POCITy.

'POETRY is not much read nowadays, yet it is published as fast as ever. Though the demand is lessened, the supply continues as before; and it will be some time, probably, before the production shall adjust itself to the consumption. This age is too Utilitarian for poetry. A great mathematican once expressed his contempt for it, "because it did not prove any thin"." The world—the English world, at least—cares little for it from a similar feeling. Poetry is the pastime of minds at leisure, and disengaged, in some 'sort, from the toils and struggles of overplay existence. But where are such minds ? The bulk of the people, of almost all 'classes, are striving to wrest from each other the means of sub- sistence, or engrossed with the mighty interests involved in the political warfare of the day. In hearts so engaged there are no :responsive chords which can be struck by the hand of the pcet; or, if' there are, they differ from those with which poetry has usually been conversant. This is the age fur an ELLIOT, whose powerful abut gloomy strains find an echo in many a toil-worn bosom; and while they inspire mutual love, firmness, and resignation, in bear- ing inevitable suffering, also rouse the flame of indignation against those that " grind the faces of the poor." It is an age, too, favour- able to the popularity of CRABBE, whose pictures, dark as they are, of the real state of rural life in England, arc now contemplated 'with an awakened interest which was but slightly felt when they were first given to the world. The thoughts of all men, in short, are now so much engaged on matters of grave import, that they have little care to bestow on the playthings of the imagination. Even in their "hours of ease," when they resort to poetry and fic- tion, they find the amusements of those regions insipid, unless :their attention is excited by strong and satirical pictures of life and manners, or their hearts are stirred by moving incidents and scenes of intense passion. It is because it is thus that the tales of SCOTT and the poems of BYRON act upon their readers, that these pro- ductions preserve their popularity.

Among the multitudinous poems which continue to issue from the press, there are many of considerable merit, which would have been received with distinction in a more poetical age; and many, of inferior ability, which, however, once might have met with a -tolerable reception. We are sorry for the authors of the former :class of these productions, for their recompense, we fear, will be sadly disproportioned to their deserts: as to mediocre poetry, it is a thing endured neither by gods nor men, and the sooner its pro- ducers find it necessary to give up so useless a calling the better. Thus much by way of proem : let us now to business. And we twill begin with

MUNDI TIT CORDIS CARMINA.

Mr.WADE'S volume, notwithstanding its pedantic title, contains many elegant and some beautiful things. His poetry, however, is pot the outpouring of a passionate spirit, but consists of thoughts and fancies, ingeniously and elaborately worked up. Every thing, indeed, appears artificial,even,to the style, which is modelled upon the poetical phraseology of two centuries ago. In the use of this antiquated dialect Mr. WADE is certainly very happy. He has a facility and copiousness of diction which argue the utmost fami- liarity with the great old English poets; but it is impossible, without the appearance of affectation, for a writer of the nineteenth .century to use the language of the seventeenth. His intercourse with them, too, has affected his habits of thinking, the refinement and metaphysical subtlety of which frequently degenerate into obscurity and conceits. The volume is made up of sonnets and short poems on a great variety of subjects, and will be read with pleasure by those who still love poetry for its own sake. Our readers, we think, will be pleased with a couple of specimens. There is considerable feeling and great delicacy of expression in the following sonnet.

TO HER LOVER.

" I am most wreched, dear, to see you merry; Smiling, and raising smiles on others' cheeks ; Whilst with a sad face in my heart I bury

A passionate love for thee, which almost breaks My spirit with its great power ; to hear you laugh And jest amid the free and empty-hearted, And gather seeming pleasure from all eyes, When from within me path all sense departed

Of joy, save that which in your fondness lies;

And bliss from thine eyes only can I quaff. My heart is eaten by its inward sighs, For all thy gentle vows seem mockeries ; But even then thine eyes to mine will turn

With a soft-lighted love that cannot falsely burn I"

The following is a piece of rich and highly-wrought description.

THE SliATUE.

She lieth bare, in unveil'd loveliness, Yet nothing naked ; for the perfect charm Of beauty and of symmetry doth dress Her figure in a raiment bright and warm—

A garb most spiritual, which doth repress The sensual eye of sense : with one fair arm

She leaneth on a pillow, softly sinking, And her sweet face upturns to some voluptuous thinking.

The other, bending with a rainbow grace, Plays with the hindmost tresses of her hair,

Over her shoulder. Oh ! that love-toned face !

It beams a passionate pleasure on the air, And makes us crave some silent dwelling-place, To gaze and live on it fur ever there! A Ince-thought stirs her mouth ; and o'er her eyes Appeals the memory of a thousand sights.

Her nett swell'd bosom, toward her white couch turn'd, Spell takes the eyelids; and her limbs, extended

In animate perferthm, are ID all the harmony of structure blended,

Pressing rash other's beauty : there 'bath burn'd A dream of rite about her, which bath ended ; And now she Itothes reposing from tilt visian, And from love's dream to love inviting soft transition.

HAROLD DE B R IT ikf Is a sort of drama, or series of dialogues, modelled after the form of livenst's Manfred, and of which BYRON is the subject. The characters are BYRON hilliself, Me. SHELLEY, and the Canines: GetectoLl, nudes the names of Harold de Burnt), Percy, and Teresa ; with two allegorical personages, BYRONS G0011 and Evil Genius, and a hermit. " The especial object of the undertaking," the au her tells " has been to de- velop what I conceive I. be the true elm' act:,r of the men ; and to dispel, as far as might be within my pe,s bility, that fantastical one which has shown itsslf amid t the tnagnitlyitig haze of popular credulity, and which, like the giant phantom of the Hartz, is but a distended shadow of him ho :lave it being." But those who wish to hum an e.e invite of Byttosis true eharacter will seek it in his own we itiugs, and ill the plainest and most unvarnished history that can lie found of the occurrences of his life, astl not in a work in which his opinions awl seistinient:, his virtues and fail- ings, are exhibited through the medium of poetry and fiction. The plan of the wo.k, theretbre, is abortive as to its "especial object;" and if we look upon it as a dramatic• poem, its subject is faulty in the extreme. There is, however, coasiderible beauty in I he exe- cution of this work, which is evidently the production of a vigo- rous and cultivated mind.

PAR ACE LSUs.

The obvious scheme of this poem is to indicate the biography of PARACELSUS, by representing hint in the leading events of his life; which, fur diiimatic convenience, tire arranged under five divisions. In the first scene or sectioa, the founder of modern chemistry and the impudent but accomplished quack appears, resolved to throw himself upon the world. The advice and entreaties of his friend and fellow student Festus, and the tears of Michel his friend's-betrothed, are vain: he feels himself driven by an inward impulse to achieve gleattiess, though he has no definite idea of his object or his means. Fourteen years have passed at the opening of the second scene, and Paracelsus is discovered at Constantinople in the house of the Greek from whom Ile was fabled to have hutted the secret of the tincture of Trisme- gistus. Here lie encounters Aprile,—a person who to the unsenti- mental reader will merely appear a mad poet crazed for love, or rather for the want of love ; and, after a long and uninteresting colloquy bstween the two, the scene closes. Ail interval of seven years more elapses, and the third act discovers Paracelsus at Basil, in the height of his celebrity, when Europe rang with the fame of his cures, and whcu the lectures of rival professors were deserted for those of the man who was supposed to possess the secrets of the philosopher's stone and of the elixir vitas. By his own desire, Festus has paid him a visit; and to hint lie unfolds, in a familiar though mucking dialogue, the di appointment of the high aspirations with which he started in life; and his general scorn of mankind; he even hints at his non-possession of the su- pernattnal powers ascribed to him. The fourth act shows him ignominiously discarded from Basil, yet with a doubtful reputa- tion still clinging to him, and still nursing thoughts of high em- prize ; but he is shaken by hearieg of the death of' his friend's wife, and at once repudiates the life-preserving power with which ignorance had invested him- " I have no julep, as they think,

To cheat the grave."

The next act occurs after a lapse of thirteen years: the scene is the hospital at Saltzburg; the persons are again Festus and Paracelsus; the incident is the alchemist's death.

The defect in the structure of this poem is palpable: there is neither action nor incident, scarcely even a story to excite the at- tention of the reader. Of this the author seems to be in some sort conscious; stating that lie has "endeavoured to write a poems not a drama, and to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phcenomenon of' the mind or of the passions by the operations of persons and events; and that instead of basin" recourse fo an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis he desired to produce, he has ventured to dis- play somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and has suffered the agency by which it is influenced and dein. mined to be generally discernible in its effects alone." But admit- ting all this to have been designed, the design may still be very injudicious : for the form of dialogue precludes those descriptions and digressions by which the author in a narrative poem can vary his subjects and "interchange delights;" whilst the fundamental plan renders the whole piece a virtual soliloquy, each person of the drama speaking up to Paracelsus, in order to elicit his feelings, thoughts, or opinions. For these reasons, we conceive that such a poem contains in its structure the elements of tediousness, which no execution could obviate; and, unfortunately, the execution of Paracelsus is not of a nature to overcome difficulties. Evidences of mental power, perhaps of poetical talent, are visible throughout; but there is no nice conception and development of character, nothing peculiar or striking in the thoughts, whilst the language in which they are clothed gives them an air of mystical or dreamy vagueness. One reason of this is clear enough: "the poem had not been imagined six months ago,”—a space of time much too short to mature the design of so difficult a subject and to write some four thousand lines. Another probably is, that the author was labour- ing with an idea which he had not distinctly conceived, or which at least he has not been able to evolve. From some scattered passages, and a word or two printed in capital letters, Paracelsus seems to have been designed for a sceptico-philosophical poem, in which the nothingness of human science and human affections— the vanity of striving to know or of seeking to love—should have been shown by examples. Paracelsus exhibiting the unattain- ableness of knowledge, Aprile that of love. Treated in the method of our author, such a design might have tasked the genius of BYRON; who would, after all, have pointed a false moral. The true human philosophy is materialism,—to limit our notions of earthly happiness to our present existence, rendering invention and thought subordinate to mundane advantages, and quietly dis- missing the more occult mysteries of nature, as things beyond our comprehension, and which as we cannot learn it is unnecessary for us to know. Those who would penetrate beyond this world, and investigate the origin of material things, or the essence of psychological nature, must not dream in science, but repose on faith. Nor is this opinion heretical. The Devil could find no better way of commencing temptation, than by exciting wonder and speculative discontent.

" Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires,"

are the means by which evil was introduced into Eden, and by which it still flourishes on earth.

THE STORY OF JUSTIN MARTYR.

The character of this collection of occasional poems may be said to belong to the first class of poetical merit pointed at in the intro- ductory remarks. Mr. TRENCH possesses a well-cultivated and ob- serving mind ; a love for and a general perception of the beauties of nature; a correctly attuned ear ; and, if not a thorough mastery, yet a full command of language. On the other hand, there is nothing very original in his mode of seeing or thinking ; his matter is spread over too wide a surface ; and his style is deficient in concentration and energy. The poems, however, may be read with pleasure by those who have time on their hands ; for their variety will prevent weariness, and they breathe for the most part a chastened and subdued spirit, looking as if they were the pro- ducts of a mind which had once pursued vain wisdom, like Para- celsus, but had wisely retired from the pursuit, having, happier than Aprile, learned to love.