lonely Lugar and the Doon; and Thomas Aird (see his exquisitely
beautiful "River"), the pastoral Cluden. But the poet of the
St. Lawrence, with Niagara flinging itself over its crag like a mad
ocean--of the Ganges or the Orellana--has yet to be born, or at least
has yet to bring forth his conceptions of such a stupendous object in
poetry.

In "Cooper's Hill" we find well, if not fully exhibited, what were
Denham's leading qualities--not high imagination or a fertile fancy,
although in neither of these was he conspicuously deficient, but manly
strength of thought and clearness of language. There are in him no
quaintnesses, no crotchets, no conceits, and no involutions or
affectations--all is transparent, masculine, and energetic. It is in
these respects that he became a model to Dryden and Pope, and may even
still be read with advantage for at least his style, which is

"Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."

His translations we have included, not for their surpassing merit, but
because, in the first place, there is little of our author extant, and
we are happy to reprint every scrap of him we can find, and because
again he, according to Dr. Johnson, was "one of the first that understood
the necessity of emancipating translation from the drudgery of counting
lines and interpreting single words." There has, indeed, been recently a
reaction, attended in some cases with brilliant success--as in Bulwer's
"Ballads of Schiller"--in favour of the literal and lineal method; but
since such popular pieces as Dryden's "Virgil" and Pope's "Homer" have
been written on Denham's plan, it is interesting to preserve the model,
however rude, which they avowedly had in their eye.

His smaller pieces are not remarkable, unless we except his vigorous
lines "On the Earl of Stafford's Trial and Death," containing such noble
sentiments as these--

"Such was his force of eloquence, to make
The hearers more concern'd than he that spake,
Each seem'd to act that part he came to see,
_And none was more a looker-on than he_;
So did he move our passions, some were known
_To wish for the defence, the crime their own_.
Now private pity strove with public hate,
_Reason with rage, and eloquence with fate_."

Nor let us forget his verses on "Cowley's Death," which, although
unequal, and in their praise exaggerated, yet are in parts exceedingly
felicitous, as for instance, in the lines to which Macaulay, in his
"Milton,"