The purpose of the remarks given in the last Essay was chiefly to assist the Reader in separating truth and sincerity from falsehood and affectation; presuming that if the unction of a devout heart be wanting everything else is of no avail.  It was shewn that a current of just thought and feeling may flow under a surface of illustrative imagery so impure as to produce an effect the opposite of that which was intended.  Yet, though this fault may be carried to an intolerable degree, the Reader will have gathered that in our estimation it is not in kind the most offensive and injurious.  We have contrasted it in its excess with instances where the genuine current or vein was wholly wanting; where the thoughts and feelings had no vital union, but were artificially connected, or formally accumulated, in a manner that would imply discontinuity and feebleness of mind upon any occasion, but still more reprehensible here!

I will proceed to give milder examples not in this last kind but in the former; namely of failure from various causes where the ground-work is good.

    Take holy earth! all that my soul holds dear: 
    Take that best gift which Heaven so lately gave: 
    To Bristol’s fount I bore with trembling care,
    Her faded form.  She bow’d to taste the wave—­
    And died.  Does youth, does beauty read the line? 
    Does sympathetic fear their breasts alarm? 
    Speak, dead Maria! breathe a strain divine;
    Even from the grave thou shalt have power to charm. 
    Bid them in duty’s sphere as meekly move: 
    And if so fair, from vanity as free,
    As firm in friendship, and as fond in love;
    Tell them, tho ’tis an awful thing to die,
    (’Twas e’en to thee) yet, the dread path once trod;
    Heaven lifts its everlasting portals high,
    And bids ‘the pure in heart behold their God.’

This epitaph has much of what we have demanded; but it is debased in some instances by weakness of expression, in others by false prettiness.  ‘She bow’d to taste the wave, and died.’  The plain truth was, she drank the Bristol waters which failed to restore her, and her death soon followed; but the expression involves a multitude of petty occupations for the fancy.  ‘She bow’d’:  was there any truth in this? ’to taste the wave’:  the water of a mineral spring which must have been drunk out of a goblet.  Strange application of the word ‘wave’ and ‘died’:  This would have been a just expression if the water had killed her; but, as it is, the tender thought involved in the disappointment of a hope however faint is left unexpressed; and a shock of surprise is given, entertaining perhaps to a light fancy but to a steady mind unsatisfactory, because false.  ’Speak! dead Maria, breathe a strain divine’!  This sense flows nobly from the heart and the imagination; but perhaps it is not one of those impassioned thoughts which should be fixed in language upon a sepulchral