robust organization. We discover, at last, that we have encountered an author who from behind a variety of masks can. be as personally communicative as Montaigne. The epithet robust seems to us particularly applicable to Landor. And his is the robustness of a naturally vigorous constitution, maintained in a healthy equipoise by regular exercise. The open air breathes through his writings, and in reading him we often have a feeling (to use a local phrase) of all outdoors. In saying this we refer to the general freedom of spirit, to the natural independence confirmed by a life of immediate contact with outward nature, and only thrown back the more absolutely on its own resources by occasional and reserved commerce with mankind; tolerated rather than sought by a haughty, and at the same time exquisitely sensitive disposition. We should add, that his temperament is one more keenly alive to his own interior emotions than those suggested to him from without. Consequently, while a certain purity and refinement suggest an intimacy with woods and fields, the truest and tenderest touches of his pencil are those of human and not of external nature. His mountain scenery is that of the soul; his rural landscapes and his interiors are those of the heart. If there should seem to be a contradiction between the coarseness and the delicacy we have attributed to him, the inconsistency is in himself. We may find the source of both in the solitary habit of his mind. The one is the natural independence of a somewhat rugged organization, whose rough edges have never been smoothed by attrition with the world, and which, unaccustomed to the pliability and mutual accommodation necessary in a crowd, resents every obstacle as intentional, every brush of the elbow as a personal affront. The other has been fostered by that habitual tendency of the isolated to brood over and analyze their own sentiments and emotions. Or shall we say that the rough exterior is assumed as a shield for the tenderness, as certain insects house themselves under a movable roof of lichen? This is sometimes the case, but we suspect that in Landor both qualities are idiosyncratic. That frailest creation of the human imagination, the hamadryad, is the tenant and spirit of the gnarled oak, which grasps the storm in its arms. To borrow a comparison from the Greeks, to whom Landor so constantly refers us, we must remember that Polyphemus, while he was sharpening the spit for Ulysses, was pining for Galatea, and that his unrequited tenderness sought solace in crushing his rival with half a mountain. There are two kinds of egoism: one which is constantly measuring itself by others, and one which as constantly meas ures others by itself. This last we call originality. It secludes a man from external influences, and, leaving him nothing to lean upon but his own judgments and impressions, teaches him their value and enables him to inspire other men with the same estimate of them. In this sense Landor is original. This gives all that he writes a decided charm, and makes the better part of it exceedingly precious. He is constructed altogether on a large scale. His littlenesses are great, his weaknesses decided; and as long as the larger part of men are so careful to give us any thing rather than themselves, let us learn to be duly thankful for even a littleness that is sincere, and a weakness that is genuine. So entirely has he been himself, that, while we cannot help being conscious of his deficiencies, we also feel compelled to grant a certain kind of completeness in him. Whatever else he might have been, we are sure that he could not have been more of a Landor. In spite of the seeming contradictions of his character, it would not be easy to find a life and mind more thoroughly consistent than his. A strenuous persistency marks every thing about him. A few friendships and a good many animosities have lasted him all his days. He may add to both, but he never lessens the number of either. In speaking of a man constituted as he is, it would perhaps be better to say oppugnancies than animosities. For an animosity properly implies contemporaneousness, and a personal feeling toward its object; but so entirely does Landor refer every thing to his absolute self, that he will pursue as vindictively a dead error, or a dead man, as a living one. It is as they affect him that they are good or bad. It is not the year 48 or 1848 that is past or present, but simply Walter Savage Landor. With him it is amicus Plato, amica veritas, magis amicus Landor. His sense of his own worth is too large and too dignified to admit of personal piques and jealousies. He resents an assault upon himself as a wrong done to sound literature, and accepts commendation merely as a tribute to truth. Nowhere We know of no writer whose pages, if opened at random, are more sure to repay us than those of Landor. shall we find admirable thoughts more admirably expressed, nowhere sublimer metaphors or more delicate ones, nowhere a mind maintained at a high level more equably, or for longer intervals. There is no author who surpasses, and few who equal him in purity and elevation of style, or in sustained dignity and weight of thought. We should hesitate to name any writings but Shakspeare's which would afford so large and so various a selection of detached passages complete and precious in themselves. The rarest and tenderest emotions of love and friendship have never found a more adequate historian. His pathos is most delicately subdued. He approaches sorrow with so quiet a footfall and so hushing a gesture, that we are fain to suspend our breath and the falling of our tears, lest they should break that tender silence. It is not to look upon a picture of grief, but into the solemn presence of grief herself, that he leads us. Landor has as little humor as Massinger, who in some respects resembles him, though at an infinite distance below. All that he has is of a somewhat gigantic and clumsy sort. He snatches up some little personage who has offended him, sets him on a high shelf, and makes him chatter and stamp for his diversion. He has so long conversed in imagination with the most illustrious spirits of all ages, that there is a plentiful measure of contempt in his treatment of those he esteems unworthy. His lip begins to curl at sight of a king, partly be cause he seems to consider men of that employment fools, and partly because he thinks them no gentlemen. For Bourbons he has a particular and vehement contempt, because to the folly of kingship they add the vileness of being Frenchmen. He is a theoretic republican of the strain of Milton, Sydney, and Harrington, and would have all the citizens of his republic far-descended gentlemen and scholars. It is not wonderful that Landor has never been a popular writer. His is a mind to be quietly appreciated rather than to excite an enthusiastic partisanship. That part of his works which applies immediately to the present is the least valuable. The better and larger portion is so purely imaginative, so truly ideal, that it will be as fresh and true a hundred or a thousand years hence as now. His writings have seldom drawn any notice from the Reviews, which is singular only when we consider that he has chosen to converse almost exclusively with the past, and is, therefore, in some sense, a contemporary of those post-secular periodicals. The appearance of a collected edition of his works seems more like the publication of a new edition of Plato than of an author who has lived through the most stirring period of modern history. Not that he does not speak and speak strongly of living men and recent events, but at such times the man is often wholly, or at least partially obscured in the Englishman. We should be quite at a loss to give adequate specimens of a man so various. As we stated in the outset, we shall confine ourselves, in making our extracts, to the "Hellenics," on a brief consideration of which we now enter. They will convince any careful reader that something more (we do not say higher or finer) goes to the making up of a poet than is included in the composition of the most eloquent and forcible of prose-writers. Opulent as the prose of Landor is, we cannot but be conscious of something like poverty in his verse. He is too minutely circumstantial for a poet, and that tendency of his mind to details, which we before alluded to, stands in his way. The same careful exactness in particulars which gives finish to his prose and represses any tendency to redundance, seems to oppress his verse and to deprive it of flow. He is a poet in his prose, but in his poetry he is almost a proser. His conceptions are in the fullest sense poetical, but he stops just on the hither side of adequate expression. He comes short by so mere a hair'sbreadth that there is something painful in it. There is beauty of a certain kind, but the witching grace is wanting. And painfully the soul receives Sense of that gone which it had never mist, In verse Landor seems like a person expressing himself in a foreign language. He may attain to perfect accuracy and elegance, but the native ease is out of his reach. We said before that his power lay less in developing a continuous train of thought, than in presenting single thoughts in their entire fulness of proportion. But in poetry, it is necessary that each poem should be informed with a homogeneous spirit, which now represses the thought, now forces it to overflow, and everywhere modulates the metre and the cadence by an instinct of which we can understand the operations, though we may be unable to define the mode of them. Beside this, we should say that Landor possessed a choice of language, and is not possessed by that irresistible and happy necessity of the true poet toward the particular word whose place no other can be made to fit. His nicety in specialties imprisons him for the time in each particular verse or passage, and the poem seems not to have grown, but to have been built up slowly, with square, single bricks, each carefully moulded, pressed, and baked beforehand. Sometimes, where a single thought or feeling is to be expressed, he appears exactly the man for the occasion. We must not be supposed to deny the presence, in Landor's "Hellenics," of those fine qualities which we admire in his prose. We mean that the beauties are not specially those of poetry, and that they gain nothing from the verse. The almost invisible nerves of the most retired emotions are traced with rapid and familiar accuracy, rare shades of sentiment and character are touched with a delicacy peculiar to Landor, noble thoughts are presented to us, and metaphors fresh from nature. But we find no quality here which is not in his prose. The "Hellenics" seem like admirable translations of original poems. It would be juster, perhaps, to say that they impress us as Greek poetry does. We appreciate the poet more than the poetry, in which the Northern mind feels an indefinable lack. The "Hellenics" have positive merits, but they are not exclusively those of poetry. They belong to every thing which Landor has written. We should mention, as especially prominent, entire clearness, and so thorough an absorption of the author in his subject that he does not cast about him for something to say, but is only careful of what he shall reject. He does not tell us too much, and wound our self-esteem by always taking it for granted that we do not know any thing, and cannot imagine any thing. We should be inclined to select, as favorable specimens of his poetry, "Thrasymedes and Eunöe," "The Hamadryad," "Enallos and Cymodameia," and the last poem of the "Hellenics," to which no title is prefixed. Of these the last is most characteristic of Landor and of his scholarly and gentlemanlike love of freedom; but the one most likely to be generally pleasing is the "Hamadryad," in copying which we again repeat that we consider Landor as eminently a poet — though not in verse. The more precious attributes of the character he possesses in as high a degree as any modern Englishman. Rhaicos was born amid the hills wherefrom And small are the white-crested that play near, |