Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/183

Rh individuality; but it is a charge to which not only the elaborate poems, but also the Scottish tales and prose idyls of Professor Wilson are prominently open. Elaborate, perhaps, is a wrong epithet to use of poems which one of the most genial of his admirers has pronounced to be chiefly marred by "fatal facility"—the florid voluntaries of youthful genius, when earth was a wilderness of sweets and life a scene of enchantments, and "language syllabled itself into music," so that improvisation rather than composition is the name for such outpourings. His later verses, however, are more carefully finished. But all, early and late, are productive of languor and satiety, unless dipped into at intervals only, when one is rewarded by many a bonne bouche, beautiful exceedingly. It is significant of the very limited number of his readers, that one so seldom meets with a quotation from his poetical works; finely stored as they are with materials for quotation. Take a shred or two torn away at random:—here is a bit of shipwreck history, telling how "five hundred souls in one instant of dread were hurried o'er the deck," to the coral rocks below:

The whole description of this wreck is a very stirring one, and of unusually sustained animation—from our first glimpse of the gallant ship, at peaceful sunrise, "so stately her bearing, so proud her array," to our last glimpse of her crashing masts and brine-draggled sails, succeeded by a solemn vision of "ocean's bosom bare, unbroken as the floating air." Here again is a morning picture—the child spoken of, an "orphan shepherdess," pure and winsome as bonny Kilmeny's self:

'Tis a lonely glen! but the happy child

Hath friends whom she meets in the morning wild.

As on she trips, her native stream,

Like her, hath awoke from a joyful dream,

And glides away by her twinkling feet,

With a face as bright and a voice as sweet.