CHARACTER OF HOGG'S POETRY.

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One word of remark on poetry such as this were superfluous: it appeals at once, and that triumphantly, to the heart and the imagination, and carries the calculating critic fairly off his feet, by a coup-de-main. But, of course, it was only in his transient fits of inspiration that the Shepherd thus wrote.

The poetry of James Hogg is not that of philosophic sentiment, like Wordsworth's, nor of reflection, like that of Bowles; nor of minute painting, like that of Crabbe; nor of picturesque action, like that of Scott. We should assign him a place between the Claud-like delicate fairy dreaminess of Wilson, and the Salvator Rosa demonology of Coleridge; although without the classic taste of the one or the gorgeous magnificence of the other. He never reveals to us the human affections and passions in the whirlwind of their operations; nor does he exhibit any intimate knowledge of the constituted forms of society. His portraitures of men and manners are, in general, sad affairs. Like Coleridge and Shelley, almost the whole of his power lay in his wonderful imagination. He delights in the vague and abstracted; in the picturesque and ideal; in the wild, lonely, savage features of nature; in the benighted traveller on the purple moors; in the Covenanter on the sea-beat cliff; the shepherd on the grassy mountain; the plaided clansman beside the sepulchral cairn in the glen; the enthusiast waiting the appearance of the sheeted spectre by the moonlit stream. His muse was a sojourner by the foaming cataract and the roaring ocean, by the scathed forest and the barren wilderness. She is conversant only with our terrors and superstitions-our " fierce wars and faithful loves -with the romance of human action,. the poetry of life.

We come naturally next to say a few words of Allan Cunningham, another racy and original poet, who also sprang from the bosom of the people, and whose genius

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ALLAN CUNNINGHAM.

was as sterling as it was peculiar. Allan Cunningham stands in direct contrast to James Hogg in this, that his best poetry, like that of Robert Burns, was composed in early life, and before he had emerged from obscurity, or become at all conversant with the conventional forms of the world. His vein was intrinsically and genuinely a native one, and could only be spoiled by artificial cultivation. His prose improved by practice; but his verse lost the peculiar characteristics which originally gave it value. He seemed himself unaware of this, and kept writing on, in the crawling crowds of London, about the pastoral Nith, and the heights of Blackwood, and the groves of Dalswinton; but in a far different tone from that to which he had tuned his youthful harp, “amang the primrose banks of the bonny Cowehill," or beside the blood-stained lintels of "Carlisle Yetts." Indeed, I doubt much if any injury would have accrued to Cunningham's fame had he dropped his poetic mantle before crossing the Border, and trusted his reputation to the early ballads published in Cromek's "Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song ;" for by these, as a poet, will he be chiefly remembered. His latter vein was thinner and weaker; he wrote more ambitiously, but more diffusely; and, in attempting polish, he lost raciness. His larger and more elaborate compositions, his "Sir Marmaduke Maxwell," and his "Maid of Elvar," with many scintillations of genius, with many diamond sparks of true inspiration, want thews and sinews; and, at best, are unsatisfactory. He is sadly deficient in plot and constructiveness; and although his eloquence and enthusiasm never flag, the reader wearies, and cannot help deploring that these are often misdirected. He knew not where to stop, and continually perilled success from lack of critical discretion.

This goes far to account for the fact that all his happiest compositions are in the shape of ballad and song, where he was necessarily compelled to be concise

HIS EARLY POEMS.

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and concentrated. His fine peculiar genius was intensely national; and he had the wonderful faculty of completely throwing himself back into, and identifying his feelings and thoughts with, those of bygone generations. Amid these, as viewed by him in the mirror of imagination, we feel that he is far more secure and at home than amid the imperfectly understood manners of his own day, while with the things of departed ages neither himself nor his readers have any misgivings about the tone or colouring of his pictures; for, when reality fails, he brightens them over with the tints of fairyland, or overshadows them with the "gloom of earthquake and eclipse."

The genius of Allan Cunningham was essentially lyrical. In the narrative and descriptive his drawing is continually out of keeping; and he lacks discretion or discernment. He was fond of large surfaces, and of painting in al-fresco; whereas his forte lay in miniature, and on small canvass. He mistook himself for an Etty, when he might have been a Noel Paton.

His early poems, "The Mermaid of Galloway," "She's gane to dwall in Heaven," "The Lord's Marie," and "Bonny Lady Anne," are perfect gems-are in their way unsurpassed and inimitable; and scarcely less may be said of his songs-" 'Tis Hame, hame, hame," "The Sun rises bright in France," "The wee, wee German Lairdie," "A Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sea," and

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My Nannie, O." The following very characteristic fragment has all the picturesque setting and artless pathos of the genuine traditionary ballad :

"Gane were but the winter cauld,
And gane were but the snaw,
I could sleep in the wild-woods,
Where primroses blaw.

Cauld's the snaw at my head,
And cauld at my feet,

H

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SCIENCE AND POETRY,

And the finger o' death's at my e'en,
Faulding them to sleep.

Let nane tell my father,

Or my mither sae dear;
I'll meet them baith in heaven,
At the spring o' the year."

Apart from mere scholarship, we know what Shakespeare and Scott, what Burns and Bloomfield, what Hogg and Cunningham were, as poets. And the question naturally arises, do Science and Poetry progress together?

Poetry may be defined to be-Objects or subjects seen through the mirror of imagination, and descanted on in harmonious language. Such a definition is far from perfect, but it may be accepted as a sufficiently comprehensive one; and, if so, it must be admitted that the very exactness of knowledge is a barrier to the laying on of that colouring by which alone facts can be invested with the illusive hues of poetry. The proof of this would be a reference to what has been generally regarded as the best poetry of the best authors in ancient and modern times. Without interfering with the laws of the world of mind-which, from the days of Plato to Kant, seem involved in the same cloud of uncertainty-let me turn to the external world, and it will be at once apparent that the precision of science, as shown in geographical limits, and in the recognised laws of matter, would at once annul the grandest portions of the Psalms-of Isaiah-of Ezekiel-of Job-of the Revelation. It would convert the mythology of Hesiod and Homer, the "Medea" of Euripides, the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid, and the "Atys" of Catullus, into rhapsodies; and transform "The Faery Queen" of Spenser, "The Tempest" and "Midsummer Night's Dream" of Shakespeare, the "Comus" of Milton, "The Fatal Sisters" of Gray,

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"The Ancient Mariner" of Coleridge, the "Thalaba" of Southey, the "Laodamia" of Wordsworth, the "Edith and Nora" of Wilson, the "Kilmeny" of Hogg, and the "Sensitive Plant" of Shelley, in fact, all high imaginative verse-into tissues of rant, bombast, and fustian.

In the contest between Bowles and Byron on the invariable principles of poetry, the lesser poet, as I hinted in a preceding lecture, had infinitely the best of the argument; but he did not make the most of it by illustration and example-for no one could be hardy enough to maintain that a castle newly erected is equally poetical with a similar one in ruins, like Tantallon, Dunotter, or Dunstaffnage; or a man-of-war, fresh from the stocks, with one that has braved the battle and the breeze-with Duncan's "Venerable," or Nelson's "Victory." Stone and lime, as well as timber and sail-cloth, require associations to raise them beyond prose. Push the theory to the extreme, and you cannot help proving Pope a greater poet than Shakespeare; and, with regard to Pope's own performances, it would make his "Essay on Criticism" equal to his "Eloïse," for it is written with the same care and power; and it would show that Darwin's "Botanic Garden," and Hayley's "Triumphs of Temper," might stand on the same shelf with Cowper's "Task," or Thomson's "Seasons." Wherever light penetrates the obscure, and illuminates the uncertain, we may rest assured that a demesne has been lost to the realms of imagination.

That poetry can never be robbed of its chief ornaments and elements, I firmly believe-for these elements are the immutable principles of our nature; and, while men breathe, there is room for a new Sappho or a new Simonides to melt, and for a new Tyrtæus and a new Pindar to excite and inspire; nor, in reference to the present state of literature, although I shrewdly doubt whether either Marmion or Childe Harold would, even