EVENING WALK. Yet oft beneath a cloud she sweeps along, Coleridge has the same thought, uttered with inferior beauty Oft with patient ear Long-listening to the viewless skylark's note, Gleaming on sunny wings. 21 The rural pictures of Clare, with less decoration, present equal truthfulness of colour and sound, as in the following scene from a summer evening walk :— From the hedge, in drowsy hum, Flopping in the labourer's face. Now the snail hath made his ring; And the moth with snowy wing Circles round in winding whirls, Through sweet evening's sprinkled pearls, Till his time has come to sleep ;- Two of the most pleasing curiosities of poetical zoology which I remember, are in Spenser, who describes an angel, Decked with divers plumes like painted jays; and in Keats, who speaks of the dyes and stains of a chapel window, rich and numberless, As are the tiger-moth's deep damask'd wings. Hood and Crabbe are generally true to nature. heron," by Hood, The coot was swimming in the reedy pond Admire "the POETRY OF LANDOR. and "the bat," by Crabbe,— The crawling worm, that turns a summer fly, The winter death-upon the bed of state. The bat, still shrieking, woo'd his flickering mate. MAY 6TH. 23 I FIND Archdeacon Hare commending, with measureless praise, the genius of Mr. Landor. The judgment of Coleridge comes nearer to my taste:-"What is it that Mr. Landor wants to make him a poet? His powers are certainly very considerable, but he seems totally deficient in that modifying faculty, which compresses several units into one whole. His poems, taken as wholes, are unintelligible; you have eminences excessively bright, and all the ground around and beneath them in darkness. Besides which, he has never learned, with all his energy, to write simple and lucid English." The earnest and affectionate applause of Southey should be thrown into the opposite scale. His admiration of Gebir was evidently sincere. But a few beautiful thoughts, shooting stars in the dark, offer to most readers the only allurement in Mr. Landor's poetry. His descriptions of the shell that still murmurs of the ocean, and of the long moonbeam that— on the hard wet sand Lay like a jasper column half up-rear'd,- are quite enchanting. Of every great author in prose or verse the motion, within certain variations, is uniform. When the singing robe is put off, the Olympian may be known by his walk. It is not so with Mr. Landor. He glitters in purple, or hobbles in rags; is either a prince, or a mendicant on Parnassus. He altogether reverses his own character of writers, who are to circulate through coming ages; who, once "above the heads of contemporaries, rise slowly and waveringly, then regularly and erectly, then rapidly and majestically, till the vision strains and aches as it pursues them in their ethereal elevation." This is precisely what he does not perform. Now and then he disengages himself from the lumber that clogs him, and begins to ascend. For a moment, he goes up bravely, higher and higher, flashing abroad fair colours in the sunlight, and catching glimpses of towered cities, crowded rivers, and spreading forests. We gaze after his flight with wonder. But before we can tell the story the buoyancy vanishes, and the pilgrim of the sun is seen tumbling back to earth; not with a flaming fall, but lifeless, powerless, collapsed-the breath of inspiration exhausted-to be dragged home in gaudy tatters and defilement. The catastrophe is regretted, in proportion as the ascending impulse is strong. Mr. Landor has spoken with delight of a draught of pure home-drawn English, from a spring a little sheltered and shaded, but not entangled in the path to it, by antiquity; and he adds, in a richer style, the picturesque contrast of Bacon and Shakspere, between whom he sees 66 as great a difference as between an American forest and a London timber-yard. In the timber-yard, the materials are sawed, and squared, and set across; in the forest we have the natural form of the tree, all its growth, all its branches, all its leaves, all the mosses that grow about it, all the birds and insects that inhabit it; now deep shadows absorbing the whole wilderness; now bright bursting glade, with exuberant grass and flowers and fruitage; now untroubled skies, now terrific thunder storms; every where multiformity, every where immensity." Among the delightful passages of the poet's prose, I would name the conversation of Sir Philip Sidney and Lord Brooke at Penshurst, which breathes the wisest thoughts in a strain of music, winning and serious. How beautiful is the remark of Sidney: "Friendship is a vase which, when it is flawed by heat, or violence, or accident, may as well be broken at once; it can never be trusted after. The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do we discern the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state. Coarse stones, if they are fractured, may be cemented again; precious ones, never." But the author seldom suffers our pleasure to be without a jar. His great deficiency seems to be in taste. He wants, to an extraordinary degree, that bright faculty which colours, subdues, shapes, and combines all the treasures of imagination. His music requires cadence, his painting tone. A coarse satiric humour sometimes breaks out with painful effect. It is a snatch of a political ballad, in the intricate melody of Mozart: it is a sweet face of Murillo, with a border by Cruikshank. Let me not, however, forget the tribute of Southey: "What you have heard me say of his temper is the best and only explanation of his faults. Never did man represent himself in his writings so much less generous, less just, less compassionate than he really is. I certainly never knew any one of brighter genius, or of kinder heart." MAY 7TH. COLERIDGE says, or sings, very prettily of the nightingale,— on moonlit bushes, Whose dewy leaflets are but half disclosed, You may perhaps behold them in the twigs. Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full, Glistening, while many a glow-worm in the shade Lights up her love-torch. In our quiet woods it is not difficult, even in broad daylight, to see and hear the nightingale. This morning I stood for several minutes under the bough, and watched, not only the flashing of E |