Lash'd up a loftier surge, and heaved on high
A ridge of billows that obstruct the sky;
And, as the accumulated mass he rolls,
Bares the sharp rocks and lifts the gaping shoals.
Forward the fearless barges plunge and bound,
Top the curl'd wave, or grind the flinty ground,
Careen, whirl, right, and sidelong dasht and tost,
Now seem to reach and now to lose the coast.

Still unsubdued the sea-drench'd army toils,
Each buoyant skiff the flouncing godhead foils;
He raves and roars, and in delirious woe
Calls to his aid his ancient hoary foe,
Almighty Frost, &c.

Roused at the call, the Monarch mounts the storm;
In muriat flakes he robes his nitrous form,

Glares thro the compound, all its blast inhales,
And seas turn crystal where he breathes his gales.
Earth heaves and cracks beneath the alighting god;
He gains the pass, bestrides the roaring flood,
Shoots from his nostrils one wide withering sheet
Of treasured meteors on the struggling fleet;
The waves conglaciate instant, fix in air,
Stand like a ridge of rocks, and shiver there.
The barks, confounded in their headlong surge,
Or wedged in crystal, cease their oars to urge;

Some with prone prow, as plunging down the deep,

And some remounting o'er the slippery steep.' p. 184-186. Then comes the angel Hesper, who mauls the poor god of frost with the trunk of a tough fir tree, and knocks the ice to pieces in which the boats had been entangled.

Stroke after stroke with doubling force he plied,
Foiled the hoar Fiend and pulverized the tide.
The baffled tyrant quits the desperate cause;
From Hesper's heat the river swells and thaws,
The fleet rolls gently to the Jersey coast,

And morning splendors greet the landing host. p. 189. The philosophic or prophetic part of the poem, in which the author, reviewing the past destiny of man, ventures to delineate his füture progress, is far superior in our estimation to the narrative or historical part. His retrospects have far more breadth and dignity, and his anticipations far more spirit than his chronicle. Wel take the following passage almost at random.

At last, a soil more fixt and streams more sweet
Inform the wretched migrant where to seat;
Euphrates' flowery banks begin to smile,
Fruits fringe the Ganges, gardens grace the Nile;
Nile, ribb'd with dikes, a length of coast creates,
And giant Thebes begins her hundred gates,

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the present day, and a few thousand years lower, the author, of course, cannot spare time to make us acquainted with any one individual. The most important personges, therefore, appear but once upon the scene, and then pass away and are forgotten. Mr Barlow's exhibition accordingly partakes more of the nature of a procession, than of a drama. River gods, sachems, majors of militia, all enter at one side of his stage, and go off at the other, never to return. Rocha and Oella take up as much room as Greene and Washington; and the rivers Potowmak and Delaware, those fluent and venerable personages, both act and talk a great deal more than Jefferson or Franklin.

It is plain, that in a poem constructed upon such a plan, there can be no development of character,-no unity, or even connexion of action,-and consequently no interest, and scarcely any coherence or contrivance in the story. Of a work of this magnitude and curiosity, however, it is proper that our readers should be enabled in some measure to judge for themselves; and therefore, we shall proceed to lay before them a short abstract of the plan, and to subjoin such extracts as are calculated to convey a just notion of its execution.

Columbus, it is well known, was repaid for his great discovery with signal ingratitude; and was at one time loaded with chains, and imprisoned on the instigation of an enyious rival.

The

poem opens with a view of his dungeon, and a long querulous soliloquy addressed to its walls. All on a sudden the gloom is illuminated by the advent of a celestial personage; and the Guardian Augel of America is introduced by the name of Hesper, who consoles and sooths the heroic prisoner, by leading him up to a shadowy mount, from which he entertains him with a full

pros

pect of the vast continent he had discovered, and sets before him in a long vision which lasts till the end of the poem, all the events which had happened, and were to happen, in that region, or in any other connected with it.

Thus, the whole history, past, present, and future, of Ame rica, and inclusively of the whole world, is delivered in the clumsy and revolting form of a miraculous vision; and thus truth is not only blended with falsehood and fancy, but is presented to the mind under the mask of the grossest and most palpable fiction. Mr Barlow, of course, judges differently of his plan; and maintains, not only that it gives great interest and dignity to the story, but that it has enabled him to observe the unities of time, place, and action, more rigidly than any other poet,-the whele action consisting in what takes place between Columbus and Hesper, which must be supposed to occupy but a few hours." There never was so cheap and ingenious a method of satisfying

the unities as this. Here is a poem of some seven or eight thou-. sand verses, containing a sketch of universal history, from the deluge to the final conflagration, with particular notices of all the battles, factions, worthies, and improvements in America, for the last half century; and when we complain of the enormous extent and confusion of this metrical chronicle, we are referred to some fifty forgotten lines at the outset, from which, it appears, that Columbus came to the knowledge of all these fine things by seeing them rehearsed before him one dark night on the top of a mountain in Spain. If this apology is to be received, Mr Scott might hold out his beautiful outlaw, the Lay of the Last Minstrel, as a perfect pattern of the unities,-since the whole story is told in one afternoon in the dressing-room of the Dutchess of Buccleugh. The antient poets, in like manner, had nothing more to do than to prefix a notice, that the whole piece was dictated to them by a muse in any given grotto or bower. Nay, even a degenerate modern, it would seem, might, upon the same principle, securely evade this most rigorous law of the unities, by merely notifying in verse, that his rambling Epic was all composed by him in the course of one term, and within the precincts of one garret. Is it possible that self-partiality should have so far blinded a man of Mr Barlow's acuteness, as to make it necessary to remind him, that the unity which the reader requires in a long poem, must be in the subject, and not in the manner of introducing it; and that the miscellaneous history of four thousand years does not become one story, by being represented in one vision, any more than by being bound up in one volume? It is time, however, to give a short sketch of this visionary legend,

The first part of it belongs rather to geography than to civil history; and contains a long description of the American hills, lakes, rivers, and vegetable productions. The next chapter goes on to the animal kingdom; and is chiefly occupied with the physiology of its human natives, and a theory about its population. Two whole books are then devoted to the fabulous exploits of Manco Capac and Oella, the Osiris and Isis of the Peruvian my. thology, their institutions civil and religious, and their conquest and conversion of the more ferocious savages around them. After this, there is a very short sketch of the Spanish oppressions, followed out by a speculation upon the Popish superstition, the Jesuits, and the Inquisition. The voyages of Sir Walter Raleigh, and the colonisation of Virginia, are then commemorated: and the next book contains the history of the Canadian war 1757, with the defeat of Braddock and the death of Wolfe; and then begins the story of the colonial war, which is given with considerable detail in the course of the two following books. This

ends

Mammoth of human works! her grandeur known
These thousand lustres by its wrecks alone;
Wrecks that humiliate still all modern states,
Press the poized earth with their enormous weights,
Refuse to quit their place, dissolve their frame
And trust, like Ilion, to the bards their fame.
Memphis amass'd her piles, that still o'erclimb
The clouds of heaven, and task the tooth of time;
Belus and Brama tame their vagrant throngs,
And Homer, with his monumental songs,
Builds far more durable his splendid throne,
Than all the Pharaohs with their hills of stone.
High roll'd the round of years that hung sublime
These wondrous beacons in the night of time;
Studs of renown! that to thine eyes attest

The waste of ages that beyond them rest;

Ages how fill'd with toils! how gloom'd with woes!

Trod with all steps that man's long march compose.' p. 283: The origin and progress of Superstition is drawn with the same strong hand.

And where the mosque's dim arches bend on high,
Mecca's dead prophet mounts the mimic sky;
Pilgrims, imbanded strong for mutual aid,
Thro dangerous deserts that their faith has made,
Train their long caravans, and famish'd come
To kiss the shrine and trembling touch the tomb,
By fire and sword the same fell faith extend,
And howl their homilies to earth's far end.

Phenician altars reek with human gore,
Gods hiss from caverns or in cages roar,
Nile pours from heaven a tutelary flood,
And gardens grow the vegetable god.
Sun, stars and planets round the earth behold
Their fanes of marble and their shrines of gold;
The sea, the grove, the harvest and the vine
Spring from their gods and clai a birth divine;
While heroes, kings and sages of their times,

Those gods on earth, are gods in happier climes.' p. 292, 293. The following reflections on the sad alternation of light and darkness, of civilization and barbarism, that has marked the past history of the species, are expressed with power and feeling. • What strides he took in those gigantic times That sow'd with cities all his orient climes ! Did not his Babylon exulting say,

I sit a queen, &c.

Where shall we find them now? the very shore
Where Ninus rear'd his empire is no more :-

The

The dikes decay'd, a putrid marsh regains
The sunken walls and tomb encumber'd plains.
The fox himself has fled his gilded den,
Nor holds the heritage he won from men;
Lapwing and reptile shun the curst abode,
And the foul dragon, now no more a god,

Trails off his train; the sickly raven flies;' &c. p. 295-6. After a transient glimpse of the glories of Greece, the author proceeds

Yet from that splendid height o'erturn'd once more,

He dasht in dust the living lamp he bore.

Dazzled with her own glare, decoy'd and sold
For homebred faction and barbaric gold,

Greece treads on Greece, subduing and subdued,
New crimes inventing, all the old renew'd;

Canton o'er canton climbs; till, crush'd and broke,

All yield the sceptre and resume the yoke.' p. 296–7.

These and other instances awake in the mind of Columbus some sad forebodings, that the returning tide of violence and superstition may again blot out the intelligence which seems so firmly established.

Tho two broad continents their beams combine
Round his whole globe to stream the day divine,
Perchance some felly, yet uncured, may spread
A storm proportion'd to the lights they shed,
Veil both his continents, and leave again
Between them stretch'd the impermeable main;
All science buried, sails and cities lost,
Their lands uncultured, as their seas uncrost.
Till on thy coast, some thousand ages hence,
New pilots rise, bold enterprize commence,
Some new Colurnbus (happier let him be,
More wise and great and virtuous far than me)
Launch on the wave, and tow'rd the rising day
Like a strong eaglet steer his untaught way,
Gird half the globe, and to his age unfold
A strange new world, the world we call the old.
From Finland's glade to Calpe's storm-beat head
He'll find some tribes of scattering wildmen spread;
But one vast wilderness will shade the soil,

No wreck of art, no sign of antient toil
Tell where a city stood; nor leave one trace

Of all that honors now, and all that shames the race. '

p. 300-1.

The angel allays these apprehensions, by reminding him of the mighty changes that have been wrought on the frame of human ociety by the press, the magnet, and the spirit of commercial independence;

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