genius oft he author, appear to ensure; and perhaps, too, we may be able, in the course of our investigation, to point out other reasons which may for a season impede the popularity of a poem containing passages, both of tenderness and sublimity, which may decline comparison with few in the English language.

The tale of "Gertrude of Wyoming" is abundantly simple. It refers to the desolation of a beautiful tract of country, situated on both sides of the Susquehannah, and inhabited by colonists, whose primæval simplicity and hospitality recalled the idea of the golden age. In 1778, Wyoming, this favoured and happy spot, was completely laid waste by an incursion of Indians and civilized savages, under a leader named Brandt. The pretext was, the adherence of the inhabitants to the provincial confederacy; but the lust of rapine and cruelty which distinguished the invaders was such as to add double horrors even to civil conflict.

We do not condemn this choice of a subject in itself eminently fitted for poetry; yet feeling as Englishmen we cannot suppress a hope that Mr Campbell will in his subsequent poems choose a theme more honourable to our national character, than one in which Britain was disgraced by the atrocities of her pretended adherents. We do not love to have our feelings unnecessarily put in arms against the cause of our country. The historian must do his duty when such painful subjects occur; but the poet who may choose his theme through the whole unbounded range of truth and fiction may well excuse himself from selecting a subject dishonourable to his own land. Although the calamity was general, and overwhelmed the whole settlement of Wyoming, Mr Campbell has judiciously selected a single group as the subject of his picture; yet we have room to regret that in some passages at least he has not extended his canvass to exhibit, in the background, that general scene of tumult and horror which might have added force to the striking picture which he has drawn of individual misery.

The opening of the poem describes Wyoming in a state of more than Arcadian case and happiness, where exiles or emigrants from all quarters of Europe met in peace, and contended only which should best adorn and improve their seat of refuge. The following stanzas comprehend this interesting description, and are at the same time a just specimen of the style and structure of the poem.

"On Susquehanna's side, fair Wyoming,
Although the wild-flower on thy ruined wall
And roofless homes a sad remembrance bring
Of what thy gentle people did befall,
Yet thou wert once the loveliest land of all
That see the Atlantic wave their morn restore.
Sweet land! may I thy lost delights recall,
And paint thy Gertrude in her bow'rs of yore,

"It was beneath thy skies that, but to prune
His Autumn fruits, or skim the light canoe,
Perchance, along thy river calm at noon,
The happy shepherd swain had nought to do
From morn till evening's sweeter pastime grew;
Their timbrel, in the dance of forests brown
When lovely maidens prankt in flow new,
And aye, those sunny mountains half way down
Would echo flagelet from some romantic town.

"Then, where of Indian hills the daylight takes
His leave, how might you the flamingo see
Disporting like a meteor on the lakes-
And playful squirrel on his nut-grown tree:
And every sound of life was full of glee,
From merry mock-bird's song, or hum of men,
While heark'ning, fearing uought their revelry,
The wild deer arch'd his neck from glades, and then
Unhunted, sought his woods and wilderness again.

"And scarce had Wyoming of war or crime
Heard but in transatlantic story rung,
For here the exile met from ev'ry clime,
And spoke in friendship ev'ry distant tongue;
Men from the blood of warring Europe sprung,
Were but divided by the running brook;
And happy where no Rhenish trumpet sung,
On plains no sieging mine's volcano shook,

The blue-ey'd German chang'd his sword to pruning-hook.

"Nor far some Andalusian saraband
Would sound to many a native roundelay.
But who is he that yet a dearer land
Remembers, over hills and far away?

Green Albyn! what though he no more survey
Thy ships at anchor on the quiet shore,

Thy pellochs rolling from the mountain bay ;

Thy lone sepulchral cairn upon the moor,

Aud distant isles that hear the loud Corbrechtan roar !

"Alas! poor Caledonia's mountaineer,

That want's stern edict e'er, and feudal grief,
Had forced him from a home he loved so dear!
Yet found he bere a home, and glad relief,
And plied the beverage from his own fair sheaf,
That fired his Highland blood with mickle glee;
And England sent her men, of men the chief,
Who taught those sires of Empire yet to be,
To plant the tree of life; to plant fair freedom's tree!

"Here was not mingled in the city's pomp
Of life's extremes, the grandeur and the gloom;
Judgment awoke not here her dismal tromp,
Nor seal'd in blood a fellow-creature's doom,
Nor mourn'd the captive in a living tomb.
One venerable man, beloved of all,
Sufficed where innocence was yet in bloom,
To sway the strife, that seldom might befall,

And Albert was their judge in patriarchal hall."

This Albert, the judge and patriarch of the infant settlement, is an Englishman; Gertrude, the heroine of the poem, his only child. The chaste and affecting simplicity of the following picture would furnish a beautiful subject for the pencil.

"I may not paint those thousand infant charms;
(Unconscious fascination, undesigned !)
The orison repeated in his arms,

The book, the bosom on his knee reclined,
Or how sweet fairy-lore he heard her con.
(The playmate ere the teacher of her mind);
All uncompanion'd else her years had gone

Till now in Gertrude's eyes their ninth blue summer shone."

An Indian of a tribe friendly to the settlers, approaches their cottage one morning, leading in his hand an English boy.

"Of Christian vesture and complexion bright,

Led by his dusky guide like morning brought by night."

The swarthy warrior tells Albert of a frontier fort, occupied by the British, which had been stormed and destroyed by a party of Hurons, the allies of France. The Oneyda chief, who narrates the story, hastened to aid, but only arrived in time to avenge its defenders. All had been massacred, excepting the widow of the commander of the garrison and her son, a boy of ten or twelve years old. The former, exhausted with fatigue and grief, dies in the arms of the friendly Indians, and bequeaths to their chief the task of conducting her son to Albert's care, with a token to express that he was the son of Julia Waldegrave. Albert instantly recognises the boy as the offspring of two old and dear friends. A flood of kindly recollections, and the bitter contrast between the promise of their early days and the dismal fate which finally awaited the parents of Waldegrave, rush at once on the mind of the old man, and extort a pathetic lamentation. The deportment of the Indian warrior forms an admirable contrast to Albert's indulgence of grief, and the stanzas in which it is described rank among the finest in the poem.

"He said-and strain'd unto his heart the boy :
Far differently the mute Oneyda took

His calumet of peace, and cup of joy;
As monumental bronze unchanged his look:
A soul that pity touch'd, but never shook:
Train'd, from his tree-rock'd cradle to his bier,
The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook
Impassive-fearing but the shame of fear-
A stoic of the woods-a man without a tear.-

"Yet deem not goodness on the savage stock
Of Outalissi's heart disdain'd to grow;
As lives the oak unwither'd on the rock
By storms above, and barrenness below:

He scorn'd his own, who felt another's wo:

And ere the wolf skin on his back he flung,

Or laced his mocasins in act to go,

A song of parting to the boy he sung,

Who slept on Albert's couch, nor heard his friendly tongue."

After a lyrical effusion addressed to the slumbering boy, his "own adopted one," the savage returns to his deserts. His capacity of tracking his way through the wilderness by a species of instinct, or rather by the habit of observing the most minute signs derived from the face of earth or heaven, is described in nervous and striking poetry, and closes the first part of the poem.

Part II. opens with a description of Albert's abode, situated be

L

tween two woods near a river, which, after dashing over a thundering cascade, chose that spot to expand itself into a quiet and pellucid sheet of living water. Beautiful in itself, the scene was graced by the presence of Gertrude, yet more beautiful, an "enthusiast of the woods," alive to all the charms of the romantic scenery by which she was surrounded, and whose sentimental benevolence extended itself even to England, which she knew only by her father's report. And here commences the great defect of the story. We totally lose sight of the orphan Waldegrave, whose arrival makes the only incident in the first canto, and of whose departure from Wyoming we have not been apprized. Neither are we in the least prepared to anticipate such an event, excepting by a line in which Julia expresses a hope that her orphan would be conveyed to" England's shore"an innuendo which really escaped us in the first, and even in the second, perusal of the poem, and which at any rate, by no means implies that her wish was actually fulfilled. The unaccountable disappearance of this character, to whom we had naturally assigned an important part in the narrative, is not less extraordinary than that Gertrude, in extending her kind wishes and affectionate thoughts towards friends in Britain whom she never knew, and only loved because they might possibly possess

"Her mother's looks-perhaps her likeness strong."

omits all mention or recollection of the interesting little orphan of whom every reader has destined her the bride from the first moment of his introduction. Of him, however, nothing is said, and we are left to conjecture whether he has gone to Britain and been forgotten by his youthful playfellow, or whether he remains an unnoticed and. undistinguished inmate of her father's mansion. We have next a splendid, though somewhat confused, description of a "deep untrodden grot," where, as it is beautifully expressed,

"rocks sublime

To human art a sportive semblance wore ;
And yellow lichens coloured all the clime.

Like moonlight battlements and towers decay'd by time."

To this grotto, embosomed in all the splendid luxuriance of Transatlantic vegetation, Gertrude was wont to retire "with Shakspeare's self to speak and smile alone," and here she is surprised by the arrival of a youth in a Spanish garb, leading in his hand his steed, who is abruptly announced as

"The stranger guest of many a distant land."

We were at least as much startled as Gertrude by this unexpected intruder, and are compelled to acknowledge that the suspense in which we were kept for a few stanzas is rather puzzling than pleasing.

story, and while hurriedly endeavouring to recover it, became necessarily insensible to the beauties of the poetry. The stranger enquires for the mansion of Albert,-is of course hospitably received, and tells of the wonders which he had seen in Switzerland, in France, in Italy, and in California, whence he last arrived. At length Albert enquires after the orphan Waldegrave, who (as his question for the first time apprizes the reader) had been sent to his relations in England at the age of twelve, after three years' residence in the earthly paradise of Wyoming. The quick eye of Gertrude discovers the mysterious stranger to be "Waldegrave's self of Waldegrave come to tell," and all is rapturous recognition. And here, amidst many beauties, we are again pressed by the leading error of the narrative, for this same Waldegrave-who, for no purpose that we can learn, has been wandering over half the world-of whom the reader knows so little, who appears to have been entirely forgotten during the space of one third of the poem, and whom even Gertrude did not think worthy of commemoration in orisons which called for blessings on friends she had never known-this same Waldegrave, of whose infantine affection for Gertrude we no where receive the slightest hint, with even more than the composure of a fine gentleman returned from the grand tour, coolly assures her and Albert at their first interview, that she "shall be his own with all her truth and charms." This extraordinary and unceremonious appropriation is submitted to by Gertrude and her father with the most unresisting and astonishing complacency. It is in vain to bid us suppose that a tender and interesting attachment had united this youthful couple during Waldegrave's residence at Wyoming. This is like the reference of Bayes to a conversation held by his personages behind the scenes; it is requiring the reader to guess what the author has not told him, and consequently what he is not obliged to know. This inherent defect in the narrative might have been supplied at the expense of two or three stanzas descriptive of the growing attachment between the children, and apprizing us of Waldegrave's departure for England. The omissio. is the more provoking, as we are satisfied of Mr Campbell's powers to trace the progress of their infant love, and the train of little

back. incidents and employments which gave it opportunity to grow with

their growth, and strengthen with their strength; in short, to rival the exquisite picture of juvenile affection presented in Thalaba.

But to proceed with our tale. Gertrude and Waldegrave are united, and spend three short months in all the luxury of mutual and innocent love described in the concluding stanza of part second.

"Then would that home admit them-happier far

Than grandeur's most magnificent saloon

While, here and there, a solitary star