Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 099.djvu/90

78 In his own "Poetry: a Metrical Essay" he marks howHis management of the "proud heroic," in serious and sustained efforts reminds us more of Campbell than any other poet we can name. But it is in that school of graceful badinage and piquant satire, represented among ourselves by such writers as Frere, and Spencer, and Mackworth Praed, that Dr. Holmes is most efficient. Too earnest not to be sometimes a grave censor, too thoughtful not to introduce occasionally didactic passages, too humane and genial a spirit to indulge in the satirist's scowl, and sneer, and snappish moroseness, he has the power to be pungent and mordant in sarcasm to an alarming degree, while his will is to temper his irony with so much good-humour, fun, mercurial fancy, and generous feeling, that the more gentle hearts of the more gentle sex pronounce him excellent, and wish only he would leave physic for song.

In some of his poems the Doctor is not without considerable pomp and pretension—we use the terms in no slighting tone. "Poetry: a Metrical Essay," parts of "Terpsichore," "Urania," and "Astræa," "Pittsfield Cemetery," "The Ploughman," and various pieces among the lyrical effusions, are marked by a dignity, precision, and sonorous elevation, often highly effective. The diction occasionally becomes almost too ambitious—verging on the efflorescence of a certain English M.D. yclept Erasmus Darwin—so that we now and then pause to make sure that it is not the satirist in his bravura, instead of the bard in his solemnity, that we hear. Such passages as the following come without stint:

Fragments of the Lichfield physician's "Botanic Garden," and "Loves of the Plants," seem recalled—revised and corrected, if you will—in lines where the Boston physician so picturesquely discriminates The scythe's broad meadow with its dusky blush;

The sickle's harvest with its velvet flush;