ABSTRACT
Every eminent writer of poetry, good or bad, has been publishing within the last month, or is to publish shortly. Lord Byron’s pen is at work over a poem as yet nameless. Lucien Buonaparte has given the world his ‘Charlemagne.’ Scott has published his ‘Lord of the Isles,’ in six cantos, a beautiful and elegant poem; and Southey his ‘Roderick the last of the Goths.’ Wordsworth has printed ‘The Excursion,’ (a ponderous quarto of five hundred pages,) ‘being a portion of the intended poem entitled “The Recluse.” ’ What the length of this intended poem is to be, as the Grand Vizier said of the Turkish poet, ‘n’est connu qu’à Dieu et à M. Wordsworth.’1 This forerunner, however, is, to say no more, almost as long as it is dull; not but that there are many striking and beautiful passages interspersed; but who would wade through a poem
—where, perhaps, one beauty shines In the dry desert of a thousand lines?
