fterwards with
indifference, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe may be permitted to pass for
poets in their way. The mixture of fancy and reality in the Pilgrim's
Progress was never equalled in any allegory. His pilgrims walk above the
earth, and yet are on it. What zeal, what beauty, what truth of fiction!
What deep feeling in the description of Christian's swimming across the
water at last, and in the picture of the Shining Ones within the gates,
with wings at their backs and garlands on their heads, who are to wipe all
tears from his eyes! The writer's genius, though not "dipped in dews of
Castalie," was baptised with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The prints in
this book are no small part of it. If the confinement of Philoctetes in
the island of Lemnos was a subject for the most beautiful of all the Greek
tragedies, what shall we say to Robinson Crusoe in his? Take the speech of
the Greek hero on leaving his cave, beautiful as it is, and compare it
with the reflections of the English adventurer in his solitary place of
confinement. The thoughts of home, and of all from which he is for ever
cut off, swell and press against his bosom, as the heaving ocean rolls its
ceaseless tide against the rocky shore, and the very beatings of his heart
become audible in the eternal silence that surrounds him. Thus he says,

"As I walked about, either in my hunting, or for viewing the country,
the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me on a
sudden, and my very heart would die within me to think of the woods,
the mountains, the deserts I was in; and how I was a prisoner,
locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an
uninhabited wilderness, without redemption. In the midst of the
greatest composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a
storm, and make me wring my hands, and weep like a child. Sometimes
it would take me in the middle of my work, and I would immediately
sit down and sigh, and look upon the ground for an hour or two
together, and this was still worse to me, for if I could burst out
into tears, or vent myself in words, it would go off, and the grief
having exhausted itself would abate."

The story of his adventures would not make a poem like the Odyssey, it is
true; but the relator had the true genius of a poet. It has been made a
question whether Richardson's romances are poetry; and the answer perhaps
is, that the