and the solitude of perfumed meadows.--John Clare, swearing everlasting
fealty to his beauteous Mary, by the elm-shadowed cottage of her bowery
home; thanking heaven for the benison of love and rurality.--Richardson,
the poet of India, sonnetizing amidst the superb cupolas and temples
which gem the banks of the deified Ganges, longing to exchange his
fevered abode for salubrious England.--Pringle transforming the
repulsive features of a South African desert into matter for piteous
song; and illumining, by the brightness of his genius, the terrible
picture of Caffre barbarity and degradation.--Roscoe, revelling in the
sweets of Italian lore, his own lips "touched with a live coal" from the
altar of poesy.--Washington Irving, grasping at the intellect, and
speculating on the wit and fancy, of all climes; so speedily
transplanting himself (bodily as well as mentally) from the back woods
of America to the land of Columbus--from the vineyards of France to the
valleys of Yorkshire--as almost to induce a belief in his power of
ubiquity.--Allan Cunningham, sympathizing with the sorrows of one "who
never told her love," and weaving a tearful elegy over her flower-strewn
grave, or painting the fiercer incidents of piratical warfare, on the
ocean's solitudes.--Felicia Hemans, her lyre musically blending the song
of sounding streams with the spontaneous melody of the "feathered choir"
composing an epicedium to the memory of departed days, and proving her
glorious claims to the poetic character, "creation's heir."--Mary
Russell Mitford, great in her histrionic portraitures of liberty,
whether patrician or plebeian; yet not forgetting in her dramatic
wanderings, her happy village; but drawing us, "by the cords of love,"
to the rustic scene; amplifying that fine axiom of the Stratford bard--


"Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade
To shepherds, looking on their silly sheep,