Who ever dreamed that he could have lent Milton an arm in his blindness, or comforted Dante in his imprisonment, or softened the frozen misanthropy of Byron; and yet who has ever read of Chatterton and Keats and Shelley, and the lamented subject of our present criticism, without a feeling of impatient regret that he could not have been there to comfort them under neglect, or want, or bitter disappointment, and assure them of a coming and just appreciation. It is not that they are not finer spirits than ourselves, and have not written that which we never could have written-but they are like magicians whose wand we have handled, and the rime of whose incantation is in our own language, and familiar to our own memory. We can bring them in imagination to our firesides, and link them with common associations, and feel that they have natures like our own, save a higher tendency and a happier direction; and when we read their books, it is not with unmingled wonder and astonishment at power we cannot comprehend, but it is gazing on resemblances of our own airy castles, and shapes which, in our vanity, we half believe to be shadows of ourselves, and our capacities as they might have been but for the cares of life, and the leaden influence of riches.

It is with this feeling of fellowship and regard, that we read the works of Henry Neele. They are of that character which wins most upon the feelings, and gives the best security for the heart of the writer. Not only do we know that he would have sympathized with all our impressions of beauty, and our more secret because finer and more elevated sentiment, but we are satisfied that he was a pure man. Extreme refinement of taste can only be the gift of the virtuous. Vice, grossness—anything that dims the purity of the soul-destroys the fine vision, and deadens the quick ear, and blunts the acute sensibilities. The very organs of taste are lost by the debasement of the mind to which they minister. This is true only in a degree of other kinds of talent. Power and strong pathos, though dependant upon taste to a degree, are not made up of it. Our passions can be wrought upon without any very nice discrimination of its lights and shadows. But in the works of taste and feeling, there can be no error in our -appreciation of the writer. If his perceptions are delicate, and his thoughts separated, not only from palpable grossness, but from the remoter links of impure allusion, we are certain of his character. We read his books as we would talk with a friend, and cherish him, as we do Addison and Gray and Roscoe-with a memory of love.

The genius of Henry Neele was rather one of taste than talent. His poetry seems to have been a natural result of a rare sense of

beauty-the expression of pleasure in the loveliness of outward things, and the fine creations of other and loftier spirits than his own. He was evidently a man of delicate and acute senses; possessing what Wordsworth finely phrases,

'An inevitable ear,

And an eye practised like a blind man's touch.' With little or no creative power, he had a peculiar faculty of appreciation, and relished, to a degree unknown to most readers, the hidden meanings, and the sweet refinements of poetry. There is a class of

men in the world, (and we are not certain that Henry Neele did not belong to them,) who are meant to be the happiest of God's creatures -but not poets. It is reserved for them to walk the inner temples of nature, and hear harmonies inaudible to their fellow men, and find out the secrets of subtle beauty, and the links of fine mysteries. They are like seeing men in a world of the blind; or hearing men in a world of the deaf. It is as if the mortal film were already removed, and they could see into another sphere. The earth is a different place to them, and they walk it like angels, with a higher knowledge, and a far more elevated conception and enjoyment of its cunning workmanship. With all this, they have no originating power, and therefore it is that we say they should not be poets. They have, it is true, finer faculties than their fellow men, but they are faculties meant to gladden their own bosoms, and gratify those who can come familiarly and delight in them. The friendships of men thus gifted are invaluable. Their love is beautiful, because it is always elevated and refined. They are the light of the circle in which they move, and go on through life, if their feelings are not embittered, giving pleasure to all around them, and winning deep measures of respect and affection. To a certain extent they will write beautiful poetry, and it is well if they can be made to consider it only as an elegant accomplishment, and a pleasant gift among friends. It will pass well with their indulgent appreciation and its local interest, but it is not strong enough to come out and wrestle with criticism, and be committed without fear to the burning ordeal of time. It is the dissonant quality of such finely mingled natures, that they are ambitious. They feel that they are superior to those about them, and they would win from others the tribute they have themselves given from the very depths of their souls to genius. They know from their own thrilling bosoms the splendid idolatry men pay to intellectual power, and they would themselves be the magicians to shew us spirits of their own calling up, and unfold to us a universe of their own unassisted crea

tion. It is not enough to stand aside and enjoy these things with a finer relish than other men. They must have a like triumph with the great mover, and a like niche in the temple of human fame; and when, from their real taste, and minds imbued with the color of their acquisitions, they start with a bright promise, and are cried up by the undiscerning as fair candidates for the palm, they are confirmed in their giddy delusion, and press upward-till, suddenly, their wings melt, and the cold truth of public opinion comes home to them, and they are confounded, as if the thunder had stricken them down.

We would not say that Henry Neele should never have written at all, but we would say that he should not have been ambitious of fame as a poet. He has, it is true, left us some poetry which we would not have lost, and would not willingly forget; but it is his prose by which he will be remembered. Creative power, which he had not, is necessary to poetry. Taste and knowledge are sufficient for prose, and these he had abundantly. He was a skilful critic, and a nervous and chaste narrative writer. If he had confined himself to these, we believe he would have been a happier man-nay, more—we believe it possible it might have saved him from himself. He died by his own hand, "the victim" says his biographer," of an overwrought imagination." This is general language, but who shall say what gave the color to his distempered fancy? We know that he had friends-many and ardent ones; that he was respected and beloved by those from whom it was an honor; that he was not the victim of vice, and that his worldly prospects were, at least, fair. There is everything in his previous circumstances to make the world wonder at the catastrophe. Who will tell us why he, to whom it promised so much, wearied of life? We would not seem wiser than our contemporaries, but we believe that the sting of his madness was disappointed ambition. The first draught of praise-a draught whose unmingled and delirious intoxication can never be felt but once, but is worth, in its one magnificent dream, the sum of a hundred common lives-he won by poetry. It chained him to it forever. Poetry was thenceforth his idol. Fame, distinction, were his perpetual dream. Success became the breath of his being, and he died-for even justice was denied him!

We do not think we have stated this too strongly. We believe the influence of unfair criticism to be all, and more, than we have represented. The painful sensitiveness of men of imaginative minds on the subject of their productions, has hitherto been culpably disregarded. We do not refer now to the attacks of the low and the envious. There must be blackguardism in literature, as in everything

else; but it is ever virulent and personal, and its malice is too visible to injure, and can excite only contempt. We speak of the higher critics-men who are, or ought to be, superior to envy and petty prejudices. From such men injustice in criticism is a heavy thing to bear. It is not the pride of the author which is most offended. Far less is it vanity. He may-he doubtless does-take pleasure in worldly consideration; but, to the highminded scholar, fame is ever a secondary and incidental thing. Poetry with him is not a mere intellectual product-a web wrought with an unimpassioned and cold skill from dead and passive material. It is a work done in the sanctuary of his own heart. It is his own feeling, and his own character. Affections, which, by the commonest courtesy of society, it is an outrage to allude lightly to, are there expressed in all their natural truth and fervor. He has lived them over again, and as vividly as at first, in his solitary labor. He has described the passionate impatience of his childhood, and the fiery impulses of his youth, and the deep stirrings of his manhood's many and strong emotions, and they are as sacred and as delicate to him, there-in the visible garb of poetry—as the same feelings kept holy and apart in the silence of other men's bosoms. If you would know how criticism affects such men, try it by this standard. Imagine your best and most sensitive feelings subjected for one moment to the rude handling of men who are bound by no law and less principle to respect them, and to whom ridicule in its most unfeeling guise is a professional indulgence! It is idle to talk of indifference' and the 'contempt of superior mind.' The critic, such as we speak of, is too high in his place for that. He can affect materially the public opinion-not of the author's writings merely-but of his heart and character. He can give to the eyes that pass him in his walks a look of ridicule. He may associate him in the minds of those whose respect is the life of his heart with ludicrous images-nay he may destroy his own self-confidence-and what is far more, his own self-respect. Is it at all reasonable to look that an author should be insensible to such power? He may not shew his suffering. He may not at its mention change color, or betray uneasiness. He may, even, in his brighter moments, and among the kind offices of his friends, forget and banish it; but, in the depression which must come with exhausted strength-when the fever of mind is preying upon him, and his diseased eye sees nothing that is bright, and magnifies tenfold everything that is painful-then it is that the little insults of criticism, and its effect upon the world, are exaggerated to a degree that is insupportable. The false and hasty

judgment of an individual seems to him the voice of universal opinion, and the bitter sneer of the critic fastens on his brain like the poisoned chaplet of Alethe that 'would not come away.'

We remember when the name of Henry Neele was first generally noticed in the English Journals. We remember their criticisms on his poetry, and our then conviction of their utter unreasonableness and cruelty. He was not abused, like Byron. He was not treated with contempt and ridicule, like Wordsworth. He was not heaped, openly, with scorn and bitterness, like Southey. He could have borne these. His pride would have strengthened him. He could have borne even a fair measure of his powers-though it might have undeceived him bitterly. But he could not bear-from the first critics in the kingdom -from the arbiters of the claims of genius for a whole nation-the indifference which is a disguised scorn, the qualified praise, the considerate mercy of their cold encouragement, and, not least, their utter and damning misapprehension of the whole scope and bearing of his powers. He had written after the dictates of his heart. He had dwelt upon beauty. He had searched out the delicate and dainty secrets of nature and feeling. He had looked on the bright side of the world, and cared only for summer, and abandoned himself utterly to the gentle and holy influences for which he alone lived, and which had flowed through his heart like a living stream from his childhood up-and because this was all-because he had confined himself to the bright and beautiful-because his poetry was not drugged with the fierce hatred of Byron, or darkened with the harrowing gloom of the Inferno, or sublime like Milton, or supernatural like Schiller and Maturin, or all these, and more, like Shakspeare-for these offences, we say, he was looked coldly on by English reviewers-men who could not, or would not see that he had not attempted all these things-that beauty and not strength, music and not thunder, feeling and sweetness and gentle thoughts, and not frenzy or the bad passions, were his aim and his whole ambition. They gave him no credit for what he had done. Oh no! It was much easier to pity him for what he had not. "He never could be a poet, for he had no strength." "His poetry would not live-for where was its powerful description, its intense interest, its thrilling pathos, its horrible catastrophe ?" "His conceits were pretty, but tame and effeminate." "Good versification, but no abruptness." "He might do something-perhaps, when he was older, he would write better-but with every wish for his success, they feared his poetry would not outlive him." Oh the cant of criticism! Is beauty nothing? Is music nothing? Are our better and purer natures