182 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMFS GATES PERCIVAL. 



watch-house, we might suppose her capable of this me- 

 lodious substitute 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 not like him or 

 his verses so much as he himself did. There is some- 

 thing deliciously ludicrous in the conception of night- 

 hags ringing the orthodox bell of the Second Congrega- 

 tional 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 " Prometheus" it is 

 Shelley who is paramount for the time, and Shelley at 

 his worst period, before his unwieldy abundance of 

 incoherent words and images, that were merely words 

 and images without any meaning of real experience to 

 give them solidity, had been compressed in the stricter 

 moulds of thought and study. In the blank verse 

 again, we encounter Wordsworth's tone and sentiment. 

 These were no good models for Percival, who always 

 improvised, and who seems to have thought verse the 

 great distinction between poetry and prose. Percival 

 got nothing from Shelley but the fatal copiousness which 

 is his vice, nothing from Wordsworth but that tendency 

 to preach at every corner about a sympathy with nature 

 which is not his real distinction, and which becomes a 

 wearisome cant at second-hand. Shelley and Words- 

 worth are both stilted, though in different ways. Shel- 

 ley wreathed his stilts with flowers ; while Wordsworth, 

 protesting against the use of them as sinful, mounts his 



