Not born, but made, by transmutation, Though Poet's trade, of all that I know, An obstacle to cutting dashes. For Gods and Goddesses, who traffic Have sworn they will not loan me, gratis, What then occurs? A lucky hit I've found a substitute for wit; 2 My tintinabulum of rhyming. The clock-work tintinabulum of rhyme. COWPER. On Homer's pinions mounting high, Beddoes (bless the good Doctor) has 3 I'll drink Pierian puddle dry. Pursuant to Mr. Pope's advice; 4 Sent me a bag full of his gas, This wondrous soul-transporting modification of matter is christened by chemists Gaseous oxyd of nitrogen, and, as will be apparent, from the following sublime stanzas, and my judicious comments thereon (in which I hold the microscope of criticism to those my peculiar beauties, which are not visible to the naked eye of common sense), is a subject worthy the serious attention of the poet and physiologist. Any half-formed witling,' as Pope says, (Essay on Criticism,) may hammer crude conceptions into a sort of measured nonsense, vulgarly called 'prose bewitched.' But the daring mortal, who aspires to build with lofty rhyme' an Ævi Monumentum, before he sets about the mighty enterprise, must be filled with a sort of incompre With which a brother bard, inflated, Was so stupendously elated, hensible quiddam of divine inflation. Then, if he can keep clear of Bedlam, and be allowed the use of pen, ink, and paper, every line he scribles, and every phrase he utters, will be a miracle of sublimity. Thus one Miss Sibyl remained stupid as a barber's block, till overpowered by the overbearing influence of Phœbus. But when - ea fræna furenti Concutit, et stimulos sub pectore vertit Apollo; the frantic gipsey muttered responses at once sublime, prophetic, and unintelligible. Indeed this furor mentis, so necessary an ingredient in the composition of the genuine poet, sometimes terminates in real madness, as was unfortunately the case with Collins and Smart: Swift, Johnson, and Cowper, were not without dismal apprehensions of a similar fate. The wight, therefore, who wishes to secure to himself a sublunary immortality by dint of poetizing, and happens not to be Poeta Nascitur, must, like Doctor Caustic, in the present instance, seek a sort of cow-pocklike substitute for that legitimate rabies, which characterises the true sons of Apollo. Although my own experiments with Dr. Beddoes's sublimating gas would not warrant me in D2 He tower'd, like Garnerin's balloon, pronouncing it superior to the genuine, freshimported waters of Helicon, still I have no doubt but a person possessed, as Dr. Darwin expresses it, of a Temperament of increased irritability," or, as Dr. Brown would have it, whose animal machine was accommodated with a smaller quantity of 'Excitability,' might receive astonishing benefits from the stimulus of this gaseous oxyd of nitrogene. Mature deliberation and sedulous investigation of this important subject have led me to conclude, that the benefits which result from inhaling this gas, have been more widely diffused than has been generally imagined, and not at all confined to those persons in whom it produced the singular effects detailed by Dr. Beddoes, in his ingenious pamphlet on a certain windy institution, entitled, Notice,' &c. Most of the sublime speculations of our modern System-Mongers, from Doctor Burnet, who encompassed the earth with a crust, like the shell of a tortoise, and which, being unfortunately fractured, produced a Noah's flood, to Dr. Darwin, with his omnia e conchis,' have arisen from immoderate potations of this bewildering gas. But scarce had breath'd three times before he Strange things he saw, and those who know him 5 Was hous'd in heaven's high upper story. Brother Southey then made the important discovery that the atmosphere of the highest of all 'possible heavens was composed of this gas.' Beddoes's Notice. 6 Have said that, in his Epic Poem, The same poem to which the gentleman alludes in his huge quarto edition of Joan of Arc, in the words following-Liberal criticisın I shall attend ⚫ to, and I hope to profit by, in the execution of ، my MADOC, an epic poem on the discovery of ، America, by that Prince, on which I am now en، gaged.' As liberal criticism appears a great desideratum with this sublime poet, I trust he will gratefully acknowledge the specimen of my liberality towards a worthy brother in my 4th canto. |