een sonnets:--and these are his best--for most of the others appear
to us mere soap bubbles, very gay and gaudy, but which burst at the
fourteenth line and leave not the trace of an idea behind. Of two or
three Mr. Moxon has kindly told us the meaning, which, without that
notice, we confess we should never have guessed.

* * * * *

Another of the same genus--though, he had just told us

My love I can _compare_ with _nought_ on earth--

is like _nought on earth_ we ever read but Dean Swift's song of similes.
I _will prove_, he says, that

A swan--
A fawn--
An artless lamb--
A hawthorn tree--
A willow--
A laburnum--
A dream--
A rainbow--
Diana--
Aurora--
A dove that _singeth_--
A lily,--and finally,
Venus herself!
--I in truth will prove
These are not _half_ so _fair_ as she I love.

_Sonnet_ iii, p. 43.

Such heterogeneous compliments remind us of Shacabac's gallantry to
_Beda_ in _Blue Beard:_ "Ah, you little rogue, you have a prettier mouth
_than an elephant_, and you know it!"--A _fawn-coloured_ countenance
rivalling in _fairness a laburnum_ blossom, seems to us a more dubious
type of female beauty than even an elephant's mouth.

_Love_, it may be said, has carried away better poets and graver men
than Mr. Moxon seems to be, into such namby-pamby nonsense; but Mr.
Moxon is just as absurd in his _grief_ or his _musings_, as in his
_love_.

When he hears a nightingale--"sad Philomel!"--he concludes that the bird
was originally created for no other purpose than to prophesy in Paradise
_the fall of man_, or, as he chooses to collocate the words,

_Prophetic_ to have mourned of _man_ the _fall_,--p. 9.

but he does not tell us what she has been doing ever since.

When he sees two Cumberland streams--the Brathay and Rothay--flowing
down, first to a confluence, and afterwards to the sea, he fancies "a
_soul-knit_ pair," man and wife, mingling their waters and gliding to
their final haven--

in kindred love,
The haven Contemplation sees _above_!

_Below_, he would--following his allegory--have said; but rhyme forbade--
and _allegories_ are not _so headstrong_ on the banks of the Brathay as
on those of the _Nile_.

A sonnet on Thomson's grave is a fine specimen of empty sounds and solid
nonsense:--

Whene'er I linger, Thomson, near thy tomb,
Where _Thamis_--

"_Classic Cam_" w