eautifying creation, by shedding over it the charm of
melancholy. "Pleasant but mournful to the soul is the memory of joys
that are past"--is the text we should choose were we about to preach on
his genius. No vain repinings, no idle regrets, does his spirit now
breathe over the still receding Past. But time-sanctified are all the
shows that arise before his pensive imagination; and the common light of
day, once gone, in his poetry seems to shine as if it had all been dying
sunset or moonlight, or the new-born dawn. His human sensibilities are
so fine as to be in themselves poetical; and his poetical aspirations so
delicate as to be felt always human. Hence his Sonnets have been dear to
poets--having in them "more than meets the ear"--spiritual breathings
that hang around the words like light around fair flowers; and hence,
too, have they been beloved by all natural hearts who, having not the
"faculty divine," have yet the "vision"--that is, the power of seeing
and of hearing the sights and the sounds which genius alone can awaken,
bringing them from afar out of the dust and dimness of evanishment.

Mr Bowles has been a poet for good fifty years; and if his genius do not
burn quite so bright as it did some lustres bygone--yet we do not say
there is any abatement even of its brightness: it shines with a mellower
and also with a more cheerful light. Long ago, he was perhaps rather too
pensive--too melancholy--too pathetic--too woe-begone--in too great
bereavement. Like the nightingale, he sang with a thorn at his
breast--from which one wondered the point had not been broken off by
perpetual pressure. Yet, though rather monotonous, his strains were most
musical as well as melancholy; feeling was often relieved by fancy; and
one dreamed, in listening to his elegies, and hymns, and sonnets, of
moonlit rivers flowing through hoary woods, and of the yellow sands of
dim-imaged seas murmuring round "the shores of old Romance." A fine
enthusiasm too was his--in those youthful years--inspired by the poetry
of Greece and Rome; and in some of his happiest inspirations there was a
delightful and original union--to be found nowhere else that we can
remember--of the spirit of that ancient song,--the pure classical
spirit that murmured by the banks of the Eurotas and Ilissus, with that
of our own poetry, that like a noble Naiad dwells in the "clear well of
English undefiled." In almost all his strains you felt the scholar; but
his was no