by the importunate, uninterrupted display of fancy and verbal tinsel as much as possible from the fatigue of thought or shock of feeling.  A poem is to resemble an exhibition of fireworks, with a continual explosion of quaint figures and devices, flash after flash, that surprise for the moment, and leave no trace of light or warmth behind them.  Or modern poetry in its retrograde progress comes at last to be constructed on the principles of the modern OPERA, where an attempt is made to gratify every sense at every instant, and where the understanding alone is insulted and the heart mocked.  It is in this view only that we can discover that Mr. Moore’s poetry is vitiated or immoral,—­it seduces the taste and enervates the imagination.  It creates a false standard of reference, and inverts or decompounds the natural order of association, in which objects strike the thoughts and feelings.  His is the poetry of the bath, of the toilette, of the saloon, of the fashionable world; not the poetry of nature, of the heart, or of human life.  He stunts and enfeebles equally the growth of the imagination and the affections, by not taking the seed of poetry and sowing it in the ground of truth, and letting it expand in the dew and rain, and shoot up to heaven,

  “And spread its sweet leaves to the air,
  Or dedicate its beauty to the sun,”—­

instead of which he anticipates and defeats his own object, by plucking flowers and blossoms from the stem, and setting them in the ground of idleness and folly—­or in the cap of his own vanity, where they soon wither and disappear, “dying or ere they sicken!” This is but a sort of child’s play, a short-sighted ambition.  In Milton we meet with many prosaic lines, either because the subject does not require raising or because they are necessary to connect the story, or serve as a relief to other passages—­there is not such a thing to be found in all Mr. Moore’s writings.  His volumes present us with “a perpetual feast of nectar’d sweets”—­but we cannot add,—­“where no crude surfeit reigns.”  He indeed cloys with sweetness; he obscures with splendour; he fatigues with gaiety.  We are stifled on beds of roses—­we literally lie “on the rack of restless ecstacy.”  His flowery fancy “looks so fair and smells so sweet, that the sense aches at it.”  His verse droops and languishes under a load of beauty, like a bough laden with fruit.  His gorgeous style is like “another morn risen on mid-noon.”  There is no passage that is not made up of blushing lines, no line that is not enriched with a sparkling metaphor, no image that is left unadorned with a double epithet—­all his verbs, nouns, adjectives, are equally glossy, smooth, and beautiful.  Every stanza is transparent with light, perfumed with odours, floating in liquid harmony, melting in luxurious, evanescent delights.  His Muse is never contented with an offering from one sense alone, but brings another rifled charm to match it, and revels in a fairy round