a work of art, can you make it POETICAL, without adjuncts from Nature?

Take useful or decorative architecture, statuary, pictures, carvings, music, bridges, aqueducts, canals, &c.

Take an elegant mansion, or an old abbey :-It would be ridiculous to say which, as an object, is most poetical. Undoubtedly that which is rendered more interesting by various moral associations and picturesque beauty. Time, that leans on the reft battlements, brings with it a thousand associations of sublimity and melancholy. These are most poetically affecting! Even external adventitious circumstances of Nature make the picture more peculiarly and intensely interesting:

"Scarce a sickly straggling flower

Decks the rough castle's rifted tower."-WARTON.
"He, who would see Melrose aright,

Must see it by the pale moonlight."-SCOTT.

But, one of the finest pictures of modern poetry, where Nature makes the works of art so much more effectually poetical, is to be found in the Gladiator dying in the Coliseum, who remembers, as he dies," the scenes of his infancy, the hut of his mother, on the banks of the Danube."

"I see before me the gladiator lie:

He leans upon his hand his manly brow;
Consents to death, but conquers agony,
And his droop'd head sinks gradually low:
And from his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the sad gash, fall heavy, one by one,
Like the first of a thunder shower; and now
The arena swims around him. He is gone

Ere ceased the inhuman sound which hail'd the wretch who won.

"He heard it, but he heeded not. His eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away:
He reck'd not of the life he lost, nor prize;
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay,
There were his young barbarians all at play,
There was their Dacian mother. He, their sire,
Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday!

All this rush'd with his blood. Shall he expire,

And unaveng'd? Arise, ye Goths, and glut your ire !"

In the "Faithful Shepherdess" of Beaumont and Fletcher are two similes, immediately succeeding each other, which I mention, because one is from a beautiful image in nature, the other from a common one of human art

"Holy virgin, I will dance

Round about these woods as quick
AS THE BREAKING LIGHT, and prick
Down the lawns, and down the vales,
Faster than the WIND-MILL SAILS!"

It is the "sails careering in the wind" that gives such poetical effect to the last image. How exquisite is a picture from the finest poem of the present age

"It was the hour

Of vespers, but no vesper-bell was heard,
Nor other SOUND, than of the passing stream,
Or stork, who, flapping with wide wing the air,

Sought her broad nest upon the SILENT tower."-SOUTHEY.

A clock, as a work of art abstractedly, is not very poetical; but its sound at night is poetical in the highest degree: more so when associated with the moral feelings of nature the time past-the time perpetually going on-Why is this? Because we hear the sound

"As if an angel spoke."

A striking circumstance of this kind is to be found in Wilson's City of the Plague. The clock is motionless! There is no poetry in this circumstance, abstractedly; but how deeply, how affectingly, is it rendered poetry, when the circumstance that has caused it to cease is taken into consideration, and is felt to be the strongest proof of the death and silence of a multitudinous city almost devastated!

This point is so certain, so clear, that I feel almost lessened in self-estimation, that it should appear necessary to bring any proof of what ninety-nine men in a hundred, of common sense and taste, acknowledge and feel.

No exquisite description can make a water-mill as poetical as a water-fall; but when the pencil of nature works with it, how delightfully is it touched!

"Not so, where, scornful of a check, it leaps
The mill-dam, dashes on the restless wheel,-
And see, where it has hung the embroider'd banks
With forms so various, that no powers of art,

The pencil, or the pen, may trace the scene."

Even a lady working a pattern is made poetical, when "the well-depicted flow'r,

Wrought patiently, into the snowy lawn

Unfolds its bosom: buds, and leaves, and sprigs,
And curling tendrils, gracefully disposed,

Follow the nimble finger of a fair,

A wreath that cannot fade," &c. &c.

The two greatest works of art that are introduced in ancient poetry are the carved cup in Theocritus, and the shield of Achilles in Homer. But how is the description of these works of art rendered more peculiarly poetical, by animating them,-by

making the objects represented in them live, and become as if a part of Nature! The dead carving is not remembered when we see the old fisher, with his swelling muscles, near the gray rock, not on the cup, but as in the very landscapes of Nature. It is the same in the shield: the creation, the sun, the moon, the concourse of citizens, the shepherds, &c. all are represented, not as in dead art, but as living and moving. And it is this necessity of losing as much as possible the idea of the work of art, and fixing the eye and thought on the works of Nature herself, which give the only resting and most poetical charin.

It is a curious fact, that this position has been disputed, and only in those two literary journals in which we have been taught to look for the principles of critical investigation.

The Edinburgh Review, indeed now admits what it at first did not. At least, in the review of Campbell's Specimens, it is said, "They incline to my opinion!" I have no doubt, the more they think of, or the more Mr. Jeffrey thinks of it, the more he will be inclined to admit it. I have the same opinion of the most intelligent writers of the Quarterly Review, and indeed of every one, except that "unfortunate wight" who was permitted to "fret his hour upon the stage," to talk such strange nonsense about "In-door Nature!!"

Having thus written to those who know more than himself, I shall now point out, by way of apology for representations that may be to him as Muggletonian dreams, some images both from Art and Nature, which himself may estimate.

Cowley calls Nature a postilion, and Art a coachman :

"Let the postilion, NATURE, mount, and let

The coachman, ART, be set—”

Cowley, whose "language of the heart" we still love, notwithstanding these vagaries, seems very fond of images drawn from the in-door nature. So he says, speaking of the "blue sky," which would make an admirable waistcoat for an arch-angel:

"He cuts out a silk mantle from the skies,

Where the most sprightly asure pleas'd the eyes."

A rainbow also forms a most elegant scarf, adapted and fitted, from the same pattern, with the same scissars of art:—

"Of a new rainbow, ere it fret and fade,

The choicest piece CUT OUT, a scarf is made.”

Horace says,

"NATURAM expellas furca, tamen usque recurret,"

and even here, in spite of Cowley's bad taste, which I have no doubt the critic will approve, NATURE steps in, and comes with

the beautiful image, amidst all this wretched verbiage of "the rainbow, ere it fret and fade!"

To turn from the poet to the critic. I have no doubt some of the images from art here brought together, have been much more clear to you, and much more satisfactory, than the "dreams," of which our extracts from works of poetry were before filled.

Thus, Art, the postilion, and Nature, the coachman, and the angel in a new cloak of SKY-BLUE, must have been images probably congenial to your heart; and who can leave the subject without endeavouring to impress on your imagination, that perhaps the most sublime image of all the works of "in-door nature," is that "king of shreds and patches" who once, for a sight of "rural nature," went on horseback as far as BRENTFORD! and as this heroic personage is doubtless, of all images of "in-door," the most sublime, so the "bird" which attends him, though not so sublime, as “ ministrum fulminis alitem," must be admitted, of all images of in-door Nature, to be the most beautiful.

This bird, that in poetical beauty" arches its head" more than Milton's swan, is vulgarly called a goose; and if the terrible be thought as necessary for this poetical assemblage, "Hell" yawns from beneath,

Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo!

As I would have the critical admirer of the SUBLIME and BEAUTIFUL and TERRIBLE of "in-door" nature, to be like the Longinus of Pope,

"The great sublime he draws,"

I know not how I could better please him, than by comparing him with that emblem of " in-door" beauty attendant on its triumphant master, and generally described "as hot as heavy," the GOOSE!!

Begging the reader to pardon this involuntary association, I must proceed to expose, not criticism, but that which is worse than absurdity, the utter destitution of all feelings fair and honorable as a controversialist. I must expose a species of duplicity, which has on example in the character of him whom this writer defends, and whom, I fear, from the soreness which he evinces, when some obvious parts of his character are touched, he more nearly resembles.

Reader, in the "Invariable Principles of Poetry," this passage

occurs:

"Now I would put to you a few plain questions; and I would beseech you not to ask whether I mean this or that, for I think you must now understand what I do mean. I would beseech you also not to write beside the question, but answer simply and plainly whether you think that the sylph of Pope," trembling over the

froth of a coffee-cup," be an image as poetical as the delicate and

quaint Ariel, who sings

"Where the bee sucks, there lurk I,"

or the elves of Shakspeare

"Spirits of another sort,

That with the morning light make sport."

"Whether you think the description of a game of cards be as poetical, supposing the execution in the artists equal, as a description of a walk in a forest? Whether an age of refinement be as conducive to pictures of poetry, as a period less refined? Whether passions, affections, &c., of the human heart, be not a higher source of what is pathetic or sublime in poetry, than manners and habits, or manners that apply only to artificial life?

"If you agree with me, it is all I meant to say; if not, we differ, and always shall, on the principles of poetical criticism.”

I believe most sincerely that every reader, without exception, will understand my meaning in the passage, when taken together.

But the critic in the Quarterly Review takes the first sentence, no more-then makes a poor and affected banter, that "Mr. Bowles wants explaining, himself;" when, but for this his dishonest and dishonorable stratagem, no one would or could have doubted his meaning!

This is the perfect exemplification of what Mr. D'Israeli calls "breaking up a sentence," for the base purpose of securing a momentary" mock-triumph." Are such "arts" of criticism, well as they seem to be understood by Mr. D'Israeli, worthy a scholar-a gentleman? worthy a publication as distinguished as the Quarterly Review?

If this be criticism, how easy it is to be a critic! But we must add, how unprincipled must a critic be also! And well might this same writer say, "We suspect Mr. Bowles does not like criticism!"

Such criticism, connected with such mean stratagems and dishonest arts, he " DOES NOT LIKE," and trusts he never shall; when, to be a critic, in this sense, all feelings of honor must be sacrificed to a kind of vaporing professional jargon, and what argument cannot effect, personal insults may !

What this "TRUE CRITIC, of ENLARGED views," calls "FASHIONABLE CRITICISM," is, in general, equally abhorrent from the principles of every upright man; and, distinguished as are some of the masterly and eloquent articles in the Quarterly Review, as far as poetry and works of taste are concerned, the