“The virtuous Marcia towers above her sex,”

is an instance of an artificial image to express a moral superiority.  But Solomon, it is probable, did not compare his beloved’s nose to a “tower” on account of its length, but of its symmetry; and making allowance for eastern hyperbole, and the difficulty of finding a discreet image for a female nose in nature, it is perhaps as good a figure as any other.

Art is not inferior to nature for poetical purposes.  What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob?  Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.  A Highlander’s plaid, a Mussulman’s turban, and a Roman toga, are more poetical than the tattooed or untattooed buttocks of a New Sandwich savage, although they were described by William Wordsworth himself like the “idiot in his glory.”

I have seen as many mountains as most men, and more fleets than the generality of landsmen; and, to my mind, a large convoy with a few sail of the line to conduct them is as noble and as poetical a prospect as all that inanimate nature can produce.  I prefer the “mast of some great ammiral,” with all its tackle, to the Scotch fir or the alpine tannen; and think that more poetry has been made out of it.  In what does the infinite superiority of “Falconer’s Shipwreck” over all other shipwrecks consist?  In his admirable application of the terms of his art; in a poet-sailor’s description of the sailor’s fate.  These very terms, by his application, make the strength and reality of his poem.  Why? because he was a poet, and in the hands of a poet, art will not be found less ornamental than nature.  It is precisely in general nature, and in stepping out of his element, that Falconer fails; where he digresses to speak of ancient Greece, and “such branches of learning.”

In Dyer’s Grongar Hill, upon which his fame rests, the very appearance of nature herself is moralised into an artificial image: 

  “Thus is nature’s vesture wrought,
  To instruct our wandering thought;
  Thus she dresses green and gay,
  To disperse our cares away.”

And here also we have the telescope; the misuse of which, from Milton, has rendered Mr. Bowles so triumphant over Mr. Campbell:—­

  “So we mistake the future’s face,
  Eyed through Hope’s deluding glass.”

And here a word en passant to Mr. Campbell:—­

  “As yon summits, soft and fair
  Clad in colours of the air,
  Which to those who journey near
  Barren, brown, and rough appear,
  Still we tread the same coarse way—­
  The present’s still a cloudy day.”

Is not this the original of the far-famed—­

  “’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
  And robes the mountain in its azure hue?”

To return once more to the sea.  Let any one look on the long wall of Malamocco, which curbs the Adriatic, and pronounce between the sea and its master.  Surely that Roman work (I mean Roman in conception and performance), which says to the ocean, “Thus far shalt thou come, and no further,” and is obeyed, is not less sublime and poetical than the angry waves which vainly break beneath it.