episode in an epic--but the epic, where is it? and 'Cain,' his most creative work, though a distinct and new world, is a bright and terrible abortion--a comet, instead of a sun. So, too, are the leading works of poor Shelley, which resemble Southey in size, Byron in power of language, and himself only in spirit and imagination, in beauties and faults. Keats, like Shelley, was arrested by death, as he was piling up enduring and monumental works. Professor Wilson has written '_Noctes_' innumerable; but where is his poem on a subject worthy of his powers, or where is his _work_ on any subject whatever? Hogg has bound together a number of beautiful ballads, by a string of no great value, and called it the 'Queen's Wake.' Scott himself has left no solid poem, but instead, loose, rambling, spirited, metrical romances--the bastards of his genius--and a great family of legitimate chubby children of novels, bearing the image, but not reaching the full stature, of their parent's mind. Croly's poems, like the wing of his own 'seraph kings,' standing beside the sleeping Jacob, has a 'lifted, mighty plume,' and his eloquence is always as classic as it is sounding; but it is, probably, as much the public's fault as his, that he has never equalled his first poem, 'Paris in 1815,' which now appears a basis without a building. Maturin has left a powerful passage or two, which may be compared to a feat performed by the victim of some strong disease, to imitate which no healthy or sane person would, could, or durst attempt. James Montgomery will live by his smaller poems--his larger are long lyrics--and when was a long lyric any other than tedious? Hunt has sung many a joyous carol, and many a pathetic ditty, but produced no high or lasting poem. Pollok has aimed at a higher object than almost any poet of his day; he has sought, like Milton, to enshrine religion in poetic form, and to attract to it poetic admirers: he did so in good faith, and he expended great talents and a young life, in the execution; but, unfortunately, he confounded Christianity with one of its narrowest shapes, and hence the book, though eloquent in passages, and dear to a large party, is rather a long and powerful, though unequal and gloomy sermon, than a poem; he has shed the sunshine of his genius upon his own peculiar notions, far more strongly than on general truths; and the spirit of the whole performance may be expressed in the words of Burns, slightly altered,--'Thunder-tidings of damnation.' _His_ and _our_ friend, Thomas Aird, has a much subtler, more original and genial mind than Pollok's, and had he enjoyed a tithe of the same recognition, he might have produced a Christian epic on a far grander scale; as it is, his poems are fragmentary and