‘Yet sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes, Or Cytherea’s breath!’
There are those who complain of the little that Mr. Campbell has done in poetry, and who seem to insinuate that he is deterred by his own reputation from making any farther or higher attempts. But after having produced two poems that have gone to the heart of a nation, and are gifts to a world, he may surely linger out the rest of his life in a dream of immortality. There are moments in our lives so exquisite that all that remains of them afterwards seems useless and barren; and there are lines and stanzas in our author’s early writings in which he may be thought to have exhausted all the sweetness and all the essence of poetry, so that nothing farther was left to his efforts or his ambition. Happy is it for those few and fortunate worshippers of the Muse (not a subject of grudging or envy to others) who already enjoy in their life-time a foretaste of their future fame, who see their names accompanying them, like a cloud of glory, from youth to age,
‘And by the vision splendid, Are on their way attended’—
and who know that they have built a shrine for the thoughts and feelings that were most dear to them, in the minds and memories of other men, till the language which they lisped in childhood is forgotten, or the human heart shall beat no more!
The _Pleasures of Hope_ alone would not have called forth these remarks from us; but there are passages in the _Gertrude of Wyoming_ of so rare and ripe a beauty, that they challenge, as they exceed all praise. Such, for instance, is the following peerless description of Gertrude’s childhood:-
‘A loved bequest,—and I may half impart To those that feel the strong paternal tie, How like a new existence to his heart That living flow’r uprose beneath his eye, Dear as she was from cherub infancy, From hours when she would round his garden play, To time when as the rip’ning years went by, Her lovely mind could culture well repay, And more engaging grew, from pleasing day to day.
‘I may not paint those thousand infant charms; (Unconscious fascination, undesign’d!) The orison repeated in his arms, For God to bless her sire and all mankind; The book, the bosom on his knee reclined, Or how sweet fairy-lore he heard her con, (The playmate ere the teacher of her mind): All uncompanion’d else her heart had gone Till now, in Gertrude’s eyes, their ninth blue summer shone.