He was then a voluntary exile from his native land, that noble England, which should be dear to all great men, because the mother of so many; he was nursing many fictitious sorrows; affecting a scorn for his country he could not feel; defying the judgments of men to which he was painfully sensitive; mourning over the blasted blossoms of domestic happiness; seeking new sources of gratification, or old gratifications in new forms; in the midst of all he plunges into the arcana of classic lore; he dives into the crystal depths of classic antiquity, to draw forth beautiful gems, dripping with the sparkling element, untainted by its passage through centuries of time. He reconstructs the whole scene to our view, mingling his illustrations from those severer arts with the sweet and graceful touches of a pencil that seems capable of catching and delineating every form of beauty that can engage the fancy or awaken the imagination. We have been filled with admiration, we have been fired with enthusiasm, at some of these magnificent strains of poetry, noble ideas, burning thoughts, assuming precisely the dress, the costume, which best became them. Whether the poet takes us along the bank of some classic stream, places us before some romantic city, flies over the battle-field, luxuriates in a moonlight scene, lingers amid broken columns and bubbling fountains, gazes on the splendid remnants of statues that almost seem instinct with the breath of life, conducts us to the roaring of the cataract, across whose dread chasm, “the hell of waters,” is arched here and there the lovely Iris, with her seven-fold dyes, “like Hope upon a death-bed,” then upward passes and beholds the solemn mountains, the Alps or Appenines, scenes of heroic daring and suffering, contemplates the mighty ocean, “dark, heaving, boundless, endless and sublime, the image of eternity,” over whose bosom ten thousand fleets have swept, and left no marks; finally, if he leads us back to the Eternal City, not as in her pride of place and power, but as oppressed with the “double night of ages,” as the “Niobe of nations,” the “lone mother of dead empires,” sitting in solitude, “an empty urn within her withered hands,” and draws mighty lessons from all these objects, in all this we behold the splendor of true genius; we feel its power; we wonder at the gifts of God thus bestowed; we tremble at the responsibility of the man thus rarely endowed by his Creator. That regal imagination, disdaining at times the vulgarities to which a depraved heart would subject it, asserts its native dignity, and as it ranges among more quiet scenes utters, with the solemnity of a prophet, such a lesson as this: “If from society we learn to live, ’Tis solitude should teach us how to die. It hath no flatterers; vanity can give No hollow aid; alone, man with his God must strive.”