128 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 



ear compare Percival s specimens with those in the same 

 kind of Coleridge, who had the finest metrical sense since 

 Milton. We take this very experimenting to be a sufficient 

 proof that Percival s faculty, such as it was and we do not 

 rate it highly was artificial, and not innate. The true 

 poet is much rather experimented upon by life and nature, 

 by joy and sorrow, by beauty and defect, till it be found 

 out whether he have any hidden music in him that can 

 sing them into an accord with the eternal harmony which 

 we call God. 



It is easy to trace the literary influences to which the 

 mind of Percival was in turn subjected. Early in life we 

 find a taint of Byronism, which indeed does not wholly 

 disappear to the last. There is among his poems &quot; An 

 Imprecation,&quot; of which a single stanza will suffice as a 

 specimen : 



&quot; Wrapped iu sheets of gory lightning, 

 While cursed night-hags ring thy knell, 

 May the arm of vengeance bright ning, 

 O er thee wave the sword of hell ! &quot; 



If we could fancy Laura Matilda shut up tipsy in the watch- 

 house, we might suppose her capable of this melodious substi 

 tute for swearing. We confess that we cannot read it without 

 laughing, after learning from Mr. Ward that its Salmoneus- 

 thunderbolts were launched at the comfortable little city of 

 Hartford, because the poet fancied that the inhabitants 

 thereof did riot like him or his verses so much as he himself 

 did. There is something deliciously ludicrous in the concep 

 tion of night-hags ringing the orthodox bell of the Second 

 Congregational or First Baptist Meeting-house to summon 

 the parishioners to witness these fatal consequences of not 

 reading Percival s poems. Nothing less than the fear of 

 some such catastrophe could compel the perusal of the 

 greater part of them. Next to Byron comes Moore, whose 

 cloying sentimentalism and too facile melody are recalled 

 by the subject and treatment of very many of the shorter 

 lyrics of Percival. In &quot; Prometheus &quot; it is bhelley who is 



