The bliss of a perennial bloom."


Glancing back to the commencement of the nineteenth century, the only
_annual_ record of poetry and prose which we recollect, was "The
Flowers of Literature;" a thick duodecimo, habited in a flesh-coloured
wrapper, and retaining in its print and pages, the quaintness which
characterized "the good old days" of the "Universal Magazine;" and which
still clings, though somewhat modified, to the patriarchal pages of
Sylvanus Urban. The matter was in accordance with the manner--a medley of
prosing articles, from the titles of which we might select, as indicative
of their style, "Ode to Despair;" "Topographical Description of Paris;"
"The Sailor;" more agreeably interspersed with some effusion of Mrs.
Barbauld, or Mrs. Opie; mingled, again, with sundry "Observations on the
Present State of the War," written by some sleepy newspaper editor, whose
language we might assimilate with, "We have received intelligence from,"
&c. Here and there, perhaps, a straggling beam of genius broke through the
mental twilight, in the shape of, "Some Account of the poet, Burns;" a
_Rustique_ by Bloomfield, or an elegant sonnet by Bowles or Charlotte
Smith. The rest of would-be-sonneteers, tragedy-writers, and essayists,
have long ago found, with their mediocrities, a congenial oblivion in
"the tomb of all the Capulets."

But suddenly, and without much premise to warrant the commencement of such
an era, the department of our imaginative literature was established in
patronage and importance; and those "trivial, fond records," which were
wont only to sparkle a brief endurance in the mutable columns of a
newspaper, or doomed, when existing in fragile manuscript, "to die and be
forgot," found a refuge from their Lethean fate in the numerous Magazines
which the increased taste, and avidity for reading, evinced by the public,