answers all the inferences from his doctrine unfavourable to human improvement, and reduces the “Essay on Population” to a commentary illustrative of the unanswerableness of “Political Justice".), calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph.  Our works of fiction and poetry have been overshadowed by the same infectious gloom.  But mankind appear to me to be emerging from their trance.  I am aware, methinks, of a slow, gradual, silent change.  In that belief I have composed the following Poem.

I do not presume to enter into competition with our greatest contemporary Poets.  Yet I am unwilling to tread in the footsteps of any who have preceded me.  I have sought to avoid the imitation of any style of language or versification peculiar to the original minds of which it is the character; designing that, even if what I have produced be worthless, it should still be properly my own.  Nor have I permitted any system relating to mere words to divert the attention of the reader, from whatever interest I may have succeeded in creating, to my own ingenuity in contriving to disgust them according to the rules of criticism.  I have simply clothed my thoughts in what appeared to me the most obvious and appropriate language.  A person familiar with nature, and with the most celebrated productions of the human mind, can scarcely err in following the instinct, with respect to selection of language, produced by that familiarity.

There is an education peculiarly fitted for a Poet, without which genius and sensibility can hardly fill the circle of their capacities.  No education, indeed, can entitle to this appellation a dull and unobservant mind, or one, though neither dull nor unobservant, in which the channels of communication between thought and expression have been obstructed or closed.  How far it is my fortune to belong to either of the latter classes I cannot know.  I aspire to be something better.  The circumstances of my accidental education have been favourable to this ambition.  I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and the sea, and the solitude of forests:  Danger, which sports upon the brink of precipices, has been my playmate.  I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc.  I have been a wanderer among distant fields.  I have sailed down mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains.  I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change, amongst assembled multitudes of men.  I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war, cities and villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds.  I have conversed with living men of genius.  The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy,