o the
author a picture of the world as he saw it; and it is to us a mirror in
which every attribute of his genius, every peculiarity of his nature, is
reflected without distortion. After the audacious though brilliant
opening, and the unfortunately pungent reference to the poet's domestic
affairs, we find in the famous storm (c. ii.) a bewildering epitome of his
prevailing manner. Home-sickness, sea-sickness, the terror of the tempest,
"wailing, blasphemy, devotion," the crash of the wreck, the wild farewell,
"the bubbling cry of some strong swimmer in his agony," the horrors of
famine, the tale of the two fathers, the beautiful apparitions of the
rainbow and the bird, the feast on Juan's spaniel, his reluctance to dine
on "his pastor and his master," the consequences of eating Pedrillo,--all
follow each other like visions in the phantasmagoria of a nightmare, till
at last the remnant of the crew are drowned by a ridiculous rhyme--

Finding no place for their landing better,
They ran the boat ashore,--and overset her.

Then comes the episode of Haidee, "a long low island song of ancient
days," the character of the girl herself being like a thread of pure gold
running through the fabric of its surroundings, motley in every page;
e.g., after the impassioned close of the "Isles of Greece," we have the
stanza:--

Thus sang, or would, or could, or should, have sung,
The modern Greek, in tolerable verse;
If not like Orpheus quite, when Greece was young,
Yet in those days he might have done much worse--

with which the author dashes away the romance of the song, and then
launches into a tirade against Bob Southey's epic and Wordsworth's pedlar
poems. This vein exhausted, we come to the "Ave Maria," one of the most
musical, and seemingly heartfelt, hymns in the language. The close of the
ocean pastoral (in c. iv.) is the last of pathetic narrative in the book;
but the same feeling that "mourns o'er the beauty of the Cyclades," often
re-emerges in shorter passages. The fifth and sixth cantos, in spite of
the glittering sketch of Gulbeyaz, and tho fawn-like image of Dudu, are
open to the charge of diffuseness, and the character of Johnson is a
failure. From the seventh to the tenth, the poem decidedly dips, partly
because the writer had never been in Russia; then it again rises, and
shows no sign of falling off to the end.

No part of the work has more suggestive interest or varied power than some
of the lat