just as the execution is beautiful; so also is his supreme elevation of intellect, over

Greatness of bulk, or symmetry of parts.
Nothing again can be finer, than his subsequent preference of

The powers of genius and design,
over even the stupendous range

Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres.
He proceeds to ransack the stores of the mental and the moral world, as he had done the world of matter, and with a pen dipped in Hippocrene, opposes to the latter,

The charms of virtuous friendship, etc.
* * * * *
The candid blush
Of him who strives with fortune to be just.
* * * * *
All the mild majesty of private life.
The graceful tear that streams from others' woes.
"Why, Charles," said Sir John, "I am glad to find you the enthusiastic eulogist of the passage of which I suspected you were about to be the saucy censurer."

"Censure," replied I, "is perhaps too strong a term for any part especially the most admired part of this fine poem. I need not repeat the lines on which I was going to risk a slight observation; they live in the mind and memory of every lover of the Muses."

"I will read the next passage, however," said Sir John, "that I may be better able to controvert your criticism:

Look then abroad through nature to the range
Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres,
Wheeling unshaken through the void immense,
And speak, oh man! does the capacious scene
With half that kindling majesty dilate
Thy strong conception, as when Brutus rose
Refulgent from the stroke of Cæsar's fate
Amid the crowd of patriots, and his arm
Aloft extending, like eternal Jove
When guilt brings down the thunder, call'd aloud
On Tully's name, and shook his crimson steel,
And bade the father of his country hail;
For lo! the tyrant prostrate in the dust,
And Rome again is free?
"What a grand and powerful passage!" said Sir John.

"I acknowledge it," said I, "but is it as just as it is grand? Le vrai est le seul beau. Is it a fair and direct opposition between mind and matter? The poet could not have expressed the image more nobly, but might he not, out of the abundant treasures of his opulent mind have chosen it with more felicity? Is an act of murder, even of an usurper, as happily contrasted with the organization of matter, as the other beautiful instances I named, and which