practise as a physician, first at Hampstead, and afterwards in Bloomsbury Square, London, and he published several medical treatises. At Leyden he had formed an intimacy with a young Englishman of fortune, Jeremiah Dyson, Esq which ripened into a friendship of the most close and enthusiastic description: and Mr. Dyson-who was afterwards clerk of the House of Commons, a lord of the treasury, &c.-had the generosity to allow the poet £300 a year. After writing a few Odes, and attempting a total alteration of his great poemin which he was far from successful-Akenside made no further efforts at composition. In 1757, appeared the enlargement of the First Book of his Pleasures of Imagination,' of the Second Book in 1765, and a fragment of an intended Fourth Book was published after his death.

The society of the poet was courted for his taste, knowledge, and eloquence; but his solemn sententiousness of manner, his romantic ideas of liberty, and his unbounded admiration of the ancients, exposed him occasionally to ridicule. The physician in Peregrine Pickle,' who gives a feast in the manner of the ancients, is supposed to have been a caricature of Akenside. The description, for rich humour and grotesque combinations of learning and folly, has not been excelled by Smollett; but it was unworthy his talents to cast ridicule on a man of high character, learning, and genius. Akenside died suddenly of a putrid sore throat, on the 23d of June, 1770, in his 49th year, and was buried in St. James's Church. With a feeling common to poets, as to more ordinary mortals, Akenside, in his latter days, reverted with delight to his native landscape on the banks of the Tyne. In his fragment of a fourth book of the 'Pleasures of Imagination,' written in the last year of his life, there is the following beautiful passage :

O ye dales

Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands; where
Oft, as the giant flood obliquely strides,
And his banks open and his lawus extend,
Stops short the pleased traveller to view,
Presiding o'er the scene, some rustic tower
Founded by Norman or by Saxon hands!
O ye Northumbrian shades, which overlook
The rocky pavement and the mossy falls
Of solitary Wensbeck's limpid stream!
How gladly I recall your well-known seats
Beloved of old, and that delightful time
When all alone, for many a summer's day,
I wandered through your calm recesses, Jed
In silence by some powerful hand unseen.
Nor will I e'er forget you; nor shall e'er
The graver tasks of manhood, or the advice
Of vulgar wisdom, move me to disclaim
Those studies which possessed me in the dawn
Of life, and fixed the colour of my mind

For every future year: whence even now
From sleep I rescue the clear hours of morn,
And, while the world around lies overwhelmed
In idle darkness, am alive to thoughts

Of honourable fame, of truth divine
Or moral, aud of minds to virtue won

By the sweet magic of harmonious verse.

The spirit of Milton seems to speak in this strain of lofty egotism !* The Pleasures of Imagination' is a poem seldom read continuously, though its finer passages, by frequent quotation, particularly in works of criticism and moral philosophy, are well known. Gray censured the mixture of spurious philosophy-the speculations of Hutcheson and Shaftesbury-which the work contains. Plato, Lucretius, and even the papers by Addison in the Spectator,' were also laid under contribution by the studious author. He gathered sparks of enthusiasm from kindred minds, but the train was in his own. The pleasures which his poem professes to treat of, 'proceed,' he says, either from natural objects, as from a flourishing grove, a clear and murmuring fountain, a calm sea by moonlight, or from works of art, such as a noble edifice, a musical tune, a statue, a picture, a poem.' These, with the moral and intellectual objects arising from them, furnish abundant topics for illustration; but Akenside dealt chiefly with abstract subjects, pertaining more to philosophy than to poetry. He did not seek to graft upon them human interests and passions. In tracing the final causes of our emotions, he could have described their exercise and effects in scenes of ordinary pain or pleasure in the walks of real life. This does not seem, however, to have been the purpose of the poet, and hence his work is deficient in interest. He seldom stoops from the heights of philosophy and classic taste. He considered that physical science improved the charms of nature. Contrary to the feeling of another poet (Campbell) who repudiates these cold material laws,' he viewed the rainbow with additional pleasure after he had studied the Newtonian theory of lights and colours:

Nor ever yet

The melting rainsbow's vernal tinctured hues
To me have shone so pleasing, as when first
The hand of Science pointed out the path

In which the sunbeams gleaming from the west
Fall on the watery cloud, whose darksome veil
Involves the orient.

He

Akenside's Hymn to the Naiads' has the true classical spirit. had caught the manner and feeling, the varied pause and harmony, of the Greek poets, with such felicity that Lloyd considered his Hymn' as fitted to give a better idea of that form of composition, than could be conveyed by any translation of Homer or Callimachus.

Thus Milton in his Apology for Smectymnuus: Those morning haunts are where they should be, at home; not sleeping or concocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but up and stirring, in winter, often ere the sound of any bell awake men to labour, or to devotion in summer, aso t with the bird that first rouses, or not much tardier, to read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have its full fraught; then with useful and generous labours preserving the body's health and hardiness to render lightsome clear, and not lumpish, obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion, and our country's liberty. when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover their stations.' See also the fine passage ante,

Gray was an equally learned poet, perhaps superior: his knowledge was better digested But Gray had not the romantic enthusiasm of character, tinged with pedantry, which naturally belonged to Akenside. He had also the experience of mature years. The genius of Akenside was early developed, and his diffuse and florid descriptions seem the natural product--marvellous of its kind-of youthful exuberance. He was afterwards conscious of the defects of his poem. He saw that there was too much leaf for the frait; but in cutting off these luxuriances, he sacrificed some of the finest blossoms. Posterity has been more just to his fame, by almost wholly disregarding this second copy of his philosophical poem. In his youthful aspirations after moral and intellectual greatness and beauty, he seems like Jeremy Taylor in the pulpit, an angel newly descended from the visions of glory. In advanced years, he is the professor in his robes; still free from stain, but stately, formal, and severe. The blank verse of the 'Pleasures of Imagination' is free and well modulated, and seems to be distinctly his own. Though apt to run into too long periods, it has more compactness of structure than Thomson's ordinary composition. Its occasional want of perspicuity probably arises from the fineness of his distinctions, and the difficulty attending mental analysis in verse. He might also wish to avoid all vulgar and common expressions, and thus err from excessive refinement. A redundancy of ornament undoubtedly, in some passages, takes off from the clearness and prominence of his conceptions. His highest flights, however-as in the allusion to the death of Cæsar, and his exquisitely wrought parallel between art and nature-have a flow and energy of expression, with appropriate imagery, which mark the great poet. His style is chaste, yet elevated and musical. He never compromised his dignity, though he blended sweetness with its expression.

Aspirations after the Infinite.

Say, why was man so eminently raised
Amid the vast creation; why ordained

Through life and death to dart his piercing eye,
With thoughts beyond the limit of his frame;
But that the Omnipotent might send him forth
In sight of mortal and immortal powers,
As on a boundless theatre, to run
The great career of justice; to exalt
His generous aim to all diviner deeds;

To chase each partial purpose from his breast:
And through the mists of passion and of sense,
And through the tossing tide of chance and pain,
To hold his course unfaltering, while the voice
Of Truth and Virine, up the steep ascent
Of Nature, calls him to his high reward,
The applauding smile of Heaven?

Else wherefore burns

In mortal bosoms this unquenchèd hope,

That breathes from day to day sublimer things.

And mocks possession? wherefore darts the mind
With such resistless ardour to embrace

Majestic forms; impatient to be free,

Spurning the gross control of wilful might;
Proud of the strong contention of her toils;
Proud to be daring? who but rather turns
To Heaven's broad fire his unconstrained view,
Than to the glimmering of a waxen flame ?
Who that, from Alpine heights, his labouring eye
Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey

Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave

Through mountains, plains, through empires black with shade, And continents of sand, will turn his gaze

To mark the windings of a scanty rill

That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul
Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing
Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth
And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft
Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm;
Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens;
Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast.
Sweeps the long tract of day. Then high she soars
The blue profound, and, hovering round the sun,
Beholds him pouring the redundant stream
Of light; beholds his unrelenting sway
Bend the reluctant planets to absolve

The fated rounds of Time. Thence far effused,
She darts her swiftness up the long career
Of devious comets: through its burning signs
Exulting measures the perennial wheel
Of nature, and looks back on all the stars,
Whose blended light, as with a milky zone,
Invests the orient. Now, amazed she views
The empyreal waste, where happy spirits hold,
Beyond this concave heaven. their calm abode;
And field of radiance, whose unfading light
Has travelled the profound six thousand years,
Nor yet arrived in sight of mortal things.
Even on the barriers of the world, untired
She meditates the eternal depth below;
Till half-recoiling, down the headlong steep

She plunges; soon o'erwhelmed and swallowed up
In that Immense of being. There her hopes
Rest &t the fated goal. For from the birth
Of mortal man, the sovereign Maker said,
That not in humble nor in brief delight,
Not in the fading echoes of Renown,

Power's purple roses, nor Pleasure's flowery lap,
The soul should find enjoyment: but from these
Turning disdainful to an equal good,

Through all the ascent of things enlarge her view,
Till every bound at length should disappear,

And infinite perfection close the scene.

Patriotism.

Mind, mind alone-bear witness, earth and heaven -
The living fountains in itself contains

Of beauteous and sublime: here hand in hand

Sit paramount the Graces; here enthroned,
Celestial Venus, with divinest airs,

Invites the soul to never-fading joy.

Look, then, abroad throngn nature, to the range
Of planets, suns, aná adamantine spheres,
Wheeling unshaken through the void immense;

And speak, O man! does this capacious scene
With half that kindling majesty dilate

Thy strong conception, as when Brutus rose
Refulgent from the stroke of Cæsar's fate,
Amid the crowd of patriots; and his arm
Aloft extending, like eternal Jove,

When guilt brings down the thunder, called alond
On Tully's name, and shook his crimson steel,.
And bade the father of his country, hail !
For lo! the tyrant prostrate on the dust,
And Rome again is free! Is aught so fair
In all the dewy landscapes of the spring,
In the bright eye of Hesper, or the morn,
In Nature's fairest forms, is aught so fair
As virtuous friendship? as the candid blush
Of him who strives with fortune to be just?
The graceful tear that streams for others' woes,
Or the mild majesty of private life,

Where Peace, with ever-blooming olive, crowns
The gate; where Honour's liberal hands effuse
Unenvied treasures, and the snowy wings
Of Innocence and Love protect the scene.

Taste.

What, then, is taste, but these internal powers Active and strong, and feelingly alive

To each fine impulse? a discerning sense

Of decent and sublime, with quick disgust

From things deformed or disarranged, or gross

In species? This, nor gems nor stores of gold,
Nor purple state, nor culture can bestow;
But God alone, when first his active hand
Imprints the secret bias of the soul.

He, mighty Parent! wise and just in all,

Free as the vital breeze or light of heaven,

Reveals the charms of nature. Ask the swain]
Who journeys homeward from a summer day's
Long labour, why, forgetful of his toils

And due repose, he loiters to behold

The sunshine gleaming, as through amber clouds,

O'er all the western sky; ful soon, I ween,

His rude expression and untutored airs,

Beyond the power of language, will unfold

The form of beauty smiling at his heart,

How lovely! how commanding! But though heaven

In every breast hath sown these early seeds

Of love and admiration. yet in vain,

Without fair culture's kind parental aid,
Without enlivening suns, and genial showers,

And shelter from the blast, in vain we hope

The tender plant should rear its blooming head,
Or yield the harvest promised in its spring.
Nor yet will every soil with equal stores
Repay the tiller's labour; or attend
His will, obsequious, whether to produce
The olive or the laurel. Different minds
Incline to different objects: one pursues
The vast alone, the wonderful, the wild;
Another sighs for harmony and grace,

And gentlest beanty. Hence when lightning fires\
The arch of heaven, and thunders rock the ground;