126 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 



poetic temperament unballasted with those less obvious 

 qualities which make the poetic faculty. His verse carries 

 every inch of canvas that diction and sentiment can crowd, 

 but the craft is cranky, and we miss that deep-grasping 

 keel of reason which alone can steady and give direction. 

 His mind drifts, too waterlogged to answer the helm, and 

 in his longer poems, like &quot; Prometheus,&quot; half the voyage is 

 spent in trying to make up for a lee-way which becomes at 

 last irretrievable. If he had a port in view when he set 

 out, he seems soon to give up all hope of ever reaching it ; 

 and whenever we open the log-book, we find him running 

 for nowhere in particular, as the wind happens to lead, or 

 lying-to in the merest gale of verbiage. The truth is, that 

 Percival was led to the writing of verse by a sentimental 

 desire of the mind, and not by that concurring instinct of 

 all the faculties which is a self-forgetting passion of the 

 entire man. Too excitable to possess his subject fully, as a 

 man of mere talent may often do, he is not possessed by it 

 as the man of genius is, and seems helplessly striving, the 

 greater part of the time, to make out what, in the name of 

 common or uncommon sense, he is after. With all the 

 stock properties of verse whirling and dancing about his 

 ears puffed out to an empty show of life, the reader of 

 much of his blank verse feels as if a mob of well-draperied 

 clothes-lines were rioting about him in all the unwilling 

 ecstasy of a thunder-gust. 



Percival living from 1795 to 1856, arrived at manhood 

 just as the last war with England had come to end. Poor, 

 shy, and proud, there is nothing in his earlier years that 

 might not be paralleled in those of hundreds of sensitive 

 boys who gradually get the nonsense shaken out of them in 

 the rough school of life. The length of the schooling need 

 ful in his case is what makes it peculiar. Not till after he 

 was fifty, if even then, did he learn that the world never 

 takes a man at his own valuation, and never pays money 

 for what it does not want, or think it wants. It did not 

 want his poetry, simply ~ because it was not, is not, and by 

 no conceivable power of argument can be made, interesting 



