IT is rather late now to offer our readers a review of Campbell's Life of Petrarch. We took it up with such a purpose when it was new, but desisted on finding the book a performance very inferior to the promise of its title. The matter is not new, nor put in any new light; the manner is not good, nor consistent in any one kind of badness; the style is sententious, turgid, flippant, and familiar, by turns; the language sometimes pedantic and at others vulgar; and the whole work so flimsy that, like the Sybilline oracles, if two-thirds of it were burned, the remainder would be worth the whole. There are traces too of incompetency deeper than defect of style; there are tokens of ignorance of the subject and of congenial subjects, signs of a learning hastily laid in pro-hac-vice, and laid out again still crude, lumpy, and unassimilated. But enough: we have something to say about Petrarch, something about Campbell, and something about what ever may come in our way, but no more about this book.

Prose by a Poet, is not, on the whole, a very taking title; Mr. Montgomery once tried if it would sell a book, but did not meet with very distinguished success. It is a little as if one should say, English by a Dutchman, or Horsemanship by a Sailor. Excellence in verse, as a general rule, destroys prose, and the contrary. Byron excelled in both; but such instances are rare. Moore's prose is Lalla-Rookh-ish, and Southey's poems are Book-of-the-Church-ish. Such rules cannot be absolute; but Campbell is not an exception to this one, and his prose has so many defects, and so little merit of any kind to redeem it, that it gives rise to unpleasant suspicions as to the grounds on which we have admired his verse. What is good verse? What makes a good or a great poet? And what claim has Campbell-what claim has Petrarch, to such a title? These are difficult and doubtful questions; and we

shall give them some consideration in the tone of our age and country; in that sceptical cross-examining spirit which tries the spirits, and likes to see things proved.

For there is proof even in matters of poetry. Verses are intrinsically and really good or bad; like fruits from the tree, or water from the fountain, taking essential character from the minds that produce them. If the mind be not instinct with immortality, then is the poetry a form without a substance; specious, perhaps, but empty; a result, according to Campbell's own clever expression, of "tactics in the march of words;" not a speaking of the soul to the soul,-for the age has a soul, and the true poet has his mission to speak to it, and such an one shall never lack hearers. His voice sounds to the initiated-to the elect; and they, in this busy generation, are all the active and honorable, all who are true children of the age; all who, while the long sleep is not yet fallen on them, would fain be up and doing,-aye, up and doing good; and something great, if possible-but let it be good first. What they would highly, that they would holily; and, unlike Macbeth, not only would not play false, but would not wrongly win. These are the children of the spirit of the age-the sharers of that spirit which, like a little leaven, is now leavening this vast lump of a world. These are they to whom Longfellow speaks, and let us hear him. We may imagine strange and improbable changes in times to come, but does anybody believe that such words as these shall be lost?

"Life is real, life is earnest,

And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul. Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each to-morrow Find us farther than to-day."

Sir Philip Sidney said, the old ballad of Chevy Chace made his heart leap as at the sound of a trumpet. Sir Philip was a warrior: his taste is in a measure lost, and so is the force of his comparison. Blow a trumpet in Pearl street, or on 'Change, and you shall see what you shall see: it will stir as many hearts as a hurdy-gurdy, and no more. But pick me out one of those plain citizens, and put me a touchstone to his soul; follow him to his counting-house and to his desk; come behind him, and try him unawares with a criterion: he has no sympathy with a war-horse; but has he therefore none with man, none with nature, none with futurity? His coat is threadbare, perhaps; his air negligent, or even common; he passes half his life in obscure labors; the other half, unseen and unheard-of, at his domestic hearth. He has no ambition, you say no sublime longings nor high aspirations. But read these verses in his ear, and he will answer you like Isabel:

"There spoke my brother, there my father's grave

Did utter forth a voice."

For this man, who appears so simple and humble, is, nevertheless, possessed with deep and high aspirations; so deep as to be out of the ken of general observation, and so high as to look above the approbation of man for its reward. He has received from his parents a precious inheritance of good principles: it has been wrought into his early education, and made the stuff of his earliest thoughts: it has become chronic and constitutional in him, and his hope is to transmit it to his children, and perpetuate it with increase in the world. In this design every morrow finds him farther advanced than to-day -in this track the footsteps he leaves are permanent. Castles and walled cities, palaces and temples of false gods, shall pass away; but the eternal pyramids of virtue shall remain; and He that seeth in secret shall reward the builders openly.

If we consider for a moment, we shall see that there is no perennial work but this no other laboring for immortality. The highest and noblest occupation for human energy is open to us all; the only one whose effects survive and increase while everything else human

decays. We cavil at human nature; we talk of the increase of crime, of the general tendency to corruption, and we shut our eyes to the mighty truth that, so far as history can be interpreted, every great vice and crime diminishes, every virtue is more and more diffused and cherished. Religious persecution, war, tyranny, slavery, and intemperance, are put under the ban of the civilized world, and the whole world now must eventually, inevitably be civilized. That we have arrived at our present stage of improvement by a gradual progress through many ages, who can doubt? In any given ten or twenty years the change may not be appreciable; but take the view by centuries, and the conclusion is brought home. Look at England in 1540, under the brutal and cruel Henry VIII.; in 1640, on the eve of civil war; in 1740, under Walpole; and in 1840. What giant strides of progress! And if you go back from Henry VIII. to the Heptarchy, it is a regular falling off from order and some semblance of good government, to a life nearly savage, and battles, as Milton expressed it, of kites and crows. So France, Germany, Russia: everything but Italy; and there, too, in spite of Rome, there has been progress, for Rome has grown weaker.—But these remarks to our present subject only signify this, that wisdom accumu lates where fathers teach and children learn; that true wisdom is virtue, and thus civilisation is transmitted. How far it is from its perfection yet; how liable to cavil, to misapprehension ; how overlaid with hypocrisy, and beset with false friends and open enemies, we know,-but the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Each rising generation will choose more good, and reject more evil; for God so forms the minds of children that, though the good seed thrown into them may be choked, it never dies. And there is in this community a vast mass of men who never theorized upon this matter, nor put it into shape in their own thoughts, yet who do effectively believe this principle, and who act on it in their unseen lives, with a true vocation to a great but anonymous immortality.

Now, for such men, what is Poetry? It may be hard to say what poetry will suit them, but certainly none will that a man writes who could not write prose. Read "Hohenlinden" to a man of

this class, or "Lochiel," and if you find he does not relish it, macadamise the poetry, take the rhymes out, disjoint the measure, and see whether you can relish it yourself. There remains nothing but the common-places of ballad-singing. Campbell's "tactics in the march of words" are admirable, his measure is most perfect and harmonious; his poetry would appear delightful even if read to a man who understood no English: it is sweet, graceful, perfect, what you please, but burning words and breathing thoughts there

are none.

Campbell, then, shall not be the laureate of the march of mind-that is easily decided; but the question is much more difficult, who shall? He who will have minds march to his music should have some progress in his own; he should cheer us on, and go before like a trumpeter, not sit like a fiddler in an orchestra, and keep us promenading up and down; and yet most poets do so. They seclude themselves from the world, at least from its active employments, and go round and round in one circle of ideas; and, so far from to-morrow finding them farther than to-day, in any progress towards know ledge, it is a chance rather if yesterday did not. The age marches and leaves them behind, as it must all non-practical men. This is not the true system. He who would tell the world something, should inform himself first what it knows already. He who would excite, surprise, or please it, must first know it; and to know it, must mix in it. He must mix in its real bustle of business, in its contests for material interest; he must watch the collisions that take place there, expose himself to them, and note his experience well of himself and others; and if he live a century, every day will add to this experience some new and unexpected line. Such a man will not write much, but what he writes will have its meaning, and the ardor and enterprise of youth, the riper and deeper thoughts, the more enlarged, sadder, yet more charitable and impartial views of manhood, and the serene wisdom of age, will appear in their due succession. His works will be the reflection of his life-a chart for those who shall come after an impressive precept added to many precepts a grain in the pyramid, contributed toward the building

up of human perfectibility. Such should the poet be for the benefit of his poetry, and for his own, and for his readers. Not a pensioner like Wordsworth; not a troubadour like Petrarch; not a man living in morbid seclusion like Cowper; not one writing verses by contract at so much a day like Moore; but an active denizen of the every-day world, independent, vigorous, and observant, writing from fulness of thought and knowledge. Such a man would stir up the hearts of Pearl-street, and only such a man. If one went to them from the dead, though it were Homer, they would not hear him; but let one come who lives, and who has lived to some purpose, and whose works give evidence of his life, and to him they will give ear.

It is an old, but a stale and false adage, which would persuade us that matters of taste are not subjects of argument. It is a convenient thing for a prating critic first to set taste above reason, and then to give himself out for the oracle of taste, after which he leaves you no alternative but to worship his false gods, or be proscribed as a Vandal. Yet there is reason even in matters of poetry. Like the bubbles on alcohol, which, to the skilful eye, are the sure proof of the spirit, even so it is with these bubbles of the mind. The weak and washy intellect cannot give them forth bright and strong; the false and perverted cannot produce the pure and holy. What is Petrarch to us? What was he to himself, to his family, to his friends, to his age? A false priest, a negligent father, an amiable and attached friend and correspondent perhaps, but not free from interest in his attachment, and not known in his long life ever to have done one generous or disinterested act. Yet he was something beyond his age both in virtue and knowledge, enough so to have made it his highest duty to educate his children and bequeath that knowledge and virtue to them. Such a legacy, in the then existing state of Italy, would have been worth more than his poetry. Such a family might have been a leavening nucleus in the mass of the depravity of the time. Petrarch thought not of that; he ran about after laurel crowns, and danced attendance on emperors and nobles, dawdling on in endless verse about Laura, and pedantic epistles to Virgil