LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 179 



with a lofty conception of the object and purposes of 

 poesy, he had neither the resolution nor the power 

 which might have enabled him to realize it. He offers 

 as striking an example as could be found of the poetic 

 temperament unballasted with those less obvious quali- 

 ties 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 " Prometheus," 

 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 wherever 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 man- 

 hood just as the last war with England had come to an 

 end. Poor, shy, and proud, there is nothing in his 

 earlier years that might not be paralleled in those of 



