author of a new style in poetry. Pope's youthful pieces have all
the sing-song, wholly unrelieved by the glittering malignity and
eloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins' callow
namby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original genius
which he afterwards displayed. We have never thought that the world lost
more in the "marvellous boy," Chatterton, than a very ingenious imitator
of obscure and antiquated dulness. Where he becomes original (as it is
called) the interest of ingenuity ceases and he becomes stupid. Kirke
White's promises were endorsed by the respectable name of Mr. Southey
but surely with no authority from Apollo. They have the merit of a
traditional piety, which, to our mind, if uttered at all, had been less
objectionable in the retired closet of a diary, and in the sober raiment
of prose. They do not clutch hold of the memory with the drowning
pertinacity of Watts; neither have they the interest of his occasional
simple, lucky beauty. Burns, having fortunately been rescued by his
humble station from the contaminating society of the "best models" wrote
well and naturally from the first. Had he been unfortunate enough to
have had an educated taste, we should have had a series of poems from
which, as from his letters, we could sift here and there a kernel from
the mass of chaff. Coleridge's youthful efforts give no promise whatever
of that poetical genius which produced at once the wildest, tenderest,
most original and most purely imaginative poems of modern times. Byron's
"Hours of Idleness" would never find a reader except from an intrepid
and indefatigable curiosity. In Wordsworth's first preludings there is
but a dim foreboding of the creator of an era. From Southey's early
poems, a safer augury might have been drawn. They show the patient
investigator, the close student of history, and the unwearied explorer
of the beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances of a man
who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the rarer and
more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The earliest
specimens of Shelley's poetic mind already, also, give tokens of that
ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to soar above the regions
of words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be entombed, without hope
of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a
wonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity for
rhyming and for the