dipping its whiskers in the other; and so does the artificial animal, man: but the poetry of Rumford grates or Dutch ovens it would puzzle even Lord Byron to explain. Cowper has made something of the "loud hissing urn," though Mr. Southey, as being one of the more refined 66 naturals," ," still prefers "the song of the kettle." The more our senses, our self-love, our eyes and ears, are surrounded, and, as it were, saturated with artificial enjoyments and costly decorations, the more the avenues to the imagination and the heart are unavoidably blocked up. We do not say that this may not be an advantage to the individual; we say it is a disadvantage to the poet. Even "Mine Host of Human Life" has felt its palsying, enervating influence. Let any one (after ten years old) take shelter from a shower of rain in Exeter Change, and see how he will amuse the time with looking over the trinkets, the chains, the seals, the curious works of art. Compare this with the description of Una and the Red Cross Knight in Spenser:

Enforc'd to seek some covert nigh at hand,

A shady grove not far away they spied,
That promis'd aid the tempest to withstand:
Whose lofty trees, yclad with suminer's pride,
Did spread so broad that heaven's light did hide,
Not pierceable with power of any star;
And all within were paths and alleys wide,
With footing worn, and leading inward far;
Far harbour that them seems; so in they enter'd are.

And forth they pass, with pleasure forward led,
Joying to hear the birds' sweet harmony,
Which therein shrowded from the tempest's dread,
Seem'd in their song to scorn the cruel sky.
Much can they praise the trees so straight and high,

The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall,
The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry,

The builder oak, sole king of forests all,

The aspen good for staves, the cypress funeral.*

Artificial flowers look pretty in a lady's head-dress; but they will not do to stick into lofty verse. On the contrary, a crocus bursting out of the ground seems to blush with its own golden light"a thing of life." So a greater authority than Lord Byron has given his testimony on this subject: "Behold the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." Shakspeare speaks of

-Daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty.

All this play of fancy and dramatic interest could not be transferred to a description of hot-house plants, regulated by a thermometer. Lord Byron unfairly enlists into the service of his argument those artificial objects which are direct imitations of nature, such as statuary, &c. This is an oversight. At this rate, all poetry would be artificial poetry. Dr. Darwin is among those who have endeavoured to confound the distinctions of

* Most people have felt the ennui of being detained under a gateway in a shower of rain. Happy is he who has an umbrella, and can escape when the first fury of the storm has abated. Turn this gateway into a broker's shop, full of second-hand furniture-tables, chairs, bedsteads, bolsters, and all the accommodations of man's life, the case will not be mended. On the other hand, convert it into a wild natural cave, and we may idle away whole hours in it, marking a streak in the rock, or a flower that grows on the sides, without feeling time hang heavy on us. The reason is that, where we are surrounded with the works of man-the sympathy with the art and purposes of man, as it were, irritates our own will, and makes us impatient of whatever interferes with it: while, on the contrary, the presence of nature, of objects existing without our intervention and controul, disarms the will of its restless activity, and disposes us to submit to accidents that we cannot help, and the course of outward events, without repining. We are thrown into the hands of nature, and become converts to her power. Thus the idea of the artificial, the conventional, the voluntary, is fatal to the romantic and imaginary. To us it seems that the free spirit of nature rushes through the soul, like a stream with a murmuring sound, the echo of which is poetry.

natural and artificial poetry, and indeed, he is, perhaps, the only one who has gone the whole length of Lord Byron's hyper-critical and super-artificial theory. Here are some of his lines, which have been greatly admired :

Apostrophe to Steel.

Hail adamantine steel! magnetic lord,

King of the prow, the ploughshare, and the sword!
True to the pole, by thee the pilot guides

His steady course amid the struggling tides,
Braves with broad sail the immeasurable sea,

Cleaves the dark air, and asks no star but thee!

This is the true false gallop of the sublime. Yet steel is a very useful metal, and doubtless performs all these wonders. But it has not, among so many others, the virtue of amalgamating with the imagination. We might quote also his description of the spinning-jenny, which is pronounced by Dr. Aikin to be as ingenious a piece of mechanism as the object it describes; and, according to Lord Byron, this last is as well suited to the manufacture of verses as of cotton twist without end.

3. Natural interests are those which are real and inevitable, and are so far contradistinguished from the artificial, which are factitious and affected. If Lord Byron cannot understand the difference, he may find it explained by contrasting some of Chaucer's characters and incidents with those in the Rape of the Lock, for instance. Custance, floating in her boat on the wide sea, is different from Pope's heroine,

Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames.

Griselda's loss of her children, one by one, of her all, does not belong to the same class of incidents, nor of subjects for poetry, as Belinda's loss of her favorite curl. A sentiment that has rooted itself in the heart, and can only be torn from it with life, is not like the caprice of the moment-the putting on of paint and patches, or the pulling off a glove. The inbred character is not like a masquerade dress. There is a difference between the theatrical and natural, which is important to the determination of the present question, and which has been overlooked by his Lordship. Mr. Bowles, however, formally insists

(and with the best right in the world) on the distinction between passion and manners. But he agrees with Lord Byron that the Epistle to Abelard is the height of the pathetic.

Strange that such difference should be

"Twixt tweedledum and tweedledee.

That it is in a great degree pathetic, I should be among the last to dispute; but its character is more properly rhetorical and voluptuous. That its interest is of the highest or deepest order is what I should wonder to hear any one affirm who is intimate with Shakspeare, Chaucer, Boccaccio, our own early dramatists, or the Greek tragedians. There is more true, unfeigned, unspeakable, heartfelt distress in one line of Chaucer's tale just mentioned,

Let me not like a worm go by the way,

than in all Pope's writings put together; and I say it without any disrespect to him, too. Didactic poetry has to do with manners, as they are regulated, not by fashion or caprice, but by abstract reason and grave opinion, and is equally remote from the dramatic, which describes the involuntary and unpremeditated impulses of nature. As Lord Byron refers to the Bible, I would just ask him here, which he thinks the most poetical parts of it, the Law of the twelve tables, the book of Leviticus, &c.; or the book of Job, Jacob's dream, the story of Ruth, &c. ?

4. Supernatural poetry is, in the sense here insisted on, allied to nature, not to art, because it relates to the impressions made upon the mind by unknown objects and powers, out of the reach both of the cognizance and will of man, and still more able to startle and confound his imagination, while he supposes them to exist, than either those of nature or art. The Witches in Macbeth, the Furies in Eschylus, are so far artificial objects that they are creatures of the poet's brain; but their impression on the mind depends on their possessing attributes which baffle and set at nought all human pretence, and laugh at all human efforts to tamper with them. Satan in Milton is an artificial or ideal character: but would any one call this artificial poetry? It is. in Lord Byron's phrase, super-artificial, as well as super-human