Gray, and Akenside. Deficient in thought and passion, in creative power,
and copious imagination, he is strong in sentiment, in mild tenderness,
and in delicate description of nature. Whatever become of his Essay on
Truth, or even of his less elaborate and more pleasing Essays on Music,
Imagination, and Dreams, the world can never, at any stage of its
advancement, forget to read and admire the "Minstrel" and the "Hermit,"
or to cherish the memory of their warm-hearted and sorely-tried author.

We now bid the author of the "Minstrel" farewell! We love to think of
him wandering in youth through the black plantations of firs, which
border on his birthplace, or climbing grey Garvock Hill, and fixing his
dark pensive eyes on the distant white sails, hovering like rare wings
over the rounded blue-green German deep, or crossing those dreary moors
which lie between Stonehaven and Aberdeen, a solitary pedestrian, in
search of learning and distinction, in that noble old city--or teaching
his son to "consider the cresses of the garden 'how they grow,'" and to
find in them something worth a thousand homilies or elaborate arguments
for the being of a God--or taking his last look of the dead body of his
last son, Montague, and saying, "Now I have done with the world." He had
many of the powers, all the virtues, and scarcely one of the faults
generally supposed to be connected with the character, mind, and
temperament of a poet.




BEATTIE'S POEMS.