Campbell has no need of my alliance, nor they might have seen the sun shining on shall I presume to offer it; but I do hate a footman's livery, or on a brass warmingthat word "invariable." What is there of pan; but could the "calm water," or the human, be it poetry, philosophy, wit, wis-"wind," or the "sun,” make all, or any dom, science, power, glory, mind, matter, of these "poetical?" I think not. Mr. life, or death, which is "invariable?" Of Bowles admits "the Ship" to be poetical, but course I put things divine out of the ques-only from those accessaries: now if they tion. Of all arrogant baptisms of a book, confer poetry so as to make one thing poetthis title to a pamphlet appears the most ical, they would make other things poetcomplacently conceited. It is Mr. Camp-ical; the more so, as Mr. Bowles calls a bell's part to answer the contents of this performance, and especially to vindicate his own "Ship," which Mr. Bowles most triumphantly proclaims to have struck to his very first fire.

"ship of the line" without them, that is to say, its "masts and sails and streamers." "blue bunting," and "coarse canvas," and "tall poles." So they are; and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and flesh is grass, and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much poesy.

Did Mr. Bowles ever gaze upon the sea? I presume that he has, at least upon a seapiece. Did any painter ever paint the sea only, without the addition of a ship, boat, wreck, or some such adjunct? Is the sea itself a more attractive, a more moral, a more poetical object with or without a vessel, breaking its vast but fatiguing monotony? Is a storm more poetical without a ship; or, in the poem of the Shipwreck, is it the storm or the ship which most interests? both much undoubtedly; but without the vessel, what should we care for the tempest? It would sink into mere descriptive poetry, which in itself was never esteemed a high order of that art.

Mr. Bowles asserts that Campbell's "Ship of the Line" derives all its poetry not from "art," but from "nature.” "Take away the waves, the winds, the sun, one will become a stripe of blue bunting; and the other a piece of coarse canvas on three tall poles." Very true; take away the "waves," "the winds," and there will be no ship at all, not only for poetical, but I look upon myself as entitled to talk for any other purpose; and take away "the of naval matters, at least to poets: - with sun," and we must read Mr. Bowles's pam- the exception of Walter Scott, Moore, and phlet by candlelight. But the "poetry" Southey, perhaps (who have been voyagers), of the "Ship" does not depend on "the I have swam more miles than all the rest waves;" on the contrary, the "Ship of the of them together now living ever sailed, Line" confers its own poetry upon the and have lived for months and months on waters, and heightens theirs. I do not shipboard; and during the whole period deny, that the waves and winds," and of my life abroad have scarcely ever passed above all "the sun,” are highly poetical; a month out of sight of the ocean: besides we know it to our cost, by the many de- being brought up from two years till ten scriptions of them in verse: but if the on the brink of it. I recollect, when waves bore only the foam upon their anchored off Cape Sigeum, in 1810, in an bosoms, if the winds wafted only the sea- English frigate, a violent squall coming weed to the shore, if the sun shone neither on at sunset, so violent as to make us upon pyramids, nor fleets, nor fortresses, imagine that the ship would part cable, would its beams be equally poetical? I or drive from her anchorage. Mr. Hobthink not: the poetry is at least reciprocal. house and myself, and some officers had Take away "the Ship of the Line" "swing-been up the Dardanelles to Abydos, and ing round" the "calm water," and the were just returned in time. The aspect calm water becomes a somewhat monoton- of a storm in the Archipelago is as poetous thing to look at, particularly if not transparently clear; witness the thousands who pass by without looking on it at all. What was it attracted the thousands to the launch? they might have seen the poetical "calm water" at Wapping or in the "London Dock," or in the Paddington Canal, or in a horse-pond, or in a slopbasin, or in any other vase. They might have heard the poetical winds howling through the chinks of a pigstyc, or the garret-window;

ical as need be, the sea being particularly short, dashing, and dangerous, and the navigation intricate and broken by the isles and currents. Cape Sigeum, the tumuli of the Troad, Lemnos, Tenedos, all added to the associations of the time. But what seemed the most "poetical” of all at the moment, were the numbers (about two hundred) of Greek and Turkish craft. which were obliged to "cut and run" before the wind, from their unsafe anchorage

some for Tenedos, some for other isles, some for the main, and some it might be for eternity. The sight of these little scudding vessels, darting over the foam in the twilight, now appearing and now disappearing between the waves in the cloud of night, with their peculiarly white sails (the Levant sails not being of "coarse canvas," but of white cotton), skimming along as quickly, but less safely than the sea-mews which hovered over them; their evident distress, their reduction to fluttering specks in the distance, their crowded succession, their littleness, as contending with the giant element, which made our stout forty-four's teak timbers (she was built in India) creak again; their aspect and their motion, all struck me as something far more "poetical" than the mere broad, brawling, shipless sea, and the sullen winds, could possibly have been without them.

The beautiful but barren Hymettus, the whole coast of Attica, her hills and mountains, Pentelicus, Anchesmus, Philopappus, are in themselves poetical, and would be so if the name of Athens, of Athenians, and her very ruins, were swept from the earth. But am I to be told that the "nature" of Attica would be more poetical without the "art" of the Acropolis? of the Temple of Theseus? and of the still all Greek and glorious monuments of her exquisitely artificial genius? Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the Parthenon, or the rock on which it stands? The COLUMNS of Cape Colonna, or the Cape itself? The rocks at the foot of it, or the recollection that Falconer's ship was bulged upon them? There are a thousand rocks and capes, far more picturesque than those of the Acropolis and Cape Sunium in themselves; what are they to a thousand scenes in the The Euxine is a noble sea to look upon, wilder parts of Greece, of Asia Minor, and the port of Constantinople the most Switzerland, or even of Cintra in Portugal, beautiful of harbours, and yet I cannot but or to many scenes of Italy, and the Sierras think that the twenty sail of the line, some of Spain? But it is the "art," the columns, of one hundred and forty guns, rendered the temples, the wrecked vessel, which it more "poetical" by day in the sun, and give them their antique and their modern by night perhaps still more, for the Turks poetry, and not the spots themselves. Withilluminate their vessels of war in a man-out them, the spots of earth would be unner the most picturesque, and yet all this is artificial. As for the Euxine, I stood upon the Symplegades-I stood by the broken altar still exposed to the winds upon one of them-I felt all the "poetry of the situation, as I repeated the first lines of Medea; but would not that "poetry" have been heightened by the Argo? It was so even by the appearance of any merchantvessel arriving from Odessa But Mr. Bowles says, "why bring your ship off the stocks?” For no reason that I know, except that ships are built to be launched. The water undoubtedly HEIGHTENS the poetical associations, thus it does not make them; and the ship amply repays the obligation: they aid each other; the water is more poetical with the ship the ship less so without the water. But even a ship, laid up in dock, is a grand and a poetical sight. Even an old boat, keel upwards, wrecked upon the barren sand, is a "poetical" object (and Wordsworth, who made a poem about a washingtub and a blind boy, may tell you so as well as I); whilst a long extent of sand and unbroken water, without the boat, would be as like dull prose as any pamphlet lately published.

noticed and unknown; buried, like Babylon and Nineveh, in indistinct confusion, without poetry, as without existence; but to whatever spot of earth these ruins were transported, if they were capable of transportation, like the obelisk, and the sphinx, and the Memnon's head, there they would still exist in the perfection of their beauty and in the pride of their poetry. I opposed, and will ever oppose, the robbery of ruins from Athens, to instruct the English in sculpture; but why did I do so? The ruins are as poetical in Piccadilly as they were in the Parthenon; but the Parthenon and its rock are less so without them. Such is the poetry of art.

Mr. Bowles contends, again, that the pyramids of Egypt are poetical, because of "the association with boundless deserts," and that a "pyramid of the same dimensions" would not be sublime in "Lincoln's Inn Fields:" not so poetical certainly; but take away the "pyramids," and what is the "desert?" Take away Stone-henge from Salisbury-plain, and it is nothing more than Hounslow-Heath, or any other uninclosed down. It appears to me that St. Peter's, the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Palatine, the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venus

What makes the poetry in the image of the "marble waste of Tadmor,” in Grainger's | di Medicis, the Hercules, the dying Gla"Ode to Solitude," so much admired by Johnson? Is it the "marble," or the "waste," the artificial or the natural object? The "waste" is like all other wastes; but the “marble” of Palmyra makes the poetry of the passage as of the place.

diator, the Moses of Michel Angelo, and all the higher works of Canova (I have already spoken of those of ancient Greece, still extant in that country, or transported to England), are as poetical as Mont Blanc or Mount Etna, perhaps still more so, as

they are direct manifestations of mind, and presuppose poetry in their very conception; and have, moreover, as being such, a something of actual life, which cannot belong to any part of inanimate nature, unless we adopt the system of Spinoza, that the world is the Deity. There can be nothing more poetical in its aspect than the city of Venice: does this depend upon the sea, or the canals?

"The dirt and sea-weed whence proud Venice rose?"

the celestial armour, and the very brazen
greaves of the wellbooted Greeks? Is it
solely from the legs, and the back, and the
breast, and the human body, which they
inclose? In that case, it would have been
more poetical to have made them fight
naked; and Gulley and Gregson, as being
nearer to a state of nature, are more poet-
ical, boxing in a pair of drawers, than fiec-
tor and Achilles in radiant armour, and
with heroic weapons.

Instead of the clash of belmets, and the Is it the canal which runs between the pa- rushing of chariots, and the whizzing of lace and the prison, or the "Bridge of Sighs" spears, and the glancing of swords, and which connects them, that renders it poet- the cleaving of shields, and the piercing of ical? Is it the "Canal' Grande," or the Ri- breast-plates, why not represent the Greeks alto which arches it, the churches which and Trojans like two savage tribes, tugging tower over it, the palaces which line, and and tearing, and kicking, and biting, and the gondolas which glide over the waters, gnashing, foaming, grinning, and gonging, that render this city more poetical than in all the poetry of martial nature, unisRome itself? Mr. Bowles will say, per-cumbered with gross, prosaic artificial arms, haps, that the Rialto is but marble, the an equal superfluity to the natural warrior, palaces and churches only stone, and the and his natural poet? Is there any thing gondolas a "coarse" black cloth, thrown unpoetical in Ulysses striking the horses of over some planks of carved wood, with a Rhesus with his bow (having forgotten his shining bit of fantastically-formed iron at thong), or would Mr. Bowles have had him the prow, "without" the water. And I tell kick them with his foot, or smack them him that without these the water would be with his hand, as being more unsophistinothing but a clay-coloured ditch, and cated? whoever says the contrary, deserves to be at the bottom of that were Pope's heroes are embraced by the mud nymphs. There would be nothing to make the canal of Venice more poetical than that of Paddington, were it not for the artificial adjuncts above mentioned, although it is a perfectly natural canal, formed by the sea, and the innumerable islands which constitute the site of this extraordinary city.

In Gray's Elegy, is there an image more striking than his "shapeless sculpture?" Of sculpture in general, it may be observed, that it is more poetical than nature itself, inasmuch as it represents and bodies forth that ideal beauty and sublimity which is never to be found in actual nature. This at least is the general opinion; but, always excepting the Venus di Medicis, I differ from that opinion, at least as far as regards The very Cloaca of Tarquin at Rome female beauty; for the head of Lady Charare as poetical as Richmond - Hill; many lemont (when I first saw her, nine years will think more so. Take away Rome, and ago) seemed to possess all that sculpture leave the Tiber and the seven hills in the could require for its ideal. I recollect seenature of Evander's time: let Mr. Bowles, ing something of the same kind in the head or Mr. Wordsworth, or Mr. Southey, or of an Albanian girl, who was actually emany of the other "naturals," make a poem ployed in mending a road in the mountains, upon them, and then see which is most and in some Greek, and one or two Italian poetical, their production, or the common- faces. But of sublimity, I have never seen est guide-book which tells you the road any thing in human nature at all to apfrom St. Peter's to the Coliseum, and in-proach the expression of sculpture, either in forms you what you will see by the way. The ground interests in Virgil, because it will be Rome, and not because it is Evander's rural domain.

the Apollo, the Moses, or other of the
sterner works of ancient or modern art.

Let us examine a little further this "babble of green fields," and of bare nature in Mr. Bowles then proceeds to press Homer general, as superior to artificial imagery, into his service, in answer to a remark of for the poetical purposes of the fine arts. Mr. Campbell's, that "Homer was a great In landscape-painting, the great artist does describer of works of art." Mr. Bowles not give you a literal copy of a country, contends that all his great power, even in but he invents and composes one. Nature, this, depends upon their connexion with in her actual aspect, does not furnish him nature. The “shield of Achilles derives its with such existing scenes as he requires. poetical interest from the subjects described Even where he presents you with some faon it." And from what does the spear of mous city, or celebrated scene from mounAchilles derive its interest? and the hel-tain or other nature, it must be taken from met and the mail worn by Patroclus, and some particular point of view, and with

such light, and shade, and distance, as serve not only to heighten its beauties, but to shadow its deformities. The poetry of Nature alone, exactly as she appears, is not sufficient to bear him out. The very sky of his painting is not the portrait of the sky of Nature; it is a composition of different skies, observed at different times, and not the whole copied from any particular day And why? Because Nature is not lavish of her beauties; they are widely scattered, and occasionally displayed, to be selected with care, and gathered with difficulty.

Of sculpture I have just spoken. It is the great scope of the sculptor to heighten Nature into heroic beauty, i. e. in plain English, to surpass his model. When Canova forms a statue, be takes a limb from

one, a hand from another, a feature from a third, and a shape, it may be, from a fourth, probably at the same time improving upon all, as the Greek of old did in embodying his Venus.

Ask a portrait-painter to describe his agonies in accommodating the faces with which Nature and his sitters have crowded

"tower," it would have been as poetical as if he had compared her to a tree.

"The virtuous Marcia towers above her sex,"

is an instance of an artificial image to express a moral superiority. But Solomon, it is probable, did not compare his beloved's nose to a "tower" on account of its length, but of its symmetry; and, making allowance for eastern hyperbole and the difficulty of finding a discreet image for a female nose in nature, it is perhaps as good a figure as any other.

Art is not inferior to nature for poetical purposes. What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements. Highlander's plaid, a Mussulman's turban, and a Roman toga, are more poetical than the tattooed or untattooed buttocks of a NewSandwich savage, although they were delike the idiot in his glory." scribed by William Wordsworth himself

I have seen as many mountains as most his painting-room to the principles of his of landsmen: and, to my mind, a large men, and more fleets than the generality art with the exception of perhaps ten faces in as many millions, there is not one which convoy, with a few sail of the line to conduct them, is as noble and as poetical a he can venture to give without shading prospect as all that inanimate nature can much and adding more. Nature, exactly; produce. I prefer the "mast of some great simply, barely Nature, will make no great ammiral," with all its tackle, to the Scotch artist of any kind, and least of all a poet-fir or the Alpine tannen; and think that the most artificial, perhaps, of all artists more poetry has been made out of it. In in his very essence. With regard to na- what does the infinite superiority of "Faltural imagery, the poets are obliged to take coner's Shipwreck," over all other shipsome of their best illustrations from art. wrecks, consist? In his admirable applicaYou say that a "fountain is as clear or tion of the terms of his art; in a poet-sailclearer than glass," to express its beauty-or's description of the sailor's fate. These "O fons Bandusiæ, splendidior vitro!" In the speech of Mark Antony, the body of Cæsar is displayed, but so also is his mantle:

"You all do know this mantle,"

"Look! in this place ran Cassius' dagger through." If the poet had said that Cassius had run his fist through the rent of the mantle, it would have had more of Mr. Bowles's "nature" to help it; but the artificial dagger is more poetical than any natural hand without it. In the sublime of sacred poetry, "Who is this that cometh from Edom? with dyed garments from Bozrah?" Would "the comer" be poetical without his “dyed garments?" which strike and startle the spectator, and identify the approaching object.

The mother of Sisera is represented listening for the "wheels of his chariot." Solomon, in his Song, compares the nose of his beloved to "a tower," which to us appears an eastern exaggeration. If he had said, that her stature was like that of a

very terms, by his application, make the
strength and reality of his poem. Why?
because he was a poet, and in the hands
of a poet art will not be found less
ornamental than nature. It is precisely
in general nature, and in stepping out
of his element, that Falconer fails; where
and "such branches of learning."
he digresses to speak of ancient Greece,

fame rests, the very appearance of Nature
In Dyer's Grongar Hill, upon which his
herself is moralized into an artificial image:

"Thus is Nature's vesture wrought,
To instruct our wandering thought;
Thus she dresses green and gay,
To disperse our cares away.'

And here also we have the telescope, the mis-use of which, from Milton, has rendered Mr. Bowles so triumphant over Mr. Camp

bell.

"So we mistake the future's face,
Eyed through Hope's deluding glass."
And here a word, en passant, to Mr.
Campbell:

"As yon summits, soft and fair,
Clad in colours of the air,

Which, to those who journey near,
Barren, brown, and rough appear,
Still we tread the same coarse way-
The present's still a cloudy day.”
Is not this the original of the far-famed

"Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue ?"

To return once more to the sea. Let any one look on the long wall of Malamocco, which curbs the Adriatic, and pronounce between the sea and its master. Surely that Roman work (I mean Roman in conception and performance), which says to the ocean, "thus far shalt thou come, and no further," and is obeyed, is not less sublime and poetical than the angry waves which vainly break beneath it.

who has rendered the "game of cards poetical," is by far the greater of the two. But all this "ordering" of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr. Bowles. There may or may not be, in fact, different orders of poetry, but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not according to his branch of the art.

Tragedy is one of the highest presumed orders. Hughes has written a tragedy, and a very successful one; Fenton another; and Pope none. Did any man, however,— will even Mr. Bowles himself rank Hughes and Fenton as poets above Pope? Was even Addison (the author of Cato), or Rowe (one of the higher order of dramatists, as far as success goes), or Young, or even OtMr. Bowles makes the chief part of a way and Southern, ever raised for a moship's poesy depend on the "wind:" then ment to the same rank with Pope in the why is a ship under sail more poetical than estimation of the reader or the critic, before a hog in a high wind? The hog is all na- his death or since? If Mr. Bowles will ture, the ship is all art, "coarse canvas," contend for classifications of this kind, let "blue bunting," and "tall poles ;" both are him recollect that descriptive poetry has violently acted upon by the wind, tossed been ranked as among the lowest branches here and there, to and fro; and yet nothing of the art, and description as a mere ornabut excess of hunger could make me look ment, but which should never form “the upon the pig as the more poetical of the subject" of a poem. The Italians, with the two, and then only in the shape of a griskin. most poetical language, and the most fastiWill Mr. Bowles tell us that the poetry dious taste in Europe, possess now five of an aqueduct consists in the water which great poets, they say, Dante, Petrarch, it conveys? Let him look on that of Just- Ariosto, Tasso, and lastly Alfieri; and whom inian, on those of Rome, Constantinople, do they esteem one of the highest of these, Lisbon, and Elvas, or even at the remains of that in Attica.

and some of them the very highest? Petrarch, the sonneteer: it is true that some of his Canzoni are not less esteemed, but not more; who ever dreams of his Latin

Were Petrarch to be ranked according to the "order" of his compositions, where would the best of sonnets place him? With Dante and the others? No; but, as I have before said, the poet who executes best is the highest, whatever his department, and will ever be so rated in the world's esteem.

We are asked "what makes the venerable towers of Westminster Abbey more poetical, as objects, than the tower for the manu-Africa? factory of patent-shot, surrounded by the same scenery?" I will answer-the architecture. Turn Westminster Abbey, or Saint Paul's, into a powder-magazine, their poet ́ry, as objects, remains the same: the Parthenon was actually converted into one by the Turks, during Morosini's Venetian siege, and part of it destroyed in consequence. Cromwell's dragoons stalled their steeds in Worcester cathedral; was it less poetical, as an object, than before? Ask a foreigner on his approach to London, what strikes him as the most poetical of the towers before him: he will point out St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey, without, perhaps, knowing the names or associations of either, and pass over the "tower for patent-shot," not that, for any thing he knows to the contrary, it might not be the mausoleum of a monarch, or a Waterloo-column, or a Trafalgar-monument, but because its architecture is obviously inferior.

To the question, “whether the description of a game of cards be as poetical, supposing the execution of the artists equal, as a description of a walk in a forest?" it may be answered, that the materials are certainly not equal; but that "the artist,"

Had Gray written nothing but his Elegy, high as he stands, I am not sure that he would not stand higher; it is the cornerstone of his glory: without it, his odes would be insufficient for his fame. The depreciation of Pope is partly founded upon a false idea of the dignity of his order of poetry, to which he has partly contributed by the ingenuous boast,

"That not in Fancy's maze he wander'd long, But stoop'd to Truth, and moralized his song.” He should have written "rose to truth." In my mind the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth. Religion does not make a part of my subject; it is something beyond human powers, and has failed in all human hands except Milton's and Dante's, and even Dante's powers are involved in his delineation of human