“------Of outward show
Elaborate; of inward less exact.”

There are painters who trust more to the setting of their pictures than to the truth of the likeness.  Mr. Campbell always seems to me to be thinking how his poetry will look when it comes to be hot-pressed on superfine wove paper, to have a disproportionate eye to points and commas, and dread of errors of the press.  He is so afraid of doing wrong, of making the smallest mistake, that he does little or nothing.  Lest he should wander irretrievably from the right path, he stands still.  He writes according to established etiquette.  He offers the Muses no violence.  If he lights upon a good thought, he immediately drops it for fear of spoiling a good thing.  When he launches a sentiment that you think will float him triumphantly for once to the bottom of the stanza, he stops short at the end of the first or second line, and stands shivering on the brink of beauty, afraid to trust himself to the fathomless abyss. Tutus nimium, timidusque procellarum.  His very circumspection betrays him.  The poet, as well as the woman, that deliberates, is undone.  He is much like a man whose heart fails him just as he is going up in a balloon, and who breaks his neck by flinging himself out of it when it is too late.  Mr. Campbell too often maims and mangles his ideas before they are full formed, to fit them to the Procustes’ bed of criticism; or strangles his intellectual offspring in the birth, lest they should come to an untimely end in the Edinburgh Review.  He plays the hypercritic on himself, and starves his genius to death from a needless apprehension of a plethora.  No writer who thinks habitually of the critics, either to tremble at their censures or set them at defiance, can write well.  It is the business of reviewers to watch poets, not of poets to watch reviewers.—­There is one admirable simile in this poem, of the European child brought by the sooty Indian in his hand, “like morning brought by night.”  The love-scenes in Gertrude of Wyoming breathe a balmy voluptuousness of sentiment; but they are generally broken off in the middle; they are like the scent of a bank of violets, faint and rich, which the gale suddenly conveys in a different direction.  Mr. Campbell is careful of his own reputation, and economical of the pleasures of his readers.  He treats them as the fox in the fable treated his guest the stork; or, to use his own expression, his fine things are

      “Like angels’ visits, few, and far between.” [10]

There is another fault in this poem, which is the mechanical structure of the fable.  The most striking events occur in the shape of antitheses.  The story is cut into the form of a parallelogram.  There is the same systematic alternation of good and evil, of violence and repose, that there is of light and shade in a picture.  The Indian, who is the chief agent in the interest of the poem, vanishes and returns after long intervals, like the periodical