Charmed round the busy fair five shepherds press,
Praise the nice texture of their snowy dress,
Admire the artists, and the art approve,
And tell with honeyed words the tale of love.

So now, where Derwent rolls his dusky floods
Through vaulted mountains, and a night of woods,
The nymph Gossypia 1 treads the velvet sod,
And warms with rosy smiles the watery god;
His ponderous oars to slender spindles turns,
And pours o'er massy wheels his foamy urns;
With playful charms her hoary lover wins,
And wields his trident, while the monarch spins.
First, with nice eye emerging Naiads cull
From leathery pods the vegetable wool;
With wiry teeth revolving cards release

The tangled knots, and smooth the ravelled fleece;
Next moves the iron hand with fingers fine,
Combs the wide card, and forms the eternal line
Slow, with soft lips, the whirling can acquires
The tender skeins, and wraps in rising spires;
With quickened pace successive rollers move,
And these retain, and those extend the rove;
Then fly the spokes, the rapid axles glow,

And slowly circumvolves the labouring wheel below.

In all this, however, it must be confessed, there is more of ingenuity than of poetry. The excess of emphasis, and overcrowding of all the artifices and licenses of the poetical style, into which Darwin runs, would, if there were nothing else, betray the process of hard hammering, and, as it were, manual force and dexterity, by which he fabricated his verse; but his theory of poetry, as we have intimated above, was also radically vicious. Take the single figure of impersonation, in which he deals so largely. We shall all admit that there are bounds to the employment of this figure. Its effect is to represent a mere thing or idea as a living and individual being. But this can only be done with any poetical result in cases in which there is a natural disposition in the general mind, when in a state of excitement, to view the matter in that light. Sometimes such a tendency is checked by certain constituents or accessories of the object of too inherently mean or trivial a character, or too distinctly obtruding its real nature upon the senses or ↑ From Gossypium, the cotton plant.

the imagination, to allow of its being thus metamorphosed and exalted; but it is enough that there should merely be nothing in it or about it to respond to the exertion of the poet's skill. Throughout all nature, moral and material, there must be the proper sort of worth in the substance wrought upon, as well as in the instrument, or no worthy effect will be produced. The steel that strikes fire from the flint will strike none from the brick. No husbandry can raise a harvest on a sandy sea-beach. The best teaching will not illuminate a blockhead, nor the kindest help be of any enduring service to the man who can do nothing for himself. So in the treatment of a subject poetically; it cannot be done unless there be poetry in the subject, as well as in the writer. No poetical power or skill, for example, could give any grandeur or solemnity to the prosopopoeia either of a wheelbarrow, or of the art of making wheelbarrows. It would merely turn out something utterly flat and dead, if it did not prove ridiculous. It would resemble an attempt to compound gunpowder out of sulphur and common earth. The great constituent elements of the poetical in the nature of things are few in number. Whatever can be made to flash a new combination, or other exciting image, upon the fancy admits of poetical treatment and embellishment in an inferior degree; but all high poetry has its source in passion, —in veneration, in love, in terror, in hatred, in revenge, or some other of those strong emotions that, as it were, transport the mind out of and above itself, and give it to see as with a new intelligence and with other organs. But such emotions are not to be excited by such phenomena, whether of art or nature, as those with which Darwin's poetry principally deals. Many of the processes of mechanics, of chemistry, of vegetation, which he describes are in the highest degree curious and interesting, philosophically or scientifically considered; but that is quite a different thing from being poetically interesting or exciting. We may almost say that the one quality is directly opposed to and destructive of the other. Poetry and science are two rival and hostile powers. The latter is continually employed in encroaching upon and subjugating to itself the dominion of the former, which, however, is happily infinite in extent, so that, no matter how much of it may be thus wrested away, it never can suffer any real diminution. Whenever anything has been perfectly reduced to matter of science, its poetical character is extinguished: it ceases to appeal to any passion or

affection. What was veneration or terror, religion or superstition, becomes now satisfied and unimpassioned intelligence. Imagination is dethroned there, its creative power abolished and destroyed, its transforming illumination made impossible. Even mere wonder, the lowest of all the imaginative states of mind, ceases when the scientific comprehension is complete; for, of course, when understood, no one thing is really more wonderful than another, any more than it is essentially more majestic ; -the blue sky is but 66 a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors," — its golden fires, the ever-circling squadrons of the host of heaven, the suns and planets of a million systems, but another form or development of some such humble and commonplace incident as the rising of the dust from the high-road on a windy day, or of the smoke any day from a kitchen-chimney. The tendency of science is to reduce and level; the tendency of poetry is to magnify and exalt. Each, therefore, has its proper and peculiar ground; they cannot act in concert, and upon the same ground: in other words, it is impossible to treat any subject at once scientifically and poetically. That is what Darwin has attempted, or professes, to do; but in truth the spirit of his poetry is scientific, and only the form poetical. His verses are profusely decorated with similitudes and other poetical figures and forms of speech; but both the manner in which he views his subject, and his subject itself, are anti-poetical. His poetry appeals to none of what may be called our original and universal sympathies. It addresses itself, not to our hearts as moulded and inspired by nature and by those common influences of various kinds which are to us almost a second nature, but to our heads, as artificially, accidentally, and unequally furnished, or stuffed, by books, or colleges, or laboratories. For the most part, therefore, it fails of making any deep impression; but not unfrequently the effect is even jarring, and a note is struck altogether different from what the poet intended, just as would happen with a musician who, with whatever power of fingering, or other brilliancy in execution, should persist in disregarding any natural peculiarity of his instrument. As little or no aid is sought from the ordinary associations which may be presumed to be in the reader's mind, so whenever it is convenient such associations and preconceptions are outraged without hesitation. Thus a story of two lovers (in the address to the Water Nymphs, in the third canto of the Economy

of Vegetation), intended to be very pathetic, is commenced in the following droll fashion : —

"Where were ye, nymphs! in those disastrous hours
Which wrapt in flames Augusta's1 sinking towers?
Why did ye linger in your wells and groves
When sad Woodmason mourned her infant loves?
When thy fair daughters, with unheeded screams,
Ill-fated Molesworth! called the loitering streams?"

We must give the rest of this narrative for the sake of some choice
Darwinian epithets, and other flowers of speech:

"The trembling nymph, on bloodless fingers hung,
Eyes from the tottering wall the distant throng,
With ceaseless shrieks her sleeping friends alarms,
Drops with singed hair into her lover's arms.
The illumined mother seeks with footsteps fleet
Where hangs the safe balcony o'er the street;
Wrapped in her sheet, her youngest hope suspends,
And, panting, lowers it to her tiptoe friends;
Again she hurries on affection's wings,

And now a third, and now a fourth she brings;
Safe all her babes, she smooths her horrent brow,
And bursts through bickering flames, unscorched below.
So, by her son arraigned, with feet unshod

O'er burning bars indignant Emma trod.

"E'en on the day when youth with beauty wed,
The flames surprised them in their nuptial bed;
Seen at the opening sash with bosom bare,
With wringing hands and dark dishevelled hair,
The blushing bride with wild disordered charms
Round her fond lover winds her ivory arms;
Beat, as they clasp, their throbbing hearts with fear,
And many a kiss is mixed with many a tear.
Ah me! in vain the labouring engines pour
Round their pale limbs the ineffectual shower!
Then crashed the floor, while shrinking clouds retire,
And love and virtue sunk amid the fire!

With piercing screams afflicted strangers mourn,
And their white ashes mingle in their urn.”

1 London's.

Besides that every line in this labored description is manifestly prompted and regulated chiefly by the necessities of the metre, were it not that the most prosaic or most affected account of such a situation cannot hide its real horrors, the picture of the blushing, and the kissing, and the winding of the ivory arms, and the ineffectual deluging of the pale limbs, would be almost ludicrous. But the sense of the ludicrous was wanting in Darwin: as there is little genuine pathos in anything he has written, so there is not a trace of humor. It is in his first published poem, however, The Loves of the Plants (now forming the second part of the Botanic Garden), that this insensibility to the ridiculous is most remarkably shown; the whole conception of that performance, the idea of making a serious poem out of the Linnæan system of botany, is an absurdity which would be incredible if the thing had not been actually attempted. In what manner, and with what success, let the commencement of the singular rhapsody show:

First the tall Canna1 lifts his curled brow
Erect to heaven, and plights his nuptial vow;
The virtuous pair, in milder regions born,
Dread the rude blast of autumn's icy morn ;
Round the chill fair he folds his crimson vest,
And clasps the timorous beauty to his breast.
Thy love, Callitriche,2 two virgins share,
Smit with thy starry eye and radiant hair;
On the green margin sits the youth, and laves
His floating train of tresses in the waves;
Sees his fair features paint the streams that pass,
And bends for ever o'er the watery glass.

Two brother swains, of Collin's gentle name,
The same their features, and their forms the same,
With rival love for fair Collinia sigh,

Knit the dark brow, and roll the unsteady eye.

With sweet concern the pitying beauty mourns,

And soothes with smiles the jealous pair by turns.
Sweet blooms Genista in the myrtle shade,

And ten fond brothers woo the haughty maid.

1 The cane, or Indian reed; each flower of which contains one male and one female.

2 Fine-hair, star-grass; one male and two females.

3 Collinsonia; two males and one female.

4 Dyer's broom; ten males and one female.