TRUE TO THE CAUSE OF LIBERTY.

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feelings, and, if possible, by a more resolute and entire devotion to the cause of liberty. Mr. Campbell, we rejoice to say, is not among those poets whose hatred of oppression has been chilled by the lapse of years, or allayed by the suggestions of a base self-interest. He has held on his course through good and through bad report, unseduced, unterrified; and is now found in his duty, testifying as fearlessly against the invaders of Spain, in the volume before us, as he did against the spoilers of Poland in the very first of his publications. It is a proud thing indeed for England, for poetry, and for mankind, that all the illustrious poets of the present day

Byron, Moore, Rogers, Campbell -are distinguished by their zeal for freedom, and their scorn for courtly adulation; while those who have deserted that manly and holy cause have, from that hour, felt their inspiration withdrawn, their harp-strings broken, and the fire quenched in their censers! Even the Laureate, since his unhappy Vision of Judgment, has ceased to sing; and fallen into undutiful as well as ignoble silence, even on court festivals. As a specimen of the tone in which an unbought Muse can yet address herself to public themes, we subjoin a few stanzas of a noble ode to the Memory of the Spanish Patriots who died in resisting the late atrocious invasion.

"Brave men who at the Trocadero fell

Beside your cannons-conquer'd not, though slain!
There is a victory in dying well

For Freedom and have not died in vain;
ye

For come what may, there shall be hearts in Spain
To honour, ay, embrace your martyr'd lot,

Cursing the Bigot's and the Bourbon's chain,

And looking on your graves, though trophied not,

As holier, hallow'd ground than priests could make the spot!"
"Yet laugh not in your carnival of crime

Too proudly, ye oppressors! - Spain was free:
Her soil has felt the foot-prints, and her clime
Been winnow'd by the wings of Liberty!
And these, even parting, scatter as they flee
Thoughts influences, to live in hearts unborn,
Opinions that shall wrench the prison-key

From Persecution-show her mask off-torn,

And tramp her bloated head beneath the foot of scorn.

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CAMPBELL · THE RAINBOW.

Glory to them that die in this great cause!
Kings, Bigots, can inflict no brand of shame,
Or shape of death, to shroud them from applause:
No!-manglers of the martyr's earthly frame!
Your hangman fingers cannot touch his fame,
Still in your prostrate land there shall be some
Proud hearts, the shrines of Freedom's vestal flame.
Long trains of ill may pass unheeded, dumb,
But Vengeance is behind, and Justice is to come."

p. 78-81. Mr. Campbell's muse, however, is by no means habitually political; and the greater part of the pieces in this volume have a purely moral or poetical character. The exquisite stanzas to the Rainbow, we believe, are in every body's hands; but we cannot resist the temptation of transcribing the latter part of them.

66

66

'When o'er the green undelug'd earth

Heaven's covenant thou didst shine,
How came the world's grey fathers forth
To watch thy sacred sign?

And when its yellow lustre smil'd
O'er mountains yet untrod,
Each mother held aloft her child
To bless the bow of God!

"Methinks, thy jubilee to keep,
The first-made anthem rang
On earth deliver'd from the deep,
And the first poet sang.

"Nor ever shall the Muse's eye
Unraptur'd greet thy beam:
Theme of primeval prophecy,
Be still the poet's theme!

The beautiful verses on Mr. Kemble's retirement from the stage afford a very remarkable illustration of the tendency of Mr. Campbell's genius to raise ordinary themes into occasions of pathetic poetry, and to invest trivial occurrences with the mantle of solemn thought. We add a few of the stanzas.

"His was the spell o'er hearts
Which only acting lends-
The youngest of the sister Arts,
Where all their beauty blends:
For ill can Poetry express,

66

Full many a tone of thought sublime,
And Painting, mute and motionless,
Steals but a glance of time.
But by the mighty Actor brought,
Illusion's perfect triumphs come
Verse ceases to be airy thought,
And Sculpture to be dumb."

High were the task-too high
Ye conscious bosoms here!
In words to paint your memory
Of Kemble and of Lear!

But who forgets that white discrowned head,
Those bursts of Reason's half-extinguish'd glare-

Those tears upon Cordelia's bosom shed,

In doubt more touching than despair,

We have great difficulty in resisting the temptation to go on: But in conscience we must stop here.

We

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CAMPBELL NOT A COPIOUS WRITER,

are ashamed, indeed, to think how considerable a proportion of this little volume we have already transferred into our extracts. Nor have we much to say of the poems we have not extracted. "The Ritter Bann" and "Reullura" are the two longest pieces, after Theodric -but we think not the most successful. Some of the songs are exquisite- and most of the occasional poems too good for occasions.

The volume is very small- and it contains all that the distinguished author has written for many years. We regret this certainly:- but we do not presume to complain of it. The service of the Muses is a free service and all that we receive from their votaries is a free gift, for which we are bound to them in gratitude not a tribute, for the tardy rendering of which they are to be threatened or distrained. They stand to the public in the relation of benefactors, not of debtors. They shower their largesses on unthankful heads; and disclaim the trammels of any sordid contract. They are not articled clerks, in short, whom we are entitled to scold for their idleness, but the liberal donors of immortal possessions; for which they require only the easy quitrent of our praise. If Mr. Campbell is lazy, therefore, he has a right to enjoy his laziness, unmolested by our importunities. If, as we rather presume is the case, he prefer other employments to the feverish occupation of poetry, he has a right surely to choose his employments

and is more likely to choose well, than the herd of his officious advisers. For our own parts, we are ready at all times to hail his appearances with delight-but we wait for them with respect and patience; and conceive that we have no title to accelerate them by our reproaches.

Before concluding, we would wish also to protect him against another kind of injustice. Comparing the small bulk of his publications with the length of time that elapses between them, people are apt to wonder that so little has been produced after so long an incubation, and that poems are not better which are the work of so many years absurdly supposing that the

BUT A LARGE BENEFACTOR.

213

ingenious author is actually labouring all the while at what he at last produces, and has been diligently at work during the whole interval in perfecting that which is at last discovered to fall short of perfection! To those who know the habits of literary men, nothing however can be more ridiculous than this supposition. Your true drudges, with whom all that is intellectual moves most wretchedly slow, are the quickest and most regular with their publications; while men of genius, whose thoughts play with the ease and rapidity of lightning, often seem tardy to the public, because there are long intervals between the flashes! We are far from undervaluing that care and labour without which no finished performance can ever be produced by mortals; and still farther from thinking it a reproach to any author, that he takes pains to render his works worthy of his fame. But when the slowness and the size of his publications are invidiously put together in order to depreciate their merits, or to raise a doubt as to the force of the genius that produced them, we think it right to enter our caveat against a conclusion, which is as rash as it is ungenerous; and indicates a spirit rather of detraction than of reasonable judgment.