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this singularity, that prayers, penances and sacrifices, if regularly and exactly performed, are supposed infallibly to procure certain powers and advantages to the worshipper, altogether independent of the motives or dispositions by which he was influenced. The powers which may be thus acquired, are such as not only to subject all the elements to the will of the devotee, but to endanger the dominion of the deities themselves, and to expose the sovereignty of the universe to the enterprises of human ambition. Upon this revolting peculiarity of the Hindoo faith, the poem before us is founded; and a single sentence of additional explanation will enable the reader to understand perfectly the short abstract which we are about to give of the story. Kehama, a king somewhere in India, was one of those wicked worshippers, who, by penances and ritual observances, had acquired supreme power over all this lower world, and brought the gods themselves to tremble for their independence. His son, Arvalan, the heir apparent to all his power and wickedness, had offered violence to Kailyal, the beautiful daughter of a peasant in the neighbourhood of his imperial palace; and had been felled to the earth, and slain, by the avenging arm of her father. The poem opens with an account of the prince's in

terment.

It is divided into twenty four books er sections. The first of which is entitled, "The Funeral;" and contains a very complete and elaborate picture of the midnight procession, and the burning of the dead Arvalan and his living wives. This affords a very good specimen both of the author's powers of picturesque representation, and of the exhausting, and somewhat oppressive, fulness and minuteness of his details. The roofs and balconies crowded with spectators; the interminable line of smoking torches; the splen

the

did palankins; the musick; shoutings; the baldheaded priests; the soldiers; the mourning sovereign; the funeral pile; the devoted widow; the dancing and the blaze, are all described at full length, and with careful and repeated touches. The effect is undoubtedly rich, to those who have patience to go through with it. But, to many readers, it will prove very fatiguing; and, indeed, it is rather too much, to fill a whole book of an epic poem with the description of a burial; without the relief of dialogue, character, or action of any sort.

The second section is entitled "The Curse;" and begins, rather in a startling manner, with a colloquy at the side of the funeral pile, between the dead Arvalan and his father. The young gentleman complains grievously of the loss of his body, and of the piercing influences of the air on his naked spirit. The omnipotent monarch commands the elements to cease from troubling him, and promises him an ample revenge. For this purpose, he orders the peasant and his daughter to be brought forward. The former obeys, with calm resignation; but the girl clings with instinctive terrour to a wooden image of her favourite goddess, that happened to be placed hard by, on the bank of a river; and while the guards are struggling to tear her from it, a part of the bank gives way; and they, and the goddess, and her votary, are all plunged into the water. Kehama then turns to the father; and, summoning up all his energies of power and of malice, for one great effort, pronounces that portentous curse, from which this wonderful work of Mr. Southey takes its denomination. The greater part of this curse would appear to most people, we believe, as no inconsiderable blessing; since it charms its object from the effects of wounds and violence, and sickness, infirmity, and old age; and merely dooms him not to be wet with water,

nor fanned with wind, and to pass his days without sleep, with a fire in his heart and in his brain. We did not intend to give any extract, in this short view of the story; but we must make one exception, we believe, for the sake of this Curse, which is so very cardinal a point in the whole machinery. We suspect our readers have seldom met with such a miserable doggrel; nor, indeed, could we easily find a better specimen of those terrible failures to which Mr. Southey is liable.

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"I charm thy life
From the weapons of strife,
From stone and from wood,
From fire and from flood,
From the serpent's tooth,
And the beasts of blood:
From sickness I charm thee,
And time shall not harm thee;
But earth, which is mine,
Its fruits shall deny thee;
And water shall hear me,
And know thee and fly thee;
And the winds shall not touch thee
When they pass by thee,
And the dews shall not wet thee
When they fall nigh thee:
And thou shalt seek death

To release thee, in vain;
Thou shalt live in thy pain,
While Kehama shall reign,

With a fire in thy heart,
And a fire in thy brain;
And sleep shall obey me,

And visit thee never,

And the Curse shall be on thee

For ever and ever." p. 18, 19.

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"Oh misery! she cried, me from the river depth, and yet--His garment is not wet !"

The fourth canto is called "the Departure," and helps the story but little forward. The father and daughter lie in listless and silent agony, almost all day. At last, the former, not satisfied with the experiment of the dry coat, steps down to the ri

With this curse, however, such as it is, Ladurlad (for that is his name) having only laid his account for death by torture, is quite horrour-struck; and wanders away, in the beginning of the third section, entitled "the Recovery," along the banks of the river, in silent conster-ver to ascertain whether the water nation. About sunrise, he sees some thing floating in the stream; and by and by recognizes a woman clinging to a wooden image; suspects it may be his daughter; rushes in; and, by the powerful protection of the curse, walks dry through the roaring flood, and bears her to the shore.

VOL. V.

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really would not touch him; and is again thunderstruck to find, that it recedes round his dry hand. Kailyal then bethinks her of the services of the wooden goddess; and, after expressing her gratitude in some very sweet and innocent verses, crecis the image on the bank, and leads

her father further off from the residence of their omnipotent oppres

sor.

The fifth section, entitled "the Separation," is a little more progressive. The wretched pair lie down under a tree for the night, Ladurlad, breathing regularly in si lent agony, appears to his daughter to sleep; and she, after a long contest with filial anxiety, very sweetly described, yields at last to the pressure of fatigue, and sinks into slumber herself. Her father, anxious to spare her the spectacle of his incurable misery, seizes this moment to escape from her vigilant love, slips his head from her lap, and runs off. She awakes with the motion, and runs frantick after him through the dark wood. She is here met by the ghost, or rather by a new incarnation, of the detested Arvalan, who chases her to some distance, when she flies to the sanctuary of a good, quiet god, called Pollear, whose statue, in the shape of an elephant, stood by the wayside. Arvalan, impiously following to seize the maid, "with fleshly arm," as Mr. Southey has it, at the altar, is seized by the indignant statue, and tossed into the heart of the wood. The maid, rushing on in agony of fear, stumbles against the root of a manchineal tree, and falls senseless under its deadly shade.

The sixth canto, called "Casyapa," is the first that introduces the superhuman agents, and must be admitted to present us with some new and very eloquent description. One of the pure spirits termed Glendoveers in the Hindoo mythology, floating near the earth, in the sweet moonlight of that evening, discovers the prostrate maiden, and bears her in his arms up to Mount Himakoot, where old Casyapa, the sire of gods, dwells by the spring of the Ganges. The pitying spirit is here informed by the ancient divinity, of the rage and power of Kehama. A very beautiful description is given of Kailyal's

revival by the side of the holy fountain, and of the heroick pity by which the Glendoveer is roused to defy the rage of the omnipotent Kehama in her behalf. He calls to him, therefore, a ship of heaven, and embarks in it with her for the Swerga, or lowest heaven of their mythology.

"The Swerga" gives its name to the seventh section; which opens with an elegant and fanciful description of the ship of heaven, shaped like a shell, rigged with a rainbow bending in one fine sweep from end to end, coloured like the green light of evening, and holding its noiseless way through air and sunshine with inconceivable rapidity. This, which is long enough for most readers, is followed with another still longer, of the wings of the Glendoveer, which were leathery, it seems, like the bat's, without feathers, very transparent, coloured like good port wine, divided into compartments by fi bres of pliant bone of a silver hue, and folding up, when his flying was over, into the form of a very becoming drapery. After sporting through five pages with these redundant descriptions, Mr. Southey lands his voyagers at the Swerga, which is described with still more extravagant luxuriance, both of language and of fancy. A huge tree on the midland height, drops diamond water from every leaf, and feeds a thousand rills that collect into rivers, and spread into lakes among bowers of bliss. Upon these blue lakes, as a floor, the palace of Indra is reared, of clouds, and fire, and water, and pieces of rainbow; pillars of cloud, with capitals of fire, being arched over with rainbow, and spires and pinnacles of flame supporting cupolas of water. Indra, however, gives the Glendoveer as little comfort as old Casyapa. He, too, is unable to control, and afraid to oppose the will of the terrible Kehama; and as no mortal king can inhabit the ethereal bowers of the Swerga, it is

doomed that Kailyal must be conveyed back to earth, and placed again at the foot of mount Meru, beside the fountains of the Ganges. She prays, with sweet filial devotion, to be conducted again to her father. In the eighth canto, entitled "the Sacrifice," we return to earth, and Kehama; and meet again with new failures and fallings off on the part of Mr. Southey. The sacrifice which is to give the impious sovereign the dominion of the Swerga, consists in the immolation of a wild horse, upon which no man has ever laid his hand; and many thousand guards surround him, to keep off the profane touch. When the moment has arrived, Kehama rises to strike the fatal blow, when a man rushes wildly forward, and, in spite of the arrows and javelins that fall like hail around him, lays his hand on the devoted steed, and destroys the whole virtue of the ceremony. Kehama recognizes the victim of his curse, in this bold and invulnerable delinquent; and refusing him the death to which he eagerly offers himself, sends him back to his wanderings; but at the same time, orders the whole vast array of his guards to be slain on the spot, for not having done impossibilities, by stopping him in his approach; so ten thousand horsemen gallop in, and quietly cut down ten thousand infantry! This tame-told butchery, instead of being impressive or terrible, is absolutely ridiculous, and the whole canto, indeed, though indicating very great talents, is heavy, tedious, and preposterous. The next, which is called "the Home-scene," is of a mixed character. Ladurlad wanders to his own happy home, and surveys, in mute despair, the overblown flowers of his garden, the garlands withered on the brows of his household gods, the peacocks veering their glittering necks, in expectation of the wonted meal from his hand, and the wild grown marriage bower, which his widowed hands had been used

to deck with such mournful assiduity. All this is described beautifully, as well as the listless tenderness of sorrow with which the deserted scene is contemplated, and the soothing feelings of devotion that arise from this softened form of affliction. But Mr. Southey mars all again, by bringing in the disgusting form of Arvalan; and then follows nothing but disgust and failure, and cold and impotent extravagance. This amiable person, of whom it is very difficult to say whether he is dead or alive, material or spiritual, throughout the poem, shows his ugly face from the sky, and grins so provokingly at Ladurlad, that, in spite of all he had already suffered, he takes up a stick to belabour him, when the dead ravisher gathers you a handful of sunbeams, and points them at his opponent. Kehama's curse, however, enables him to set fire at defiance; but the stick in his hand is immediately reduced to white ashes! The mischievous spectre then blows up the hot sand upon his unhappy victim; and, as Mr. Southey elegantly expresses it, fills and chokes up his mouth, nose, ears, and eyes, with the drifting shower. While the poor man is reeling about in this sandy tornado, the Glendoveer whips down most opportunely from the sky, and hews the dead Arvalan to pieces with his sword; and then turning the heavenly ship a little from its course, lays the entranced father beside his daughter, and sails away with them for Mount Meru.

The tenth section begins with Sapphicks addressed to this vessel, and a description of the blessed sanctuary to which it conveyed those highfated mortals. The description is verbose, and not very intelligible. But there are some tender and poetical lines, expressive of the calm and innocent delight that awaited them in this divine retreat, where Kailyal meets the spirit of her dead mother, and the Glendoveer sports with his

fair protegée in all the playfulness of ethereal infancy. It is quite plain to the reader, that the mortal and immortal have a decided penchant for each other, as the sequel of the poem, indeed, abundantly proves: however, the author thinks proper positively to deny all knowledge of it at this period, and brings in the Indian Cupid riding on a lory, to shoot vainly at them with a bow of sugar cane, strung with a row of living bees. This section contains more childishness than any we have yet noticed, and is full of nambypamby and affectation, intermixed with a sort of amiable and pretty silliness.

The next is more entirely disagrecable. It is entitled "The Enchantress," and contains a long, disgusting account of a witch, to whom Arvalan repaired for aid and counsel in his distresses; and of her getting him a suite of armour, and sending him off in her chariot, to invade the blessed family on Mount Meru. The device which she employs to find out the place of their retreat, is, perhaps, the most revolting and contemptible extravagance in the whole poem. Her own eyes being bad, she calls her attendant spirits to bring in a "globe of liquid chrystal, as black as jet;" to make which, we are literally and distinctly told, that she had taken out the sight from a thousand eyes, and kneaded it into this magical organ! by looking through which, she immediately discovers Kailyal's bower of bliss on Mount Meru. The catastrophe of the unhappy Arvalan is not very intelligibly narrated. He sets out galJantly in a car drawn by dragons, according to the universal practice of all champions equipped by enchanters, and gets very near the habitation of his victims, when his chariot and steeds are very conve niently drawn aside by "All-cominanding Nature!" and dashed upon certain adamantine rocks, from which

the wicked prince falls battered down into an ice-rift, ten thousand miles below, where he is jammed in, and left to howl, unpitied and unheard.

The succeeding section is not much better. It is called "The Sacrifice completed," and contains a dull and noisy account of the evacuation of the Swerga by Indra and his attendant spirits, in consequence of Kehama having got another wild and untouched horse within the reach of his axe. The affrighted gods take ship for a higher heaven; but call, on their voyage, to explain the melancholy cause of their emigration, to the party on Mount Meru, and to apprize the unhappy Ladurlad and his daughter (the former of whom, we think, might have baffled the sacrifice again) that they must return within the sphere of the tyrant's power.

The thirteenth canto, entitled "the Retreat," drops these devoted victims upon the lower earth; and contains an account of the sylvan abode in which they resolved to await the renewal of their trials. We are rather inclined to think it the most beautiful of the whole poem. There is a fine description of a Banian tree, and of the rich oriental scenery around it; and though the idea of the tyger and elephant losing their fierceness at sight of the beauty and innocence of Kailyal, be borrowed from the lowest commonplaces of poetry, yet the picture of their homage is finished with great elegance and beauty, as well as that of the pious resignation and simple occupations of her who receives it. Having "fed upon heavenly fare," as Mr. Southey elegantly expresses it, she had been converted, by a process somewhat analogous to that of making a queen bee, into a creature of a much higher order than a mere peasant girl; and begins to be familiar with lofty thoughts and imaginings, though she cannot repress some womanish and

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