With horny finger as he read the lines, And it came wheeling back-ah! heavily-Had, in his child-like trust and confidence, To the great laughing earth that gleam'd below!

these words which are at present a striking poetry. Fourthly, there is a stumbling-block to many, in this proud good deal of the hideous in the poem, and sceptical age, when intellect is wor- imitated, apparently, from the worse passhipped as a God, and humility is tram-sages of "Festus." We give one specipled on as a slave-taken up, set in the men-the worst, however, in the volume splendid imagery, and sung in the lofty (page 132):— measures of one of our most gifted young poets.

We have not analysed the story, for this reason, that story, properly speaking, there is none. Two couples are the principal interlocutors-Ferdinand and Caroline; Alexis and Flora. The first are all bliss and blue sky together; they seem almost in heaven already. Alexis, again, is a kind of Manfred, without the melancholy end of that hero. Certain spirits form a conspiracy against him, and lead him through wild weltering abysses of struggle-very powerfully describedduring which he forgets poor Flora, and a lady named Edith dies in love for him. When he returns to himself, and reaches the solid ground of hope, he returns to Flora too, and they are left in a very happy frame-she blessing the hour of his deliverance, and he resuming his old poetical aspirations. The poem closes with a song, in the "Locksley Hall" style, on the "Poet's Mission," which is not, we think, in the author's best manner; and will be thought, by many, not quite in keeping with the Christian moral of the poem before enunciated.

"Last night I dream'd the universe was mad,
And that the sun its Cyclopean eye
Roll'd glaring like a maniac's in the heavens;
And moons and comets, link'd together,
scream'd

Like bands of witches at their carnivals,
And stream'd like wandering hell along the
sky;
And that the awful stars, through the red
light,

Glinted at one another wickedly,
Throbbing and chilling with intensest hate,
While through the whole a nameless horror
And worlds dropp'd from their place i' the
shuddering,

ran;

Like leaves of Autumn, when a mighty wind
Makes the trees shiver through their thickest
Great spheres crack'd in the midst, and belch'd
robes;

out flame,

And sputtering fires went crackling over hea

ven:

་

And space yawn'd blazing stars; and Time
shriek'd out,
That hungry fire was eating everything!
And scorch'd fiends, down in the nether hell,
Cried out, The universe is mad-is mad!'
And the great thing in its convulsions flung
System on system, till the caldron boil'd,
(Space was the caldron, and all hell the fire,
And every giant limb o' the universe
Dilated and collapsed, till it grew wan,
And I could see its naked ribs gleam out,
Beating like panting fire-and I awoke.
'Twas not all dream;-such is the world to

me."

This will never do. Fifthly, Mr Bigg appears to us to write too fast, and too diffusely. Many of his passages would be greatly improved by leaving out every third line.

And now for fault-finding. First, we state the want of objective interest. "Night and the Soul" is just a heap of fine and beautiful things. The story has no hinge. The plot is nothing. You might almost begin to read the book at the end, and close it at the beginning. Secondly, there is no dramatic skill displayed in the management of the dialogue. All the characters talk equally This, however, is an ungracious task, well, and all talk too long. All are and we must hurry it over. The author poets or poetesses, uttering splendid so- of " Night and the Soul" is a genuine liloquies. Hence inevitably arise consi- poet. He has original genius-prolific derable monotony and tedium. Thirdly, fancy-the resources, too, of an ample we demur to that Spirit-scene altogether. scholarship-an unbounded command of Either these beings should have been de- poetic language-and, above all, a deeplyscribed as doing more, or doing less. As human, reverent, and pious spirit breathit is, their introduction is a mere excres-ing in his soul. On the future career of cence, although it is redeemed by much such an one, there can rest no shadows

of uncertainty. A little pruning, a little ture poems, are all he requires to rank more pains in elaborating, and the selec- him, by and by, with our foremost living tion of an interesting story for his fu- poets.

PHILIP JAMES BAILEY.

THESE sketches are by no means intended as a complete literary history of the age; yet we believe that in our "Galleries" few names of great note will be found altogether omitted. To omit, at all events, a distinct notice of such a phenomenon as "Festus," were unpardonable, and to this we now address ourselves. "Festus" is, indeed, a phenomenon. "When I read 'Festus,'" said poor David Scott to us, "I was astonished to find such work going on in a mind of the present day." It seemed to him, as Edinburgh on first view was called by Haydon, a "giant's dream." Indeed, it much resembles one of Scott's own vast unearthly pictures, the archetypes of which he may have recognised now in that world of shadows, of which he was born and lived a denizen; for surely, if ever walked a "phantom amongst men," it was the creator of "Vasco," "Sarpedon," and the "Resurrection of the Cross."

last, all the abortional shapes and unearthly scenery became beautiful as the landscapes of a dream. It was an angel after all, and not an eccentric demon, who was our conductor, and we yielded ourselves gladly to his gentle guidance, although the path lay over all prodigious and unspeakable regions. We want words to express the wonder which grew upon us, as each page opened like a new star, and we felt that the riches of thought, and imagery, and language, scattered through the poem, were absolutely "fineless," and that the poet's mind was as vast as his theme. That vague but thrilling wonder has subsided into a calm but profound sense of the various elements of power and beauty which compose the "one and indivisible" "Festus."

It is, first of all, an original production. Some, indeed, have called it a mere cento from Goethe, Byron, and Shelley. We grant at once that it bears a striking The first feeling which affected many resemblance to some of the productions besides us at the perusal of "Festus," was of those three; but the resemblance is a shock of surprise, mixed with pain, and only that of a kindred subject and a kinnot free from a shade of disgust. If we dred elevation. It is a new comet in an did not "believe," we trembled; if we did old sky. As well call "Manfred" a copy not sympathise, we shuddered. Every- of "Faust," or "Faust" of Job, as trace thing was so strange, that the whole "Festus" to a slavish imitation of any seemed monstrous. We can compare our preceding poem. It takes its place infeelings to nothing else than Cain's flight stantly as the lawful member of a family with Lucifer through the stars. We of sublime eccentrics, who have pierced found ourselves caught up on dark and more or less boldly into forbidden regions mighty wings, through wildernesses of dim "beyond the solar path and milky-way," and shadowy objects, worlds unpeopled, and whose fiery tresses tell on their return worlds half-created, worlds peopled by that they have neared the ardours, now of forms so monstrous that solitude seemed the light that is full of glory, and now of sweet in the comparison-"gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire." But just as disgust and terror were about to drive us away from this weltering chaos, a light appeared, softer than sunlight, warmer than moonlight-the light of genius which beckoned us on, and in which, at

the flames that shall never be quenched. In all these, however, the argument and object are different. Job, as we have shown elsewhere, contains a solution or the grand problem of the reconciliation of individual man to God, and to the difficulties of the universe, through a divine

We could have wished that the author of this poem had severed its masses of beauty from a moral or theological system. All such unions are dangerous to poems. Milton, indeed, has surmounted the difficulty; and while we spurn Shelley's assertion that the system of Christianity shall by and by only be remembered in Milton's poem, we grant that the "Paradise Lost" is a subordinate evidence of its truth, as

medium. "Faust" is a fragmentary at- | splendid evening sky; or if it die not tempt to settle the same question, apart altogether away, it must be from its confrom supernatural aid. "Manfred" howls nection with the imperishable fame of back to both, that such reconciliation is "Festus." impossible, and that the riddle of the universe is absolutely illegible by man. Shelley's "Prometheus" is the argument of the "Faust" extended from man the individual to man the species; while Bailey's "Festus" is the argument of Job applied, in like manner, to the whole human family. He takes a similar view to that which Blake has so beautifully developed in his illustrations of the book of Job. "Festus" is to the one as Job to the other-well as a rich halo around its central and a type of the fall and recovery of all men. The scene of "Faust" and of "Prometheus" is in earth; that of Job and of "Festus" is (essentially) in eternity.

solid greatness. To Pollok's work, again, his high Calvinism has proved partly a blessing and partly a bane-inwrought as it is into the entire structure of the poem, That the book of Job is intended to it has created either blind partisans or teach universal restoration, we do not, bitter enemies; only a few have been able notwithstanding Blake, believe. But one to look through the "fire-mist" into the principal object of "Festus" is to promul- poetical beauties which are hid beneath gate this dream. A lovely dream, verily, it. In like manner, while Festus has it is. That the surprise of a final deliver- been adopted and fondled by the large ance should pierce into the darkness of sect (large at least in America) calling the second death-that heads bowed down itself Universalists, its doctrines have reon the pillows of despair should be raised up to look and be lightened by the THIRD ADVENT of a more glorious "star of Lethe" than was ever Mercury as he descended into the Pagan shades-that "faces faded in the fire" should glow with the freshness of eternal youth-that the prey should be taken out of the hands of such mighty ones, and the captives from a fate so terrible, that the spring of a sublimer resurrection should reach the remote Hecla of hell, substituting flowers for flames, and for ice sunshine-that the words of the "Devil's Dream" should be fulfilled even in the case of the eldest born of Anarchy and Sin

"Thou shalt walk in soft white light, with

kings and priests abroad, And thou shalt summer high in bliss upon the hills of God"—

is a most captivating notion, and might be credited, had it the slightest ground in the Word of God, or anywhere but in the poetic fancy or the wild wish of man. As it is, it rises up before us, a brilliant but unsubstantial and fading pomp, like a

Nor

pelled many of the orthodox, who other-
wise would have rejoiced in the "wilder-
ness of sweets" and the forest of gran-
deurs which its circuit includes.
must Mr Bailey imagine that he has, by
his notion of a universal restoration, in
any effectual way recommended religion to
the sceptical of the present day. Eternal
punishment, fifty years ago, was a great
stumbling-block to unquiet spirits. Such
have generally now travelled on so far to-
wards Naturalism or Pantheism, that they
will not return at the voice of the char-
mer, charm he never so wisely-they will
laugh at the fine dream, as a man would
at the offer of sugar-plums for food, and
walk on their own ungovernable way.
They will ask, must not the reason for a
hell at all be an infinite one, and, if so,
is it not likely to be an eternal reason
too? In every great house, is there not
a furnace for the dross, as well as a light
in the drawing-room? If sin be of an
expansive character, will not punishment
expand along with it? or, if God means
to destroy sin hereafter, why does he not

Thus innocuously will the milk and rose-water of Bailey's doctrine drop upon the iron scales of modern scepticism, which seeks now, not so much to object to our special form of revelation, as to deny revelation altogether.

begin by abolishing it here? And what and Then" in its third edition, and Aird's need, they will ask again, of any hell"Poems" scarcely out of their first; Macafterwards, when justice is done now? aulay crowned with the richest laurels And, again, your theory may prove the of the historic muse, and Thomas de book human, but does it prove it di- Quincey, with a genius, an intellect, and vine? a learning qualifying him for an historian as far superior to the ex-Edinburgh member as was Tacitus to Suetonius, comparatively neglected; a Course of Time" and a "Silent Love" in their teens of editions, and "Festus," after sixteen years, in its fifth; phenomena somewhat subBailey's originality is not merely that stantiating the assertion of an old clever of plan, but of thought and style. He clergyman about the march of intellect, "hath a demon." He speaks as immedi- "It has certainly been very rapid of late ately told from behind. All convention--it has marched out of sight." alisms are spurned-all opposites paired The poem of "Festus," however, has -all contradictions reconciled-all ele- by no means lost its reward. Its evident ments mingled-all tenses lost in the holy earnestness-its holy yet charitable spirit and glorious hubbub of "Festus." He-its inexhaustible fountain of imageryis evidently a boy at blood-heat, but an its individual thoughts of splendour, like inspired boy. We have been as much spots of sunshine amid the dark forests amazed to find critics treating "Festus" around-its long sweeping passages, which --sometimes with praise, sometimes with seem to grow visibly and audibly before blame as an elaborate piece of art, as you-its infinite variety-the spirit and Byron was to find his "Don Juan"-the music of its songs-the living aspect of child of gin and sin-treated by the Ger- its characters-the bold but striking gemans as an artistic work. But Bailey's nerality of its descriptions-the simplibook is the effect of the intoxication of city, or force, or beauty, or languor, of its youth-a powerful and lawful stimulant, language-the broad picture of life it prewhich the poor jaded hack of the "Ex-sents-prove it, apart from its theological aminer" or Athenæum," or any such pretensions, one of the greatest poems in small critic, is as incapable of sympathis-the age. We should, perhaps, forbear to ing with, as he is now of imbibing. add, that, besides the warm verdict of These miserable effigies of critics, when the thinking youth of the country, it has they approach books like "Festus," should gained the praise of Bulwer, Montgoreally read the "Riot Act;" for certainly mery, Wilson, Tennyson, Binney, David such works do rebel against all arbitrary Scott, Professor Nichol, Samuel Brown, authority, and do stir the air and load and others of equal note. Partial, or inthe wind with extravagant liberties of sincere, or interested praise (although we thought and word, which neither they nor by no means apply these terms to the their fathers (Rymer, Dennis, &c.) were above), and also malicious censure, may able to bear. We have, within the last be told here to stand aside, inasmuch as few years, witnessed (through such critics)" Festus" has written its own indelible the strange phenomena of a Dickens impress upon a very broad, true, and redeified and a Christopher North (save sponsive section of the intellectual world. in Scotland) forgotten; a Warren's "Now "You may know it by its fruits."

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