The truth is, Mr. Campbell was never strong in his natural history; he does not scruple to put flamingoes and palm trees into the valley of Wyoming. Another reason why the first poem of Campbell’s, written when he was only twenty-one, came to such success, was the comparatively clear field it had. The date of publication was at the end of the century. Byron was in his boyhood; Scott had not published his _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ (1805); Southey had printed only his _Joan of Arc_ (1796), which few people read; the same may be said of Landor’s _Gebir_, (1797); Cowper was an old story; Rogers’s _Pleasures of Memory_ (1792), and Moore’s translation of _Anacreon_ (1799-1800), were the more current things with which people who loved fresh poetry could regale themselves. The _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge had indeed been printed, perhaps a year or two before, down in Bristol; but scarce any one read _these_; few bought them;[20] and yet--in that copy of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was lying _perdu_--almost unknown and uncared for--the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” _Gertrude of Wyoming_, a poem, written at Sydenham, near London, about 1807, and which, sixty years ago, every good American who was collecting books thought it necessary to place upon his shelves, I rarely find there now. It has not the rhetorical elaboration of Campbell’s first poem; never won its success; there are bits of war in it, and of massacre, that are gorgeously encrimsoned, and which are laced through and through with sounds of fife and warwhoop; but the landscape is a disorderly exaggeration (I have already hinted at its palm trees) and its love-tale has only the ardors of a stage scene in it; we know where the tragedy is coming in, and gather up our wraps so as to be ready when the curtain falls. He was a born actor--in need (for his best work) of the foot-lights, the on-lookers, the trombone, the bass-drum. He never glided into victories of the pen by natural inevitable movement of brain or heart; he stopped always and everywhere to consider his _pose_.