nature is a fit material on which the poet may work; forgetting that poetry has a nature of its own, and that it is the destruction of its essence to level its high being with the triteness of every-day life. Can there be a Can there be a more pointed concetto than this address to the Piping Shepherds on a Grecian Urn?

'Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone :'

but it would be irksome to point out all the instances of this kind which are to be found in Mr. K.'s compositions.

Still, we repeat, this writer is very rich both in imagination and fancy; and even a superabundance of the latter faculty is displayed in his lines On Autumn,' which bring the reality of nature more before our eyes than almost any description that we remember.

TO AUTUMN.
I.

• Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
II.

'Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

III.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies:'

If we did not fear that, young as is Mr. K., his peculiarities are fixed beyond all the power of criticism to remove, we would exhort him to become somewhat less strikingly original, to be less fond of the folly of too new or too old phrases, and to believe that poetry does not consist in either the one or the other. We could then venture to promise him a double portion of readers, and a reputation which, if he persist in his errors, he will never obtain. Be this as it may, his writings present us with so many fine and striking ideas, or passages, that we shall always read his poems with much pleasure.

ART. XV. Marcian Colonna, an Italian Tale; with Three Dramatic Scenes, and other Poems. By Barry Cornwall. 8vo. pp. 190. 8s. 6d. Boards. Warren, and Ollier.

1820.

WH HEN Marcian Colonna was put into our hands, we almost felt inclined to exclaim with Falstaff, "Oh thou hast damnable iteration!' Mr. Barry Cornwall, as this writer still chuses to designate himself, has no idea of losing the place which he has acquired in the estimation of the public by any want of activity on his own part; and indeed we have no wish that he should, our only desire being that he would render himself, as we are convinced he is capable of doing, still more truly worthy of the reputation which he has begun to obtain. We cannot think, however, that he will accomplish this desirable object by persisting to write in that spirit, which we have before felt ourselves required to mention with disapprobation: nor will he, in acting thus, be true to himself. He was not intended to be a mere copyist, which he seems inclined to become. The spirit of better things resides in him, and should be invoked, not exorcised.

It is the fashion of that school of poetry to which Mr. C. most decidedly belongs, to worship as the models of poetic imitation the elder poets of Italy; and, as a natural consequence of this admiration, their next favourites are the writers of the age of our own Elizabeth, who pursued the same track. Indeed to such an excess was the passion for every thing that was Italian then carried, that the grave

Ascham,

Ascham, in one of his letters, makes serious complaints of it. Poetry ought to partake strongly of the character of the age in which it is written, we mean in its spirit; and nobody can read the works of the Augustan writers, without immediately perceiving that Rome was fast sinking into that abyss of slavish infamy from which she has never yet risen. It is in vain, also, to endeavour to transfer the feeling of one age to another. Yet this is the attempt which Mr. Barry Cornwall makes; who would sometimes transport us to the days of Boccaccio and Petrarch, and at others would make us think that we are living in the age of Shakspeare. To such an extent, in some instances, is this mal d'Italie pushed, that every thing which bears the title of Italian is sacred in the eyes of these worshippers; and the poem now before us opens with certainly a fine apostrophe to that country. This fashion of falling into raptures at the mention of a land which the writer has never seen is somewhat preposterous; and yet it is now chiefly in vogue among a knot of poets whose feet, we believe, have been mostly confined to a perambulation of the streets of our metropolis, or to the enjoyment, in common with many others of their fellow-citizens, of the prospects with which the neighbourhood of London abounds.

We are told that the story of Marcian Colonna is fictitious, but that the catastrophe was suggested by paper which appeared in a northern Magazine, intitled

An Extract from Gosschen's Diary." If that paper contained a powerful delineation of passion, it abounded with the overwrought and unnatural feeling which produces disgust. Marcian Colonna' was originally intended as a delineation of the fluctuations of a fatalist's mind; touched with insanity, alternately raised by kindness and depressed by neglect or severity, ameliorated by the contemplation of external nature, and generally influenced by the same causes which operate on more healthful temperaments:' but this intention has not been carried into effect; and the story, as it now stands, is nothing more than the history of the ravings of a lunatic, with whose fate the fortunes of a beautiful, tender, and devoted woman are most unaccountably connected. The general effect of a picture like this is almost revolting: but the detached sentiments, and the details of feeling, which the story contains, make some amends for the pain which the fable inflicts.

The tale opens with a description of the convent of Laverna among the Appennines, which displays considerable energy and power of painting; and

X 4

• Among

Among the squalid crowd that lingered there,
Mocking with empty forms and hopeless prayer
Their bounteous God, was one of princely race
The young Colonna - in his form and face
Honoring the mighty stem from which he sprung.
Born amidst Roman ruins, he had hung
O'er every tale of sad antiquity,
And on its fallen honors, once so high,
Had mused like one who hoped.
Into the depth of ages, and had brought
From thence strange things and tidings.'
Marcian was the youngest of his house, and,

His soul had gone

by many men

(Who some ancestral taint had not forgot,)
Marcian was shunned from very infancy,

And marked and charter'd for the madman's lot.'

From all that we can gather of the young Italian's history, this suspicion, though severe, was just. He was studious: but the themes over which he pored seem only to have furnished food to his distempered imagination. His father had resolved that he should wear the cowl: but, as his mind grew more disordered, he was conveyed by his parent's direction to the prison of the convent of Laverna.

In the mean time, the Colonna palace was the scene of festivals and gladness, and the lonely misery of Marcian is well contrasted with this joyful revelry:

'He was missed

By none, and when his mother fondly kissed
Her eldest born, and bade him on that day
Devote him to the dove-eyed Julia,

The proud Vitelli's child, Rome's paragon,

She thought no longer of her cloistered son.'

Julia, amid the gaiety of the dance, questioned why Marcian joined not in it, but questioned only to cause silence or angry looks:

-She dwelt upon that night till pity grew

Into a wilder passion: the sweet dew

That linger'd in her eye" for pity's sake,"
Was (like an exhalation in the sun)

Dried and absorbed by Love.'

We have now rather a long description of the situation and feelings of Marcian in the solitude of his mountainous prison. The hallucinations and wild visions of a disturbed intellect are described with much power by Mr. Cornwall: who traverses with skilful feet the dim and shadowy confines

on

on which the human mind sometimes wanders, and who always seems to recur to such subjects with the consciousness of power.

Some memory had he of Vitelli's child,
But gathered where he now remembered not;
Perhaps, like a faint dream or vision wild,
(Which, once beheld, may never be forgot,)
She floated in his fancy; and when pain
And fevers hot came thronging round his brain,
Her shape and voice fell like a balm upon
His sad and dark imagination.

A gentle minister she was, when he
Saw forms, 'twas said, which often silently
Passed by his midnight couch, and felt at times
Strange horror for imaginary crimes,

(Committed or to be,) and, in his walk,

Of Fate and Death, and phantom things, would talk
Shrieks scared him from his sleep, and figures came
On his alarmed sight, and thro' the glades,

When evening filled the woods with trembling shades,
Followed his footsteps; and a star-like flame

Floated before his eyes, palely by day,

And glared by night, and would not pass away.'

At length, Giovanni the elder brother of Marcian falls
A victim in a cause he lov'd too well.'

Whatever idea this line excited in the mind of the writer, it certainly conveys no very definite image to that of the reader. Marcian now sought his home, and was recognized as a descendant of the Colonnas. Soon afterward, Vitelli and his daughter Julia return to Rome. The latter had been betrothed and wedded to one of the Orsini; who had been (in Mr. Cornwall's phrase) a bitter husband;' and of whose death every person was rejoiced to hear. The young love of Julia revived when she beheld Colonna, and he saw in her the spirit which had been the softener of his solitary agony. Her character is beautiful, and the love-part of the tale is decidedly the best:

6

Oh with what deep fear

He listened now, to mark if he could hear

The voice that lulled him, - but she never spoke;

For in her heart her own young love awoke

From its long slumber, and chain'd down her tongue,
And she sate mute before him: he, the while

Stood feasting on her melancholy smile,

Till o'er his eyes a dizzy vapour hung,
And he rush'd forth into the fresh'ning air,

Which kissed and played about his temples bare,

And