tary forms, and he has sung only what was most familiar to his mind. What could he have told us about the

"Alps and Apennines,

The Pyrenean and the river Po,"

whose summer excursions never, till of late, extended farther than Inversnaid or Glencoe, and to whom

The stars were nearer than the fields ?"

Nothing worth listening to; and therefore he watches the moon circling large and queenly over the smoky tiles of the Gallowgate; or he contemplates the round red sun, shining rayless through the Glasgow morning fogs; or he sees the head of the Great Bear or the foot of Orion glimmering on him at the corner of the streets; or striking out from the city, he marks the

"Laboring fires come out against the dark,

Where, with the night, the country seemed on flame;
Innumerable furnaces and pits,

And gloomy holds, in which that bright slave, Fire,
Doth pant and toil all day and night for man,

Throw large and angry lustres on the sky,

And shifting lights across the long black roads."

Or, in his rare holidays, he sails to Loch Lomond, or paces the banks of Loch Lubnaig, and fancies eclipse instead of sunshine bathing the crags of Benledi, and shadowing into terror and inky darkness the placid lake. Thus has he sought to realise and to utter the poetry which he has found around him, and, verily, great has been his reward. Few as are the objects he describes, what a depth of interest he attaches to them. With what lingering gusto does he describe them. In proportion to the smallness of their number, is the strength of his love, the felicity of his descriptions, and the energy and variety of the poetic use he makes of them. It is as if he were apprehensive of immediate blindness coming to hide them from his view, and were anxious previously to daguerreotype them for ever before the eye of his soul.

In this we are reminded of Óssian; and the defence put in by Blair on behalf of the monotony of the objects of his poetry may be used with fully more force in reference to Smith. His figures, like Ossian's, are chiefly derived from the great pri

mary forms of nature, but their application is still more various, and much less than the Highland bard does he repeat himself, not to speak of the far subtler and intenser spirit of imagination which pervades the later poet. For we fearlessly venture to assert, that no poet that ever lived has excelled Smith in the beauty and exquisite analogical perception displayed in his images from nature. We select a few on this principle, that we have not seen them quoted in any other of the reviews or notices:

"The anguish'd earth shines on the moon-a moon."

"Now the fame that scorned him while he liv'd

Waits on him like a menial."

"His part is worst that touches this base world;
Although the ocean's inmost heart be pure,
Yet the salt fringe that daily licks the shore
Is gross with sand."

"The vain young night
Trembles o'er her own beauty in the sea."

"The soft star that in the azure east
Trembles in pity o'er bright bleeding day."

"The hot Indies, on whose teeming plains
The seasons four, knit in one flowery band,
Are dancing ever."

"Oh, could I lift my heart into her sight,

As an old mountain lifts its martyr's cairn
Into the pure sight of the holy heavens"

"His cataract of golden curls."

"The married colors in the bow of heaven."

"The while the thoughts rose in her eyes, like stars
Rising and setting in the blue of night"

"The earnest sea

ne'er can shape unto the listening hills

The lore it gather'd in its awful age:

The crime for which 'tis lash'd by cruel winds
To shrieks, mad spoomings to the frighted hills."
"A gallant, curl'd like Absalom,
Cheek'd like Apollo, with his luted voice."
"Tis four o'clock already. See, the moon
Has climb'd the blue steep of the eastern sky,
And sits and tarries for the coming night,
So let thy soul be up and ready arm'd,
In waiting till occasion comes like night."
"The marigold was burning in the marsh,
Like a thing dipp'd in sunset."

By the way, not one critic, so far as we know, has noticed the exquisite poem from which this last line is quoted-a poem originally entitled "The Garden and the Child," and which alike we and the author consider the best strain in the whole "Life Drama." Our readers will find it in page 91. Its history is curious. Mr. Smith was trudging one day to his work along the Trongate, when he saw a child "beautiful as heaven." There was no more work for him that day. Her face haunted him; her future history rose before his fancy; and in the evening he wrote the poem (or rather it "came upon him") in the space of two hours. Certainly it reads like. inspiration. It is one gush of tender or terrible beauty. The author now says of it (p. 101):

"I almost smile

At the strange fancies I have girt her with-
The garden, peacock, and the black eclipse,
The still grave-yard among the dreary hills,

Grey mourners round it. I wonder if she's dead.
She was too fair for earth."

The child is another little Eva. We must say that we love not only little children, but all who love them. Especially we sympathise with all those who have some one dead and sainted image of a child hanging up in the chamber of their heart, as Kate Wordsworth hangs in De Quincey's, and A. V. hangs in our own, and who daily and nightly pay their orisons to the Great God who dwelt in it for a season. We suspect that scarce one who has lived to middle age but can remember some such early sunbeam, which shone as only sunbeams in the morning can shine, and returned with its freshness and glory all untainted to the fountain whence it sprang, bearing with it in its return to heaven a whole, loving, yearning, broken, yet submissive heart. Perhaps, after all, this feeling may have prejudiced us in favor of the "Garden and the Child," but certainly it was the perusal of it which first increased to certainty our previous notion that Mr. Smith was one of our truest poets.

It convinced us, too, that he had a heart. This, we fear, has of late been a vital deficiency in many of our most celebrated bards. The odious examples of Goethe and Byron,

the constant inculcation, by critics, of the necessity of reaching artistic merit at every expense and every hazard, and the solitary or divorced life of some of our literary men, not to speak of the withering effects of scepticism and of a modified licentiousness, have all tended to deaden or mislead, or to render morbid, the feelings of our men of genius. Neither Keats nor Moore, nor Tennyson nor Rogers, nor Henry Taylor, have given, in their poetry, any decided evidence of that warm, impulsive, childlike glow, which all men agree in calling "heart." They have proved abundantly that they are artists, and even poets, but have failed to prove that they are men.

We rejoice, however, to recognize in our younger generation of poets-in Yendys and Smith, and Bigg and Baileysymptoms that a better order of things is at hand, and that the principle, "the Greatest of these is Love," so long acknowledged in religion, shall by and by be felt to be the law of poetry-understanding, too, by love, not a mere liking to all things, not a mere indifferentism, raised on its elbow to contemplate objects, but a warm, strong, and enacted preference for all things that are "lovely and true, and of a good report."

The great distinction between the speaker and the singer in this age, as in past ages, is, perhaps, music. Many now, as ever, possessing all other parts of the poet-genius, originality, constructive power-are doomed (sad fate!) all their lives long to the level of prose by their deficiency in ear, their want of music. Apollo's soul may be in them, but Apollo's lute they can by no means tune. Look at Walter Savage Landor! No one can doubt that he is intensely and essentially a poet, and that his prose and verse contain little bursts of glorious poetic music. But they are brief; they are broken; they are not sustained; they are perpetually intermingled with harsh and harrow-like paragraphis, and both his prose and verse conjoin in proving that he never could have elaborated any long, linked, and continuous harmony. Feeling all this, we have watched with considerable interest and care Smith's versification, trying it, however, not by any artificial standard, but solely by the car; and our decided opinion is, that he has been destined by nature to sing rather than to speak his fine

thoughts to the world.

riety of natural music.

His poetry abounds with every va

Take that of the ballad, in this specimen :

Or take a specimen of what we may call the Wordsworthian measure, culled from the "Garden and the Child:"-