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is its soul.5 With the passions of mankind — although it may modify them greatly — although it may exalt, or inflame, or purify, or control them — it would require little ingenuity to prove that it has no inevitable, and indeed no necessary co-existence. We have hitherto spoken of poetry in the abstract: we come now to speak of it in its everyday acceptation — that is to say, of the practical result arising from the sentiment we have considered.

      And now it appears evident, that since Poetry, in this new sense, is the practical result, expressed in language, of this Poetic Sentiment in certain individuals, the only proper method of testing the merits of a poem is by measuring its capabilities of exciting the Poetic Sentiments in others. And to this end we have many aids — in observation, in experience, in ethical analysis, and in the dictates of common sense. Hence the Poeta nascitur, which is indisputably true if we consider the Poetic Sentiment, becomes the merest of absurdities when we regard it in reference to the practical result. We do not hesitate to say that a man highly endowed with the powers of Causality — that is to say, a man of metaphysical acumen — will, even with a very deficient share of Ideality, compose a finer poem (if we test it, as we should, by its measure of exciting the Poetic Sentiment) than one who, without such metaphysical acumen, shall be gifted, in the most extraordinary degree, with the faculty of Ideality. For a poem is not the Poetic faculty, but the means of exciting it in mankind. Now these means the metaphysician may discover by analysis of their effects in other cases than his own, without even conceiving the nature of these effects — thus arriving at a result which the unaided Ideality of his competitor would be utterly unable, except by accident, to attain. It is more than possible that the man who, of all writers, living or dead, has been most successful in writing the purest of all poems — that is to say, poems which excite more purely, most exclusively, and most powerfully the imaginative faculties in men — owed his extraordinary and almost magical preeminence rather to metaphysical than poetical powers. We allude to the author of Christabel, of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and of Love — to Coleridge — whose head, if we mistake not its character, gave no great phrenological tokens of Ideality, while the organs of Causality and Comparison were most singularly developed.

      Perhaps at this particular moment there are no American poems held in so high estimation by our countrymen, as the poems of Drake, and of Halleck. The exertions of Mr. George Dearborn have no doubt a far greater share in creating this feeling than the lovers of literature for its own sake and spiritual uses would be willing to admit. We have indeed seldom seen more beautiful volumes than the volumes now before us. But an adventitious interest of a loftier nature — the interest of the living in the memory of the beloved dead — attaches itself to the few literary remains of Drake. The poems which are now given to us with his name are nineteen in number; and whether all, or whether even the best of his writings, it is our present purpose to speak of these alone, since upon this edition his poetical reputation to all time will most probably depend.

      It is only lately that we have read The Culprit Fay. This is a poem of six hundred and forty irregular lines, generally iambic, and divided into thirty-six stanzas, of unequal length. The scene of the narrative, as we ascertain from the single line,

      The moon looks down on old Cronest,

      is principally in the vicinity of West Point on the Hudson. The plot is as follows. An Ouphe, one of the race of Fairies, has “broken his vestal vow,”

      He has loved an earthly maid

       And left for her his woodland shade;

       He has lain upon her lip of dew,

       And sunned him in her eye of blue,

       Fann’d her cheek with his wing of air,

       Play’d with the ringlets of her hair,

       And, nestling on her snowy breast,

       Forgot the lily-kings behest-

      in short, he has broken Fairy-law in becoming enamored of a mortal. The result of this misdemeanor we could not express so well as the poet, and will therefore make use of the language put into the mouth of the Fairy-King who reprimands the criminal.

      Fairy! Fairy! list and mark,

       Thou hast broke thine elfin chain,

       Thy flame-wood lamp is quench’d and dark

       And thy wings are dyed with a deadly stain.

      The Ouphe being in this predicament, it has become necessary that his case and crime should be investigated by a jury of his fellows, and to this end the “shadowy tribes of air” are summoned by the “sentry elve” who has been awakened by the “wood-tick”— are summoned we say to the “elfin-court” at midnight to hear the doom of the Culprit Fay.

      “Had a stain been found on the earthly fair,” whose blandishments so bewildered the little Ouphe, his punishment would have been severe indeed. In such case he would have been (as we learn from the Fairy judge’s exposition of the criminal code,)

      Tied to the hornet’s shardy wings;

       Tossed on the pricks of nettles’ stings;

       Or seven long ages doomed to dwell

       With the lazy worm in the walnut shell;

       Or every night to writhe and bleed

       Beneath the tread of the centipede,

       Or bound in a cobweb dungeon dim

       His jailer a spider huge and grim,

       Amid the carrion bodies to lie

       Of the worm and the bug and the murdered fly-

      Fortunately, however, for the Culprit, his mistress is proved to be of “sinless mind” and under such redeeming circumstances the sentence is, mildly, as follows —

      Thou shalt seek the beach of sand

       Where the water bounds the elfin land,

       Thou shalt watch the oozy brine

       Till the sturgeon leaps in the bright moonshine,

       Then dart the glistening arch below,

       And catch a drop from his silver bow.

      If the spray-bead be won

       The stain of thy wing is washed away,

       But another errand must be done

       Ere thy crime be lost for aye;

       Thy flame-wood lamp is quenched and dark,

       Thou must re-illume its spark.

       Mount thy steed and spur him high

       To the heaven’s blue canopy,

       And when thou seest a shooting star

       Follow it fast and follow it far

       The last faint spark of its burning train

       Shall light the elfin lamp again.

      Upon this sin, and upon this sentence, depends the web of the narrative, which is now occupied with the elfin difficulties overcome by the Ouphe in washing away the stain of his wing, and re-illuming his flame-wood lamp. His soiled pinion having lost its power, he is under the necessity of wending his way on foot from the Elfin court upon Cronest to the river beach at its base. His path is encumbered at every step with “bog and briar,” with “brook and mire,” with “beds of tangled fern,” with “groves of night-shade,” and with the minor evils of ant and snake. Happily, however, a spotted toad coming in sight, our adventurer jumps upon her back, and “bridling her mouth with a silk-weed twist” bounds merrily along

      Till the mountain’s magic verge is past

       And the beach of sand is reached at last.

      Alighting now from his “courser-toad” the Ouphe folds his wings around his bosom, springs on a rock, breathes a prayer, throws his arms above his head,

      Then tosses a tiny curve in air

       And plunges in the waters blue.

      Here, however,

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