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long to see a country in which the sentiment of liberty is disjoined from that blind levelling spirit which France has so fatally impressed on many minds. We would fain hope that Mazzinian republicanism may yet be replaced, not only in Italy, but throughout Europe, by something more like our English republicanism. It is the despotism of numerical majorities, and not the mere absence of monarchial forms, that the Moderates of Europe are resolved not to have. If revolutions come, they must be looked manfully in the face, and, if possible, not be merely shrieked at. Meanwhile, we think it augurs well for any country when the breathless expectation of such tornadoes, be it an ardently hopeful or an affrighted expectation, is superseded by the work of gradually erecting free institutions, and strengthening them against their enemies. A free Italian country, with a press, and a parliament, and a noble army under the control of responsible ministers, and impregnable fortifications building on the side next Austria;-is not this in itself a sure and certain hope for the Italian cause, though we cannot as yet see the point at which the new forces are to be used? If we really believe in Italian nationality, we cannot doubt that the occasion will arise. It may be that Count Cavour's scheme for the evacuation of the Roman States by the French and Austrians may be carried out, and may involve the attainment of constitutional liberties at Rome under the guarantee of a Piedmontese army. It may be that Piedmont is destined to shield a roused Neapolitan people from those who have no right to withhold them from dealing retribution on their oppressors, and that England and France would bear her harmless in such a maintenance against Austria of the principle of non-intervention. Italy is full of contingencies. We would not dwell overmuch on the Western alliance. It would be cruel to hold out the expectation that England and France would be ready now to back Piedmont in an unprovoked crusade against Austria, or indeed that France would at any time be eager to create for herself a Mediterranean rival in a united Italy. But the provocation may come from Austria, and in such a form as to insure the antagonism of the Western powers. It is not for us to prophesy the future of Italy. Her revelation, like all revelations, will probably come in the form and at the time least calculated on beforehand. We can but look for the seeds of strength within her borders; and we claim for Piedmontese liberty that it be admitted to hold a new and high place among the hopes of Italy-one more development, and in a very new and very right direction -an additional chance for Italy and for Europe. One benefit at least will accrue from her position: her politicians will be able to instruct Europe on the real bearings of Italian questions. It is, in itself, the beginning of better days, that we look forward

with reasonable confidence to receiving enlightenment from such

a source.

Our fear in reference to the attitude of England is lest we should be contented to follow the lead of France too submissively. The place where the time for action now seems to be ripening is Naples. An English fleet would be supreme at Naples; and it cannot be supposed that the Frc.ach emperor, having regard to his own position in France, would venture to oppose England were she to take a vigorous initiative in protecting an anti-Bourbon movement there against Austrian interference. Napoleon himself favoured the recent Italian discussion at Paris, and on his invitation England spoke out, through Lord Clarendon, with a plainness which his colleagues have since endeavoured to explain away. England must not be at the beck of a French emperor, to give an air of liberalism to his diplomacy, and then stop when her own principles and declarations bind her to go on. The French alliance will be an evil instead of a good if the ancient pride of England permanently submits to a secondary position. Selfishness is frequent enough, but legitimate selfassertion is one of the most commonly neglected of duties. We look for it at the hands of our rulers.

ART. VII.-SYDNEY DOBELL'S POEMS ON THE WAR. England in Time of War. By Sydney Dobell, author of "Balder," and "The Roman." London, 1856. Smith, Elder, and Co.

AN utter incapacity in a man to criticise himself adds very seriously to the labour of others who have to discharge that duty. Mr. Dobell is scarcely at the pains even of rough-hewing his poetry. He is like a sculptor who should present us with a block of marble, with here a toe finely carved out' in it, and there a finger, here the indication of a rounded arm, and there a delicately chiselled nose, and should ask us to admire the statue thus shadowed out, and executed only in some few arbitrary details. His thoughts and fancies flow like the sounds from an instrument of music, struck by the hand of a child,-a jumble of sweet and disconnected notes, without order or harmony. There is an utter absence of the faculty which looks on what it has made and sees that it is bad, and discards it accordingly. The reader is harassed by the constant conviction forced upon him of a shallow and easily self-satisfied artistic nature, which can be content to go on producing new masses of crude thought and hasty expression, instead of pa

tiently labouring till some single poem, however short, has received all the perfection it is in the power of its author to bestow. There are few men of ordinary intellectual activity who could not, if they chose, vent a rude rhythmical and rhymed torrent in any assigned number of volumes, and intersperse it with more or fewer gleams of real beauty and power. Men of sense and taste are deterred from the attempt by some true knowledge of the proportion of the valuable to the commonplace in what it is in their power to produce. Men of cultivation are familiar with the productions of genius; they have learned to know and feel something of what goes to form a good poem. Completeness is necessary to them,-they shrink from what is chaotic. Their first effort is to give form and wholeness to their imaginative productions; and failing in this, they acknowledge their incapacity, and find a field for their energies elsewhere. A man who has been so unhappy as never to learn the great lesson that he must finish his work before he sends it out, lies under this disadvantage, that he is very liable to be misled in comparing his own productions with the poems of others. He will always be found instituting a mental comparison between the pearls and diamonds he has sown among his sand, and some arbitrarily disconnected phrase, or simile, or thought, in the poet he would rival. He is blind to the fact, that although his own fine thoughts and fine images are merely fine thoughts or fine images, and are just as good, or perhaps better, looked at singly than in the connection in which he has placed them, the others are living portions of a work of art, and injured by separation from a whole to which they give, and from which they receive, additional beauty.

That Mr. Dobell has an imaginative genius of more than ordinary richness his pages bear abundant evidence. It by no means follows that he is a poet. He prefers to let the waters from his spring trail in desultory ragged streamlets wherever the inclination of the ground may chance to lead them, rather than to lead them through defined channels, selected for the variety and harmony of their course. The field of literature is marshy with small and wasted driblets of genius; and poetry, such as this before us, springs, indeed, from a fountain more copious than is common, but could not possibly be worse husbanded, or more idly allowed to run to waste. Such poetry excites a momentary attention from the brilliancy of some of its expression, and the occasional real beauty of sentiment and wealth of imaginative ideas which it discloses; but human readers will not take the good and the bad in such close conjunction. It is impossible to derive permanent pleasure from a set of verses which have at least as much to repel as to

attract. Men won't read such things twice. They make an effort, say they are fine, and forget them. More labour, more cultivation, more thought, than these poems bear any trace of, are requisite to enable a writer to hold a place in the field of English poetry. A man who can write some of the things we find here, and is content to write other things we also find,— who has got so much at his command and does so little with it, -must rest satisfied to be applauded by the Athenæum, and to pass into swift oblivion.

No

Mr. Dobell has another more positive fault. He is not simple. He is thinking how Dobell shall say something striking. All he writes is disfigured by affectation. writer will be affected who gives the direct and simple, though the highest and fullest, expression to his thoughtwho is occupied only with the effort to speak himself most completely. He, on the other hand, will always be affected who is thinking how to write most effectively. A trained mind is as liable to this error as any other: but it has this advantage, that it will recoil from the results when it sees them; and if it cannot be simple, will avoid at least the more glaring results of being otherwise. But where a man has the richness of Mr. Dobell's mind without the restraints either of natural simplicity or a cultivated taste, the utmost he can produce is a wilderness of ill-combined and ill-contrasted thoughts and fancies, which seem brought together under only one dominant requisition-that all must be fire. This is the one sine quân non. And the condition must be confessed to be well adhered to. All is not intelligible, all is not true; much is not profound, much is but a whirlwind of imagery, raising only the dust of an idea; but all is fire-all is effective. It is the poetry of Posters. It should be printed in large capital type, and posted in the desert places of the metropolis. It calls aloud for attention. Morison and Rowland would like to know the secret of it. It involves a terrible expenditure of words; but expense in this direction is no object though readers like ourselves may grumble somewhat at the "damnable iteration" which distinguishes Mr. Dobell's style. Some of the more striking features of what may be called the emphasis of repetition so prominent in this book are an importation from America, where Mr. Edgar Poe invented a particular form of it, of which Mr. Dobell has availed himself very largely. The essence of poetry is truth: the essence of affectation is untruthfulness. A man who strives to give poetic expression to the real passions which a sailor and his mistress feel in the anticipation and fulfilment of their meeting will write a poem, if he is capable of writing poetry at

all: a man who bends himself to say on this subject something very striking, very forcible-something which nobody has said before-which shall be utterly new, and very sure to elicit admiration-writes this sort of thing:

AFLOAT AND ASHORE.

"Tumble and rumble, and grumble and snort,
Like a whale to starboard, a whale to port;
Tumble and rumble, and grumble and snort,
And the steamer steams through the sea, love.

I see the ship on the sea, love,

I stand alone

On this rock,

The sea does not shock

The stone;

The waters around it are swirled,

But under my feet

I feel it go down

To where the hemispheres meet

At the adamant heart of the world.

O, that the rock would move!

O, that the rock would roll

To meet thee over the sea, love!

Surely my mighty love

Should fill it like a soul,

And it should bear me to thee, love;

Like a ship on the sea, love,

Bear me, bear me, to thee, love!

Guns are thundering, seas are sundering, crowds are wondering,
Low on our lee, love.

Over and over the cannon-clouds cover brother and lover, but

over and over

The whirl-wheels trundle the sea, love,

And on through the loud pealing pomp of her cloud

The great ship is going to thee, love;

Blind to her mark, like a world through the dark,
Thundering, sundering, to the crowds wondering,
Thundering ever to thee, love.

I have come down to thee coming to me, love.
I stand, I stand

On the solid sand,

I see thee coming to me, love;

The sea runs up to me on the sand:

I start-'tis as if thou hadst stretched thine hand

And touched me through the sea, love.

I feel as if I must die,

For there's something longs to fly,

Fly and fly to thee, love.

As the blood of the flower ere she blows

Is beating up to the sun,

And her roots do hold her down,

And it blushes and breaks undone

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