The solutions of manganese, and of peroxide of mercury, yield no precipitates when thus treated.

VI. Such are the properties of iodine, and such the compounds which it forms with the simple combustibles and the simple supporters of combustion. We have still to notice some curious combinations which it forms with the compound combustibles.

(1.) Hydriodic ether. This curious compound was discovered by Gay-Lussac. He mixed together equal measures of absolute alcohol and hydriodic acid of the specific gravity 1.7, and distilled the mixture in a water-bath. He obtained an alcoholic liquor perfectly neutral, colourless, and limpid, which, when mixed with water, became muddy, and let fall in small globules a liquid at first milky, but which became gradually transparent. This liquid is hydriodic ether. What remained in the retort was hydriodic acid coloured with iodine.

Hydriodic ether, when well washed in water, is perfectly neutral. It has a strong peculiar odour, analogous to that of the other ethers. After some days it acquires a red colour, which does not increase in intensity. Its specific gravity is 1.9206. It boils at the temperature of 148° 5. It is not inflammable; but when poured on burning coals exhales a purple vapour. Potassium may be kept in it without alteration. Neither potash, nitric acid, chlorine, or sulphurous acid, produce any immediate change in it. When passed through a red-hot tube it is decomposed. The products are, an inflammable gas, hydriodic acid, and charcoal. This ether has not been analyzed; but if we consider it as analogous to muriatic ether, it will be a compound of two volumes of hydriodic acid gas, and one volume of vapour of alcohol. On this supposition it is composed, by weight, of

Acid.
Alcohol..

.100.00
18.55

(2.) Iodide of starch. This compound was first formed by MM. Colin and Gaultier de Claubry, who have published a detailed description of it. If starch and iodine be triturated together in a mortar they speedily combine, and the colour of the compound varies according to the proportion of the ingredients. If the starch exceed, the colour is reddish; if the iodine be in excess, the colour is black; but it is of a beautiful blue when the ingredients are united in the requisite proportions to saturate each other. This blue neutral compound may always be obtained with ease by dissolving the iodide formed by trituration in potash, and precipitating by a vegetable acid. When this compound is boiled for some time in water, a colourless evolution is obtained, part of the iodine being driven off; but if iodine be added to

the solution, or if the water evaporated be poured back again, the blue colour is restored. This iodide is soluble likewise in alkalies, and the solution is colourless; but it is immediately precipitated of its natural blue colour, if an acid be poured into the alkaline solution. The acids dissolve this iodide without destroying the blue colour, unless they be sufficiently concentrated and powerful to decompose the starch. decompose the starch. Heat does not alter the iodide of starch, unless it be sufficiently high to decompose the starch. In that case a quantity of hydriodic acid is

formed.

VII. It now only remains to mention the different methods that have been contrived to detect the presence of iodine when present in small quantity in saline solutions. It has the property of corroding metals, and especially of blackening silver more powerfully than any other body at present known. It was this property that led to its original discovery in kelp. Sir Humphry Davy employed its property of blackening silver as a method of detecting it in the solutions of the ashes of different sea-weeds.

When sulphuric acid is poured upon a dry salt containing iodine, a reddish brown liquid is obtained. This is a good method of detecting the presence of iodine in salts.

of so

But the most delicate re-agent for iodine, according to Stromeyer, is starch. When this substance is put into a liquid containing iodine in a state of liberty, it detects the presence small a quantity as part, by the blue colour which it forms. But he has given us no directions of the method of using this re-agent.

Such is a pretty full detail of the properties of iodine, and of the compounds which it forms with other bodies. If the reader has paid sufficient attention to the properties which we have described, he will be able, without difficulty, not only to appreciate the long details into which some chemists have entered; but even to foretell the action of iodine on those bodies which we have omitted to notice. So that the theory of this curious body may be looked upon as almost complete.

ART. XVII.-The White Doe of Rylstone: or, the Fate of the Nortons: a Poem. By William Wordsworth. 4to. London. Longman and Co.

pp. 162.

IT is usually thought a recommendation of any poem to say, that it is popular. But are the most popular poems always those

which essentially deserve the distinction? We are bold enough to doubt of this, and to suspect that a genuine poet who has high aspirings, and who looks to that mental elevation, that inward sense of moral dignity, and that enthusiasm of sentiment and taste, which accompanies his labours, as their great reward,-who looks to the soothing of his common-life anxieties and the visions of his pillow, as among the privileges of his sublime vocation, will be apt to distrust a popularity too rapidly and easily acquired.

Pure poetry is in fact a mystery to the million, and may without any impeachment of its excellence be unintelligible to the sciolist in belles lettres and the drawing-room critic, or fail to amuse or strike the superficial multitude. I banish you, said Coriolanus to the Roman rabble: and so the poet may exclaim when driven into temporary exile by the light-minded, and those who float, as it were, upon the surface of society. Among men who have drunk of the well of knowledge, how few are there to whom the muse has opened those recesses of her precious repository which contain the furniture of a poet's mind.

The popular feeling is now, however, more just than at the period which has been styled the English Augustan Age: and although it can scarcely be considered in its highest possible state of improvement, as likely to become favourable to poetry, purely imaginative or philosophical; yet it is encouraging to perceive that the French rules of criticism, which resembled the figure-gardening in the Spectator, and which threatened to reduce all English poetry to a polished and featureless mannerism, has gradually been superseded by one more vigorous and more national. Goldsmith set an example of original sentiment; of case, and nature, and tenderness. Glover exhibited in his Leonidas the simple outline of an ancient statue. Cowper has, as it were, crept into the bosom confidence of half his countrymen. The cold brilliancy of Darwin's merc material poetry dazzled for a while; but its gleam was that of an ignis fatuus. General taste has, upon the whole, within this last half century, been simplified, purified, and invigorated. Men have begun to be weaned from the persuasion that poetry is something necessarily striking and dazzling, and epigrammatic, and antithetical, squared and balanced by rule and measure, and made up of established periphrases, conventional phrases, and traditional metaphors; forming altogether a sort of poetic cypher; a symbolical diction as unlike as possible to the language immemorially spoken by men and women and children. They have begun to give up the expectation that every word and line in poetry must be essentially different from prose; to perceive that to call a line flat

or lagging is sometimes the dictate of an inflexible and prejudiced ear, not knowing or not considering that poetry has its reliefs as well as painting. They have begun to admit that poetry, like prose, must have her moods of relaxation; her easy moments; her bye-passages and resting-places: to discover, in short, that poetry is not a being of mere artifice, moving in buckram and sparkling with embroidery; but that, like the mountain shepherdess, she searches the woods and the meadows for her fairest and freshest ornaments, assumes all the changing colours, and follows all the vagrant varieties of primitive nature: "MILLE habet ornatus; mille decenter habet."

The turbulent era of the French revolution, bringing with it a succession of gigantic and astounding events, roused the spirits of men to a pitch of unnatural excitement. Literature, for ever operated upon by external causes, and poetry more especially, caught the contagion. Goblin novels, infidel and obscene, ballads of witchcraft, and tales of wonder and of terror, came like a cloud upon us, and "darkened all the land" of genius.

At length a poet, truly deserving that name, conceived the project of gratifying this appetite for stimulating novelties by resorting to the times of border heroism, and exhibiting the rude characters and picturesque manners of that gallant age in the new and striking form of lyrical epopoeia: recommended also by a singular strength and distinctness in the representation of sensible objects, by an animating impetuosity in the description of busy action, and a boldness and relief in the display of individual character, scarcely exceeded since the time of Homer. A similar experiment has been tried with respect to eastern manners: and that, too, with a peculiarity of powers which may claim the honour of invention; with much of wildness and of melancholy, much of thought and of sentiment. These productions, though open to many exceptions, have done good, independently of the example afforded of a daring poetic spirit, by diffusing a taste for poetical reading among all classes; by recalling conversation from insipid trifling, and disposing it to critical discussion. But the result has, perhaps, been injurious to the moral value of poetry, and perhaps to its interests in general. The sublimations of a spiritual philosophy; the pure ideal of the imagination; the fine and ethereal essence of feeling, are disregarded with a coarse and vulgar contempt as visionary obscurities: admiration is reserved for the dazzle and the bustle of adventure; for incidents so arranged as to embrace the complicated interest of a novel; and for characters in which a capricious and incongruous mixture of virtues and vices, which never did and never could meet and mingle in the self-same human being, are conceived in a

spirit of forced and overstrained enthusiasm, and applied to pamper the outrageous craving of a diseased and insatiable appetite for distortion and eccentricity.

In attempting to interest mankind in a species of poetry composed of mere simple elements, Mr. Wordsworth has had to contend with the prejudices of two descriptions of readers. Those who, accustomed to the refined language of Pope or the smooth couplets of Hayley and Rogers, cry out on a common or trivial expression or a loose line, as if they had made a notable detection of poetic insufficiency; and those who, aware of the natural variety and relief of these occasional softenings of tone, yet expect a certain supernatural vehemence of passion; a rapidity of detail; a stirring and hurrying excitement; a constant darkening of the gloomy and illuminating of the splendid.' Neither the ballad character of the poem before us, nor the quiet and passive fortitude and meek sympathy which are its object, will stand the touchstone of artificial criticism, or float on the breath of popular applause. It is a song fitted to a calmer and better age, and a less sophisticated audience: such as might have reckoned among its hearers a Spenser and a Sydney. It might be said of it, in the language of the Arcadian, "Behold! he cometh to you with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner." Yet, after all, we cannot let Mr. Wordsworth escape from our hands without correction. His extreme love of simplicity has sometimes betrayed him into affectation, and by affectation he has been carried into excess. Sometimes we discern in his compositions an inverted laboura studious departure from grace, and a fastidious disdain of cultivation; as if ease implied the absence of ornament, and nature delighted in discord. It is to be regretted that Mr. Wordsworth, with his powers of harmony and delicate apprehension of metrical beauty, should ever forget that, however grave or sublime, affecting or noble the sentiment, if it pretend to array itself in verse, it must adopt its characteristic embellishments, or sink below the level of prose.

The historical part of the poem is grounded on the great northern insurrection in the twelfth year of Elizabeth, 1509; which forms the subject of one of the ballads in Dr. Percy's collection, entitled "The Rising in the North." The Duke of Norfolk had been committed to the Tower by Elizabeth, on the discovery of a negotiation for marrying him with Mary, Queen of Scots, in which several of the English nobility were implicated: and the Earl of Northumberland, on being commanded to repair to the English court, took up arms, on the plea of settling the succession of the crown, and restoring the ancient religion. His standard-bearer was Richard Norton, whose sons,