button to main menu  Gents Mag 1842 part 1 p.10
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Gentleman's Magazine 1842 part 1 p.10

"Ah, miserable men! what curse is this
That takes you now? Night wraps herself around
Your faces, bodies, limbs; the palace shakes
With peals of groans - and, oh! what floods ye weep!
I see the walls and arches dappled thick
With gore! The vestibule is throng'd, the court
On all sides throng'd with apparitions grim
Of slaughtered men, sinking into the gloom
Of Erebus! The sun is blotted out
From heaven, and midnight whelms you premature."
Cowper, Od. b.20.
The visions selected by the two Grecian critics are as different as raving madness, prophetic enthusiasms, and poetic fury could create; and yet they do not dream of any classification of them under different powers of mind. The phantasia of the inspired Ithacan forces upon our memory the Bard of Gray, to whom we must listen for a moment:

"Dear lost companions of my tuneful art,
Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes,
Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart, -
Ye died amid your dying country's cries."
After this bold apostrophe, the Bard, entranced by the overpowering energy of thought, sees these his lost companions in the character of avengers of their native land, sitting upon the distant cliffs, and weaving with bloody hand the tissue of Edward's line.
The prophetic images continue to pour themselves upon him in so rapid and multitudinous a presentment, that, as if unable longer to gaze upon the spectacle, the Bard exclaims, in a burst of almost frenzied deprecation,

"Visions of glory! spare my aching sight;
Ye unborn ages, rush not on my soul!"
We cannot forbear to add a short quotation from an old divine, in whose writings our POET takes just delight.
"A man is sometimes so impressed with the false fires and glarings of temptation that he cannot see the secret turpitude and deformity; but when the cloud and veil is off, then comes the tormentor from within. Then the calamity swells, and conscience increases the trouble, when God sends war, or sickness, or death. It was Saul's case, when he lost that fatal battle in which the ark was taken. He thought he saw the priests of the Lord accusing him before God. And this hath been an old opinion of the world, that in the days of their calamity, wicked persons are accused by those whom they have injured. Then every bush is a wild beast, and every shadow is a ghost, and every glow-worm is a dead man's candle, and every lantern is a spirit."*
The practice of these so highly and so justly esteemed instructors in the principles of criticism has the merit, in our opinion, of being established on good sense and sound philosophy. The invention of new powers or faculties, and new operations of the mind, to support systems, or to answer an emergency, has been the ignis fatuus by which founders of sects or teachers of neoteric refinements have suffered themselves to be misled, from the earliest days of metaphysical subtilty to the present hour. Anxious, however, as we are to escape from these erroneous paths, and pursue the course of our ancient masters, we shall far conform ourselves
* Bp. Taylor's Rule of Conscience, B. i. c. 1.
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