holy man, and assured of the ultimate forgiveness of the Goddess on certain conditions. She is adjudged to wander over the earth till she has raised an altar to the offended deity, Where perfect happiness, in lonely state, Has fixed her temple in secluded bower, She despairs of attaining this blessed seat of tranquillity, these "Vaghi colli, ameni prati, Di Riposo Alberghi veri !" where she is to forget all her sorrows;—when lo! 'Sent by the hand of Love a turtle flies,' and, as the emblem of Innocence, precedes and directs her path. She arrives at length, conducted by this unerring guide, at the woodland shade' which we commemorated before; and here the poem, at the end of the 2d canto, returns to its ex post facto beginning in the first; so far violating the admirable rule of the French,-" Commencez par le commencement.” In the 3d canto, a champion, in complete mail, meets the wandering fair-one. He is attended by a page, named Constance, and assumes the command of Passion, who appears as a Lion. Psyche then proceeds under the protection of her champion. She is persuaded to repose in the bower of Loose Delight: but, after a safe escape, she is led by Innocence to Retirement. She encounters Vanity and Flattery, and is exposed by them to the power of Ambition. Her Knight rescues her. Canto IV. Psyche is benighted, and meets with Credulity, the prey of the Blatant Beast,' or Slander. The Knight is wounded in a contest with the latter, but puts her to flight. Credulity leads Psyche to the castle of Suspicion. Here we may observe, en passant, that a little confusion occurs in the allegory; and that the qualities of Suspicion and Credulity, which, when put in action, must often be identified, are rather unintelligibly interchanged. Yet although in this, and one or two other instances, the author has been embarrassed by her double design of relating a literal and a figurative story, yet on the whole we know no allegory which has been so clearly conducted through an equal extent of fable. To resume: Psyche, deluded by Suspicion, or Credulity, laments the desertion of her Knight to the train of Inconstancy. She is betrayed into the power of Jealousy, who persuades her that her Knight, by whom she was then abandoned, was Love himself. (This also, by the way, is rather indistinct; for had she not previously known her Knight to be Love, would she have been jealous of him?—and, to get rid of these trifling objections at once, we may just remark that the name of Geloso suggests Ridicule rather than Jealousy to a classical ear, and that Disfida is a barbarous compound.) Psyche is again delivered by her Knight; and a reconciliation takes place between them. In the Vth canto our heroine beholds the palace of Chastity. She pleads for the admission of her Knight, and obtains it through the intervention of Hymen. A hymn is introduced, celebrating the triumphs of Chastity;-(of this, we shall speak presently;) and, enraptured with the strain, Psyche desires to devote herself wholly to the service of that Queen, by whom she is intrusted to the continued guidance of the Knight. They are wrecked by a tempest in a voyage which they now take, and are thrown on the coast of Spleen. Psyche is received and sheltered by Patience. In the VIth and last canto, the heroine is becalmed in prosecuting her voyage, surprized, and carried to the island of Indifference: she is pursued, and finally rescued by her Knight. The voyage is concluded; and Psyche, brought home to the Island of Pleasure, beholds again the Temple of Love; is re-united to her lover, who, we need not say, is her faithful Knight; and is invited by Venus to receive her apotheosis in heaven. Such is the story of Psyche; of which the author thus farther speaks, with exemplary modesty, in her preface : I much regret that I can have no hope of affording any pleasure to some, whose opinion I highly respect, whom I have heard profess themselves ever disgusted by the veiled form of allegory, and yet Are not the choicest fables of the poets, Who were the fountains and first springs of wisdom, But if I have not been able to resist the seductions of the mys terious fair, who perhaps never appears captivating except in the eyes of her own poet, I have however remembered that my verse cannot be worth much consideration, and have therefore endeavoured to let my meaning be perfectly obvious. The same reason has deterred me from using the obsolete words which are to be found in Spenser and his imitators. Although I cannot give up the excellence of my subject, I am yet ready to own that the stanza which I have chosen has many disadvantages, and that it may, perhaps, be as tiresome to the reader as The frequent recurrence of the same it was difficult to the author. rhymes is by no means well adapted to the English language; and I know not whether I have a right to offer as an apology the restraint which I had imposed upon myself, of strictly adhering to the stanza which my partiality for Spenser first inclined me to adopt.' So far from thinking that the stanza, as managed by this writer, is tiresome, we are delighted with the variety and L 2 beauty 1 beauty of its construction. If it was indeed difficult to her in the composition, we can only say that she has completely concealed that difficulty; and that she has added another example to the scanty list of writers whose works, from the apparent facility of their execution, flatter their imitators with the hopes of arriving at an unattainable excellence : "facile ut sibi quivis Speret idem: sudet multum, frustraque laboret We proceed to fulfil the less agreeable part of our task, but which will not detain us long.- Idleness has seldom produced inaccuracy in this poem ; and bad taste, we think, is still more rarely to be detected. She laid her down, and piteously bethought Herself on the sad changes of her fate'-page 11. is a blemish which might easily have been avoided, and is therefore deserving of censure. Of the same stamp are the following passages. blast which sweeps along Sparing the lovely trembler, while the strong It levels low,'-page 13. is a bombastic description of a snowdrop escaping from the force of the wind. For sweet refreshment all inviting seems To taste celestial food, and pure ambrosial streams,' page 13. is, to us, unintelligible. The word undistanced,' page 130. we believe is of no authority; and, in page 131., two immediately successive stanzas end with the easy rhymes of attentively' and sigh ;'-' eye' and 'mystery.'- Page 134. has the barbarism of had strove, and it occurs again, subsequently. The Hymn to Chastity,' in page 157., is to our apprehension one of the rare instances of false taste in the volume. It is crowded with stale classical allusions, and drest out in all the moth-eaten finery of the mythological wardrobe. We have Bellerophon, and Peleus, and Hippolytus; and the daring spring' of Dictynna; and the trembling flight' of Arethusa; and Daphne, and Syringa; not to mention the true histories' of Clusia, and Clelia, and Sulpicia, and Lucretia, and Virginia, "Cum multis aliis, quas nunc perscribere longum est. To be received in Castabella's train.'-page 164. is a flat and prosaic line, which has few parallels in the poem: but And torture the too susceptible mind,' p. 116. is still worse;-and in the same stanza, Lest he she loved, unmindful or unkind,' is not much better. In page 193. the coldness with which Indifference hears the voice of Affection is compared to the impassibility (if we may here be allowed the term) of an oiled surface,' over which a stream of water glides, without a drop gaining admission. The expression oiled surface' is objec tionable in the simile, because it irresistibly suggests an oilcase for the hat in a rainy day, and destroys the effect of a comparison which, if the substance to which Indifference is compared had been judiciously chosen and specified, might have produced a very pleasing effect. We had marked a much more numerous list of faults in the shorter poems subjoined to Psyche:' but a passage in the advertisement of the editor has induced us to omit our intended criticisms. These poems,' he says, may perhaps stand in need of that indulgence which a posthumous work always demands, when it did not receive the correction of the author. They have been selected from a larger number of poems, which were the occasional effusion of her thoughts, or productions of her leisure, but not originally intended or pointed out by herself for publication.' We deem it equitable, therefore, to pass over such blemishes as we think we have discovered in these compositions; and, for the sake of perfect impartiality, we shall also be silent on the beauties which they certainly contain. To return to Psyche; and to the completion of our critiquer -We have now to lay before our readers some of those passages in which this pathetic writer has spoken to the hearts of all her feeling readers: 'Oh! have you never known the silent charm Abridge the hours which must in absence roll? have never loved! you know not what is love! They do not love who can to these prefer Their joyless state, even more than his who mourns Unto Unto his widowed heart indeed returns, Yet, while he weeps, his soul their cold indifference spurns But if soft hope illumines fancy's dream, While sweet remembrance sooths his thrilling heart, And turns to drops of joy the tears that sadly start." We shall not anticipate, nor interrupt, the approbation with which such stanzas as the preceding and the following must be received. Nothing is more offensive to readers of taste than to be officiously directed how they are to admire; and nothing is more useless than to point out to others where the secret charm lies, in the passages proposed to their consideration: There are who know not the delicious charm And courts may lure them with each splendid toy: Oh! blind to man's chief good who Love disclaim, When pleasure sparkles in the cup of youth,' &c. is of unusual excellence: but, captivating as it is, we must reluctantly exclude it from our pages, of which the limits sternly warn us to forbear. The dreadful power of indifference, that "slumber of the soul," (as it has been well denominated,) is admirably described in this passage; and every Benedict and his Beatrice should lay the lesson to heart which it so strikingly conveys. The growth and progress of this fatal apathy we must omit, as we premised: but the two concluding stanzas absolutely demand insertion, Who can describe the hopeless, silent pang With which the gentle heart first marks her sway? 'Deceive' and 'receive,' in that passage, are hardly admissible rhymes, unless the stanza cxcuses them. • Anxious |