“A loved bequest—­and I may half impart
  To those that feel the strong paternal tie,
  How like a new existence in his heart
  That living flow’r uprose beneath his eye,
  Dear as she was, from cherub infancy,
  From hours when she would round his garden play,
  To time when as the ripening years went by,
  Her lovely mind could culture well repay,
  And more engaging grew from pleasing day to day.

  “I may not paint those thousand infant charms
  (Unconscious fascination, undesign’d!)
  The orison repeated in his arms,
  For God to bless her sire and all mankind;
  The book, the bosom on his knee reclined,
  Or how sweet fairy-lore he heard her con
  (The play-mate ere the teacher of her mind)
  All uncompanion’d else her years had gone,
  Till now in Gertrude’s eyes their ninth blue summer shone.

  “And summer was the tide, and sweet the hour,
  When sire and daughter saw, with fleet descent,
  An Indian from his bark approach their bower,
  Of buskin’d limb and swarthy lineament;
  The red wild feathers on his brow were blent,
  And bracelets bound the arm that help’d to light
  A boy, who seem’d, as he beside him went,
  Of Christian vesture and complexion bright,
  Led by his dusty guide, like morning brought by night.”

In the foregoing stanzas we particularly admire the line—­

  “Till now in Gertrude’s eyes their ninth blue summer shone.”

It appears to us like the ecstatic union of natural beauty and poetic fancy, and in its playful sublimity resembles the azure canopy mirrored in the smiling waters, bright, liquid, serene, heavenly!  A great outcry, we know, has prevailed for some time past against poetic diction and affected conceits, and, to a certain degree, we go along with it; but this must not prevent us from feeling the thrill of pleasure when we see beauty linked to beauty, like kindred flame to flame, or from applauding the voluptuous fancy that raises and adorns the fairy fabric of thought, that nature has begun!  Pleasure is “scattered in stray-gifts o’er the earth”—­beauty streaks the “famous poet’s page” in occasional lines of inconceivable brightness; and wherever this is the case, no splenetic censures or “jealous leer malign,” no idle theories or cold indifference should hinder us from greeting it with rapture.—­There are other parts of this poem equally delightful, in which there is a light startling as the red-bird’s wing; a perfume like that of the magnolia; a music like the murmuring of pathless woods or of the everlasting ocean.  We conceive, however, that Mr. Campbell excels chiefly in sentiment and imagery.  The story moves slow, and is mechanically conducted, and rather resembles a Scotch canal carried over lengthened aqueducts and with a number of locks in it, than one of those rivers that sweep in their majestic course, broad and full, over Transatlantic plains and lose themselves