"It often happened," says Somerville, "that he wandered into my room— -never oftener than when he wanted to get away from himself. One night, especially, he stalked in, knitting his brows, and without uttering one word, sat himself down before the fire then, after a while, he took up the poker, and began to trace mathematical figures among the soot on the back of the chimney." In the manner of an insane man he addressed Somerville in insulting language; and, at last, the true pent-up feeling burst out. He had been working at the proofs of his poem till whatever meaning the verses had, or seemed to have, vanished away, and the whole thing appeared to him to be trash. It became torture to him to look at what he had done. "There are days," he added, "when I can't abide to walk in the sunshine, and when I would almost rather be shot than come within the sight of any man, or be spoken to by any mortal! This has been one of those days. How heartily I wished for night!"

That night they supped together. We are not sure that Dr. Beattie is right in his statement that Campbell was, at this period of his life, always temperate. They sat up till after one o'clock; and at that hour there seems no probability that they separated, as Somerville says, that about that hour Campbell became wildly merry--regarded it as a settled point that his poem was to make him a great man-fixed how and where he was to live; and his friend regarded him in all this as perfectly in earnest. "I told him," says Somerville, " that he had got a cross of the Spanish hidalgo in his character. Pride and hauteur shared largely in his composition. He would fire up at the remotest indications of an intentional slight or offense."

Never was a poem subjected to a severer ordeal than "The Pleasures of Hope," while yet in manuscript. Anderson insisted on the jealous correction of every line. The opening altogether dissatisfied him; and the publication was delayed till some happy hour of inspiration might supply something poetical enough for Anderson's scrupulous taste. His own character for discrimination was risked, as he had everywhere praised the poem; and Campbell was actually thrown into a fever by the perpetual efforts at correction imposed on him. At last the opening of the poem, as it at present stands, was hit upon. The original manuscript of the

Maxwell of Edinburgh. We trust that in future editions of The Pleasures of Hope" such variations as the manuscript presents may be communicated to the public.

The poem was instantly successful, and it deserved its instant and great success. Its finished versification, in all probability, aided its immediate impression on the public mind more than it would, had it been published a few years after, when Scott had familiarized the lovers of poetry to the looser ballad rhymes in which his verse-romances were written. There was something in "The Pleasures of Hope" to delight every one: the leading topics of the day were seized on

the Slave Trade-the French Revolutionthe Partition of Poland--a number of unconnected pictures were united by a bond which the imagination recognized, and which the judgment did not repudiate; for, distinct as the objects of Hope are, Hope itself is sufficiently one to give a kind of unity to the subject--a unity greater than was felt sufficient for poetical purposes in the case of Akenside's and Rogers' poems. Campbell is said, late in life, to have shed tears when reading the poetry of Goldsmith; and in some of his earliest verses he gives him praise of a kind that shows with what delight he had read the Traveller and the Deserted Village. A stronger proof of this is his unconscious imitation of Goldsmith's forms of expression--his easy, idiomatic style in the description of the familiar scenes of domestic life--and the very cadence of his verses. No young writer's style can be altogether his own; but through Campbell's style, while it is often an echo of Goldsmith's, and yet oftener of Darwin's, there is a distinguishing tone, in some respects superior to that of either. In Darwin everything peculiar is glaring picture or mere sound: where he is best, he is most unlike himself. Campbell, when he most reminds us of Darwin, is yet sure to relieve us from the intolerable glare by some appeal to the heart and mind. There is in Darwin a strange confusion, as if sounds were addressed to the eye and colors to the ear, and in all this dealing with the human mind, as influenced through the senses alone, he does not succeed in either producing music or picture. In Goldsmith we sometimes find repose, and almost languor, where you look for elevation. Campbell, though he can scarcely be said to have the exquisite graces of Goldsmith, even in his happiest passages, rarely allows the spirit of his reader to flag. Open any where "The

These lines surely were the effect of Goldsmith's lines still echoing on the young poet's dreaming ear:

"The slow canal, the yellow-blossomed vale, The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sail," &c. We transcribe a few lines, without saying whether they are from Darwin or from Campbell. Those who have but a general recollection of both poems will, we think, find some difficulty in saying from which poem they are:

"Roll on, ye stars! exult in youthful prime; Mark with bright curves the printless steps of Time;

Near and more near your beamy cars ap-
proach,

And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach.
Flowers of the sky, ye too to age must yield,
Frail as your silken sisters of the field!

Star after star from heaven's high arch shall
rush;

Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,
Headlong, extinct, in one dark centre fall,
And death and night and chaos mingle all!
Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal nature lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,

And soars and shines another and the same."

The poem immediately introduced Campbell into whatever of literary society there was at Edinburgh. Burns was but three years dead; and the men who hailed the advent of Burns were still living, and disposed to welcome with honor the young poet. Each day increased the popularity of his poem-each day increased the circle of his acquaintances. The Edinburgh booksellers gave him so many new commissions, that there was considerable danger of his becoming little better than a provincial literary hack. The Edinburgh savans and their wives asked him to so many dinners and soirées, that he describes himself as fagged to death, and as unable to fulfill his engagements with the booksellers. He appears to have at once given up, and forever, all no

tions of studying medicine, which, when he came to Edinburgh, was among his purposes, to make his way to London. As his object was to obtain the means of livelihood among the booksellers, and as the profits of "The Pleasures of Hope" gave him the opportunity, he determined to ramble for a while through Germany, there to before visiting London. In June, 1800, he learn something of its language and literature went to Newhaven, and then to Leith, from which he and his brother passed over to Hamburgh. He was introduced to Klopstock, whom he describes as "a mild, civil, old man." "Our only intercourse was in Latin." He gave Klopstock a copy of the third edition of "The Pleasures of Hope," and Klopstock made his visit to Germany pleasant by giving him letters of introduction to his friends in other parts of Germany. He proceeded to Ratisbon; a letter to Anderson describes the scenery. We must make room for a sentence.

"The journey to Ratisbon was tedious, but not unpleasant. The general constituents of German scenery are corn-fields, many leagues in extent, and dark tracts of forests, equally extensive. Of this the eye soon becomes tired; but in a few favored spots there is such a union of wildness, variety, richness and beauty, as cannot be looked upon without lively emotions of pleasure and surprise. We entered the valley of Heitsch, on the frontier of Bavaria, late in the evening, after the sun had set behind the hills of Saxony. A winding road through a long woody plain leads to this retreat. It was some hours before we got across it, frequently losing our way in the innumerable heaths that intersect each other. At last the shades of the forest grew deeper and darker, till a sudden and steep descent seemed to carry us into another world. It was a total eclipse; but, like the valley of the shadow of the scene expanded into a broad, grassy glen, death, it was the path to paradise. Suddenly lighted from above by a full and beautiful moon. It united with all the wildness of a Scotch glen the verdure of an English garden. The steep hills on either side of our green pathway were covered with a luxuriant growth of trees, where millions of fire-flies flew like stars among the branches. Such enchantment could not be surpassed in Tempé itself. I would travel to the walls of China to feel again the wonder and delight that elevated my spirits when I first surveyed this enchanting scene. An incident apparently slight certainly heightened the effect produced by external beauty. While we gazed up to the ruined fortifications that stretched in military music sounded at a distance. bold broken piles across the ridge of the mountain, thousand Austrians, on their march to Bohemia, (where the French were expected to penetrate,) passed our carriage in a long broad line, and en

Five

camped in a wide plain at one extremity of the valley. As we proceeded on our way, the rear of their army, composed of red cloaks and Pandours, exhibited strange and picturesque groups, sleeping on the bare ground, with their horses tied to trees; whilst the sound of the Austrian trumpets died faintly away among the echoes of the hills."

In all Campbell's poetry there is nothing better-we had almost said nothing so good; and the incidents of actual war which he beheld are described with equal effect. He was hospitably received by the Benedictine Monks of the Scottish College of St. James. He describes the splendor and sublimity of the Catholic service, which he probably heard for the first time; and the Cathedral music at Ratisbon he speaks of as grand beyond conception.

"On the morning before the French entered Ratisbon, a solemn ceremony was held. The passage in the Latin service was singularly apropos to the fears of the inhabitants for siege and bombardment. The dreadful prophecy, Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem! thou shalt be made desolate,' was chanted by a loud single voice from one end of the long echoing Cathedral. A pause more expressive than any sound succeeded, and then the whole thunder of the organs, trumpets, and drums broke in. I never conceived that the terrific in music could be carried to such a pitch."

In the Benedictine Monastery of St. James's, young Scotchmen were educated for the Roman Catholic priesthood. Its revenues have declined, and the brotherhood, Dr. Beattie tells us, has latterly amounted but to six or seven individuals. They were strongly attached to the interests of the Stuarts; they had for the most part left Scotland at six or seven years of age, and every prejudice of religion and politics was carefully nourished. They and Campbell did not long continue friends. The Jacobite and the Jacobin cannot long hunt in couples. The monks had recommended Campbell to lodgings, where he was robbed by his host or his servants; and when he complained, the monks took part with the native against the stranger. Then came letters home from Campbell, describing the monks as "lazy, loathsome, ignorant, and ill-bred." He tells of one of them attacking him with the most blackguard scurrility, and this in their own refectory.

"I never," says Campbell, "found myself so carried away by indignation. I flew at the scoundrel, and would have rewarded his insolence had not the others interposed; but prevented as I

have been from proceeding to extremities, what I have done is punishable by law, and the wretch has malevolence enough to take advantage of my rashness. Oh, if I had him at the foot of John's Hill, I would pummel his carroty locks, and thrash him to the gates of purgatory! I saw him to-day. I was on the bridge along with him, and had grasped my yellow stick to answer his first salutation if he had dared to address me, but he slunk past without saying a word."

This scene would have been enough to have separated Campbell from the Scotch monks; but he also speaks of the conversation whenever he went there turning on politics, and with very ignorant men-and both Campbell and the monks were exceedingly ignorant of the actual springs of European politics-it is not surprising that a temper of disputativeness on both sides, which seems inseparable from the blood which both inherited, rendered all society, in any true sense of the word, impossible.

Campbell's pecuniary means now began to fail, and his letters evince increasing gloom; but his was a mind that the slightest gleam of sunshine was sufficient to cheer, and even for his gloom he had then an unfailing resource in the glorious faculty of imagination. An engagement to supply occasional poems to the Morning Chronicle, by which he earned some two guineas for each little copy of verses, makes him the happiest of men, and the very incidents that had almost overcome his spirit, and made his friends fear that melancholy might deepen into insanity, became the subject of his poems. The lines on leaving a scene in Bavaria, are evidence of this. Campbell took advantage of an armistice between Austria and France, to make several excursions into the interior, but when hostilities were renewed he became apprehensive of personal danger, and returned to Hamburgh. He settled for the winter months at Altona. From Altona his communications with the Morning Chronicle became frequent. Several of the poems which have been since collected into the authorized editions of his works, appeared for the first time in this form-many of them with his name, and some-for he began to fear that his name appearing too frequently in newspapers might injure his reputation—were printed without his name. Among the latter was "The Mariners of England," and we believe "The Exile of Erin." "Lochiel," and Hohenlinden," at an after period, were first Of published without the author's name. "The Exile of Erin," we have Campbell's own account of the origin:

"While tarrying at Hamburgh, I made acquaintance with some of the refugee Irishmen, who had been concerned in the rebellion of 1798. Among them was Anthony M'Cann, an honest, excellent man-who is still I believe alive-at least I left him in prosperous circumstances in Altona a few years ago. When I first knew him he was in a situation much the reverse; but Anthony commanded respect, whether he was rich or poor. It was in consequence of meeting him one evening on the banks of the Elbe, lonely and pensive at the thoughts of his situation, that I

wrote The Exile of Erin."."

The song is to an Irish air, to which more than one set of words had been written in Ireland resembling Campbell's in metre, and the general turn of the sentiment. It seems certain, that either among the Irish students at Glasgow, or with M'Cann and his associates, Campbell had fallen in with the air, and some one or other of these songs. One of these songs, which is said to have been written in 1792, begins with the words—

"Green were the fields, where my forefathers dwelt, oh

Erin mavourneen, slawn lath go bragh; Though our farm it was small, yet comforts we felt, oh

Erin mavourneen, slawn lath go bragh; At length came the day, when our lease did expire,

And fain would I live where before lived my

sire;

But oh, well a day, I was forced to retire,

Erin mavourneen, slawn lath go bragh."

Campbell's acquaintanceship with M'Cann and his other Irish friends was likely to lead him into trouble. Perhaps some feeling of this made him not solicitous to connect his name with the Exile of Erin." At Ratisbon he knew that his politics were more than suspected. In April he returned, via London, to his mother's, who had during his absence become a widow. While in London he made the acquaintance, chiefly through Perry, of Lord Holland, Mackintosh, Rogers, and others of that class. His stay was short. He returned by sea. A lady who travelled by the same vessel, startled him by the information that Campbell the poet had been arrested in London for high treason, was confined to the Tower, and expected to be executed. This was rather serious. Coming events cast their shadows before." When he got to his mother's, he found her alarmed by similar reports. He at once wrote to the Sheriff of Edinburgh, saying, that he would wait on him, to refute the calumny. Next

* Written in 1837-M'Cann is since dead.

morning he found the Sheriff disposed to deal kindly with him, but believing in his guilt. "Mr. Campbell, I wish you had not come to me; there is a warrant out against you for high treason; you are accused of conspiring with General Moreau in Austria, and with the Irish in Hamburgh, to get a French army landed in Ireland. Take my advice, and do not press yourself on my notice." Where are the proofs ?" "Oh, you attended Jacobin clubs in Hamburgh, and you came over from thence in the same vessel with Donovan, who commanded a regiment of rebels at Vinegar Hill." Campbell insisted on an investigation of the charges. His trunks had been seized at Leith-they were examined for documentary proofs of his treason; among his papers was found a copy of "Ye Mariners of England." This was not an hour to say more than was necessary of the authorship of the "Exile of Erin."

The Irish traitors after all were not treated with any great severity. Campbell tells Donovan's story, which, we dare say, was the story of dozens. At first, things looked bad enough. At Leith he was put into a post-chaise with a King's messenger, who humanely observed at every high post they passed on the road-"Look up, you Irish from which you will be dangling in a few rascal, and see the height of the gallows days."

6

་

"A twelvemonth after," says Campbell, “I met Donovan in London, and recognized my gaunt Irish friend, looking very dismal. Ha, Donovan, I wish you joy in getting out of the Tower, where, I was told, they had imprisoned you, and were likely to treat you like another Sir William Wallace. Och!' said he, good luck to the Tower; black was the day that I was turned out of it. Would that any one would get me into it for life. My stars! and were you not in confinement ?--Ne'er a bit of it. The Governinent allowed me a pound sterling a-day as a State prisoner. The Tower gaoler kept a glorious table; and he let me walk out where I liked all day long, pretty secure that I should return at meal times; and, then, he had a nice pretty daughter.'-'And don't you go and see her in the Tower ?'-Why, no, my dear fellow; the course of true love never yet ran smooth. I discovered that she had no money, and she found out that my Irish estates, and all I had told her of their being confiscated in the rebellion, was sheer blarney. So then your merciless Government_ordered me to be liberated as a State prisoner. I was turned adrift on the wide world, and glad to become a reporter to one of the newspapers.'

While Donovan was living comfortably in the Tower, Campbell was experiencing the