are in the most perfect and delightful keeping.  But still there are no passages in this exquisite little production of sportive ease and fancy, equal to the best of those in the Seasons.  Warton, in his Essay on Pope, was the first to point out and do justice to some of these; for instance, to the description of the effects of the contagion among our ships at Carthagena—­“of the frequent corse heard nightly plunged amid the sullen waves,” and to the description of the pilgrims lost in the deserts of Arabia.  This last passage, profound and striking as it is, is not free from those faults of style which I have already noticed.

“------Breath’d hot
From all the boundless furnace of the sky,
And the wide-glitt’ring waste of burning sand,
A suffocating wind the pilgrim smites
With instant death.   Patient of thirst and toil,
Son of the desert, ev’n the camel feels
Shot through his wither’d heart the fiery blast. 
Or from the black-red ether, bursting broad,
Sallies the sudden whirlwind.   Straight the sands,
Commov’d around, in gath’ring eddies play;
Nearer and nearer still they dark’ning come,
Till with the gen’ral all-involving storm
Swept up, the whole continuous wilds arise,
And by their noon-day fount dejected thrown,
Or sunk at night in sad disastrous sleep,
Beneath descending hills the caravan
Is buried deep.   In Cairo’s crowded streets,
Th’ impatient merchant, wond’ring, waits in vain;
And Mecca saddens at the long delay.”

There are other passages of equal beauty with these; such as that of the hunted stag, followed by “the inhuman rout,”

“------That from the shady depth
Expel him, circling through his ev’ry shift. 
He sweeps the forest oft, and sobbing sees
The glades mild op’ning to the golden day,
Where in kind contest with his butting friends
He wont to struggle, or his loves enjoy.”

The whole of the description of the frozen zone, in the Winter, is perhaps even finer and more thoroughly felt, as being done from early associations, than that of the torrid zone in his Summer.  Any thing more beautiful than the following account of the Siberian exiles is, I think, hardly to be found in the whole range of poetry.

      “There through the prison of unbounded wilds,
      Barr’d by the hand of nature from escape,
      Wide roams the Russian exile.  Nought around
      Strikes his sad eye but deserts lost in snow,
      And heavy-loaded groves, and solid floods,
      That stretch athwart the solitary vast
      Their icy horrors to the frozen main;
      And cheerless towns far distant, never bless’d,
      Save when its annual course the caravan
      Bends to the golden coast of rich Cathay,
      With news of human kind.”

The feeling of loneliness, of distance, of lingering, slow-revolving years of pining expectation, of desolation within and without the heart, was never more finely expressed than it is here.

The account which follows of the employments of the Polar night—­of the journeys of the natives by moonlight, drawn by rein-deer, and of the return of spring in Lapland—­