and this without exciting any painful or laborious attention, without any anatomy of description, (a fault not uncommon in descriptive poetry)-but with the sweetness and easy movement of nature. This energy is an absolute essential of poetry, and of itself would constitute a poet, though not one of the highest class;--it is, however, a most hopeful symptom, and the Venus and Adonis is one continued specimen of it. In this beautiful poem there is an endless activity of thought in all the possible associations of thought with thought, thought with feeling, or with words, of feelings with feelings, and of words with words. Even as the sun, with purple-colour'd face, Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase: Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn. Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-faced suitor 'gins to woo him. Remark the humanizing imagery and circumstances of the first two lines, and the activity of thought in the play of words in the fourth line. The whole stanza presents at once the time, the appearance of the morning, and the two persons distinctly characterized, and in six simple verses puts the reader in possession of the whole argument of the poem. Over one arm the lusty courser's rein, Under the other was the tender boy, Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain, With leaden appetite, unapt to toy, She red and hot, as coals of glowing fire, He red for shame, but frosty to desire:-- This stanza and the two following afford good instances of that poetic power, which I mentioned above, of making every thing present to the imagination--both the forms, and the passions which modify those forms, either actually, as in the representations of love, or anger, or other human affections; or imaginatively, by the different manner in which inanimate objects, or objects unimpassioned themselves, are caused to be seen by the mind in moments of strong excitement, and according to the kind of the excitement,--whether of jealousy, or rage, or love, in the only appropriate sense of the word, or of the lower impulses of our nature, or finally of the poetic feeling itself. It is, perhaps, chiefly in the power of producing and reproducing the latter that the poet stands distinct.