orations; while by the very attempt to describe the celebrated buildings and sculptures of antiquity, he seems to confess that _they_ are the poetical text, his the rhetorical comment. Still it is a work of splendid talent, though, as a whole, not of the highest poetical excellence. Juvenal is, perhaps, the only ancient author who habitually substitutes declamation for poetry.[23] [22] We would here mention Rogers’s _Italy_, if such a cursory notice could convey our high opinion of its merit. [23] The difference between oratory and poetry is well illustrated by a passage in a recent tragedy. _Col._ Joined! by what tie? _Rien._ By hatred-- By danger--the two hands that tightest grasp Each other--the two cords that soonest knit A fast and stubborn tie; your true love knot Is nothing to it. Faugh! the supple touch Of pliant interest, or the dust of time, Or the pin-point of temper, loose or rot Or snap love’s silken band. Fear and old hate, They are sure weavers--they work for the storm, The whirlwind, and the rocking surge; their knot Endures till death. The idea is good, and if expressed in a line or two, might have been poetry--spread out into nine or ten lines, it yields but a languid and ostentatious declamation. The _philosophy of mind_ may equally be made subservient to poetry, as the philosophy of nature. It is a common fault to mistake a mere knowledge of the heart for poetical talent. Our greatest masters have known better;--they have subjected metaphysics to their art. In _Hamlet_, _Macbeth_, _Richard_, and _Othello_, the philosophy of mind is but the material of the poet. These personages are ideal; they are effects of the contact of a given internal character with given outward circumstances, the results of combined conditions determining (so to say) a moral curve of original and inimitable properties. Philosophy is exhibited in the same subserviency to poetry in many parts of Crabbe’s _Tales of the Hall_. In the writings of this author there is much to offend a refined taste; but at least in the work in question there is much of a highly poetical cast. It is a representation of the action and re-action of two minds upon each other and upon the world around them. Two brothers of different characters and fortunes, and strangers to each other, meet. Their habits of mind, the formation of those habits by external circumstances, their respective media of judgement, their points of mutual attraction and repulsion, the mental position of each in relation to a variety of trifling phenomena of every-day nature and life, are beautifully developed in a series of tales moulded into a connected narrative. We are tempted to single out the fourth book, which gives an account of the childhood and education of the younger brother, and which for variety of thought as well as fidelity of