tion. It is in subjects of this kind, that Wilson is least successful, because least true.

"The broad daylight of cloudless truth,

Like a sunbeam bathes his face:
Though silent, still a gracious smile
That rests upon his eyes the while
Bestows a speaking grace.

That smile hath might of magic art,
To sway at will the stoniest heart,
As a ship obeys the gale;

And when his silver voice is heard,
The coldest blood is warmly stirred,
As at some glorious tale.

The loftiest spirit never saw

This youth without a sudden awe;
But vain the transient feeling strove
Against the stealing power of love.
Soon as they felt the tremor cease,
He seemed the very heart of peace ;-
Majestic to the bold and high,

Yet calm and beauteous to a woman's eye."

Isle of Palms, Canto I.

The discursive manner of this description will not have passed unmarked; it is a feature observable in all Wilson's poems. An easy abundance of thought and language would appear to supply him with materials which he has never dreamed of subjecting to any process of revisal or compression. This extreme facility, which perpetually hovers on the borders of negligence, is a fault, and the parent of faults. Yet the entire ness wherewith the poet seems thus confidingly to pour into the hearts of his readers, without reserve or distrust, all the utterance of his enraptured moments, has something in it so earnest and persuasive, as almost to disarm critical severity.

We have yet to inquire with what success our author has grasped materials of a sterner and less evanescent texture. For he has not busied his contemplation with glowing or pathetic reveries alone, or in reposing on the mystical beauty of nature; but has ventured, with no timid step, into the dark region of human calamity and endurance, and amidst the inflexible realities of life. In "The City of the Plague," written at a period when his faculties, it may be supposed, were fully matured, he found a subject, the most rigorous and thrilling perhaps, that the register of man's misery contained; a theme, the full command of which demanded no common exercise of a class of powers uncalled for by the materials of his former poems. We cannot say that the demand has been effectual. The failures, no less than the beauties of this striking but unequal performance, only display, in higher relief, the prevalent features which have already been described. As a representation of human character and motive, exhibited in one of those fearful seasons which sweep away uses and conventions, leaving the hearts of men in bare and quivering nakedness, it is faint and improbable the story lingers amidst profitless incidents, and scenes which the French would term décousus. The characters are introduced and dismissed with as much consecutive fitness as the succession of figures in a magic lantern, to which they bear no slight resemblance; in short, although composed in the dramatic form, the poem has no claim whatsoever to dramatic merit. On the other hand, the uncontrollable mood of the author, which appears to have estranged him from the truth required by such a tale, finds breathless occupation amidst

the mysterious and terrible images which it suggests, or pursues visions of unreal loveliness and excellence, as they flit, like sea-birds in a storm, amidst the fearful gloom which surrounds them. Many of the passages, depicting the pest and its consequences, are in the finest vein of descriptive poetry, sombre, thrilling, and forcible. The imagination and eloquence of the poet seem to be kindled by the lurid majesty of the subject; and he represents, like one who is himself possessed with a burden of horror, the forebodings or the frenzy of a time, sick and crazed with the superstitions of hopeless despair. We can only select the following pictures:

"Oh! my friend,

Far other sounds and sights have filled my dreams!
Still, noiseless floors, untrod by human feet;

Chairs standing rueful in their emptiness;

An unswept hearth choked up by dust and ashes;
Beds with their curtains idly hanging down,

Unmoved by the breath of life; wide open windows,
That the fresh air might purify the room
From vapours of the noisome pestilence;
In a dark chamber, ice-cold like a tomb,

A corpse laid out-O God! my mother's corpse,
Woefully altered by a dire decay!

While my stunned spirit shuddered at the toll,
The long, slow, dreary, sullen, mortal toll,
Of a bell swinging to the hand of death."

City of the Plague, Act I.

A terrible foreboding truly, which not unfitly precedes the representation of the actual wo.

"Stand aloof,

And let the Pest's triumphal chariot
Have open way advancing to the tomb.
See, how he mocks the pomp and pageantry
Of earthly kings! A miserable cart,

Heaped up with human bodies; dragged along
By pale steeds, skeleton anatomies!

And onwards urged by a wan, meagre wretch,
Doomed never to return from the foul pit,

Whither, with oaths, he drives his load of horror.
Would you look in? Grey hairs and golden tresses;
Wan, shrivelled cheeks that have not smiled for years;
And many a rosy visage smiling still;
Bodies in the noisome weeds of beggary wrapt,
With age decrepit, and wasted to the bone;
And youthful frames, august and beautiful,
In spite of mortal pangs;-there lie they all,
Embraced in ghastliness! But look not long;
For haply, 'mid the faces glimmering there,
The well-known cheek of some beloved friend
Will meet thy gaze, or some small snow-white hand,
Bright with the ring that holds her lover's hair."

City of the Plague, Act 1.

The entire passage, recording the fears and phantoms which perplexed the dwellers in the doomed city, is very powerfully written. We can only find room for a part:

We question, however, if De Foe, to whom Wilson is evidently much indebted, does not produce a higher effect of solemnity, despair, and awe, by his plain and vi

gorous prose.

"Yea! before the plague burst out,
All who had eye-sight, witnessed in the city
Dread apparitions, that sent through the soul
Forebodings of some wild calamity.

The very daylight seemed not to be poured
Down from the sun-a ghastly glimmering haze
Sent upwards from the earth; while every face
Looked wan and sallow, gliding through the streets
That echoed in the darkness. When the veil
Of mist was drawn aside, there hung the sun
In the unrejoicing atmosphere, blood-red,
And beamless in his wrath. At morn and even,
And through the dismal day, that fierce aspect
Glared on the city, and many a wondering group
Gazed till they scarce believed it was the sun.
Did any here behold, as I beheld,

That Phantom, who three several nights appeared,
Sitting upon a cloud-built throne of state,

Right o'er St. Paul's Cathedral? On that throne,
At the dead hour of night, he took his seat,

And, monarch-like, stretched out his mighty arm
That shone like lightning. In that kingly motion
There seemed a steadfast threatening-and his features,
Gigantic 'neath their shadowy diadem,

Frowned, as the Phantom vowed within his heart,
Perdition to the city. Then he rose,

Majestic spectre! keeping still his face
Towards the dome beneath, and disappeared,

Still threatening with his outstretched arm of light,
Into a black abyss behind the clouds."

City of the Plague, Act II.

The following fragment we consider the best in the poem. It has a dreary sublimity, which is quite appalling; and the language almost re. minds us of the nervous clearness and felicity of Massinger.

"The plague broke out,

Like a raging fire, within the darksome heart

Of a huge mad-house; and, one stormy night,

As I was passing by its iron gates,

With loud crash they burst open, and a troop
Of beings, all unconscious of this world,
Possessed by their own fearful fantasies,
Did clank their chains unto the troubled moon
Fast rolling through the clouds. Away they went
Across the glimmering square! some hurriedly,
As by a whirlwind driven; and others moving
Slow-step by step-with melancholy mien,
And faces pale in idiot vacancy.

For days those wild-eyed visiters were seen
Shrieking, or sitting in a woful silence,

With withered hands, and heaps of matted hair!

And they all died in ignorance of the plague
That freed them from their cells."

City of the Plague, Act II.

The last passage we can extract may be censured by some as a picture too ghastly for poetical representation.

"What signifies a living maniac's face?
Have we not often seen the unsheeted dead
Reared up like troops in line against the walls?

To us, at distance, seemingly alive;

All standing with blotched faces, and red eyes

Unclosed, as in some agonizing dream.

2d. Man-Just round the corner of that street, even now,

I stumbled on such hideous company;

The lamps burned dimly, and the tall church-tower
Rose up between me and the moon. I saw
A glimmering whiteness all along the walls
Of several silent houses; up I went,

And, right before me, stood the ghastly dead,
For whose grim faces no kind hand had done
The last sad office. Oh! 'twas terrible
To recognize, in those convulsed features,
Friends at whose fireside I had often sat!
And, as I hurried off in shivering fear,
Methought I heard a deep and dismal groan
From that long line of mortal visages,

Shudder through the deepening darkness of the street."

City of the Plague, Act III.

These are very terrible and graphic. The descriptive portions constitute, indeed, the chief praise of the work: the personal interest of which is feeble throughout, notwithstanding that the author has evidently taken great pains to interest us on behalf of an exquisite but unreal creation, "the lovely lady no one knows,

Who walks through lonesome places day and night."

Of this sweet vision, Magdalene, we find the appearance and occupations, thus beautifully described:

"Not in some spot

Apart from death, in deathlike loneliness

Doth Magdalene dwell. Throughout the livelong day,

And many a livelong night, for these three months

Hath she been ministering at the dying bed

From which, with an unnatural cowardice,

Affection, ardent in the times of joy,

Had fled; perhaps to stumble o'er the grave.

What though thy Magdalene heretofore had known
Only the name of sorrow, living far

Within the heart of peace, with birds and flocks,
The flowers of earth, and the high stars of heaven,
Companions of her love and innocence;
Yet she who, in that region of delight,

Slumbered in the sunshine, or the sheltered shade,
Rose with the rising storm, and, like an angel,
With hair unruffled in its radiance, stood

Beside the couch of tossing agony,

As undisturbed as on some vernal day

Walking alone through mountain solitude,

To bring home in her arms a new-yeaned lamb
Too feeble for the snow!

Many think she bears a charm against the Plague,
And they are not deceived. A charm she hath,
But hidden not in ring or amulet,

Sleeping in the quiet of her sinless soul.
Some think she is a spirit; many look
With tears of sorrow on a mortal creature
Whom death may steal away; but all agree,
That a thing so piteous, kind, and beautiful,
Did never walk before upon this earth."

City of the Plague, Act II.

The irreconcilable strife in Wilson's temperament between fancy and experience, in which the former perpetually conquers, bearing him from the clear realities of life into a world of dreams,-this strife, we think, will for ever incapacitate him from dramatic writing. He is continually forgetting his personages in himself; his own feelings break through their thin disguises; they are merely quaint or elegant masks, beneath

which he expatiates upon the images suggested by a contemplation, (in his own character, as a remote spectator,) of the events in which they are supposed to move. With this propensity, Wilson can never become the creator of living characters; nor are we acquainted with a single figure in his works which makes the slightest approach towards robust vitality.

The universe, indeed, in which his poetical experience has gathered its treasures, is a purely imaginary region; a Fata Morgana, which can but be approached through the clouds. He stamps his representations of life with the impress of a fanciful coinage; the joys and sorrows he describes are alike unsubstantial. The grief of his mourners is not the stern tyrant that wrings the heart's-blood from human bosoms, but a winged monitor, breathing, with a placid mien, the tidings of a speedy extinction of all woes in the rejoicings of a region beyond the grave. His personages ever dwell within the shadow of a further existence, which softens every perception of suffering or delight. They tread but lightly upon a world, which is to them but as a bridge leading to a region of perfect communion and happiness. This is a beautiful conception of what human motives might be; perhaps, were it not otherwise ordained, we would say ought to be, considering the actual conditions and tenure of life; and we may feel inclined at times to lament, that the heart of man should seem unable thus to prevail over the passionate eagerness of the present, by stedfastly looking towards the future. But until the temper of human feeling has undergone a thorough change, representations like the following, however exquisite as conceptions, cannot be admitted to possess any actual, or even poetical fidelity.

"There is in love

A consecrated power, that seems to wake,
Only at the touch of death, from its repose
In the profoundest depth of thinking souls.
Superior to the outward signs of grief,

Sighing or tears; when these have past away,
It rises calm and beautiful, like the moon
Saddening the solemn night; yet with that sadness
Mingling the breath of undisturbed peace."

City of the Plague, Act II.

A son is seated by the corpse of his mother, whose death he has but lately learned.

"Even then a smile

Came o'er her face, a sweet, upbraiding smile,
That silently reproved my senseless grief.

O! look upon her face! eternity

Is shadowed there! a pure, immortal calm,
Whose presence makes the tumult of this world
Pass like a fleeting breeze, and through the soul
Breathes the still ether of a loftier climate."

City of the Plague, Act III.

Is this the strain of filial grief in the first consciousness of its bereav

ment?

A young girl looks on the grave of her only protector and friend, whom she has just seen expire, and then hastily committed to the earth. She is asked,

"Is not this church-yard now a place of peace?
Isabel. Of perfect peace! My spirit looks with eyes
Into the world to come. There Magdalene sits
With them she loved on earth. O mortal body,