Part 63

````Si stravolse cosi alcun del tutto

````Ma io nol vidi, ne credo che sia.”=

The tempest is thus described:=

```“But lo! around the marsh’lling clouds unite,

```Like thick battalions halting for the fight;

```The sun sinks back, the tempest spirits sweep

```Fierce through the air and flutter on the deep.

```Till from their caverns rush the maniac blasts,

```Tear the loose sails, and split the creaking masts,

```And the lash’d billows, rolling in a train,

```Rear their white heads, and race along the main”=

What, we should like to know, is the difference between the two operations which Mr. Robert Montgomery so accurately distinguishes from each other, the fierce sweeping of the tempest-spirits through the air, and the rushing of the maniac blasts from their caverns? And why does the former operation end exactly when the latter commences?

We cannot stop over each of Mr. Robert Montgomery’s descriptions. We have a shipwrecked sailor, who “visions a viewless temple in the air”; a murderer who stands on a heath, “with ashy lips, in cold convulsion spread”; a pious man, to whom, as he lies in bed at night,=

```“The panorama of past life appears,

```Warms his pure mind, and melts it into tears”:=

a traveller, who loses his way, owing to the thickness of the “cloud-battalion,” and the want of “heaven-lamps, to beam their holy light.” We have a description of a convicted felon, stolen from that incomparable passage in Crabbe’s Borough, which has made many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child. We can, however, conscientiously declare that persons of the most excitable sensibility may safely venture upon Mr. Robert Montgomery’s version. Then we have the “poor, mindless, pale-faced maniac boy,” who=

`````“Rolls his vacant eye

```To greet the glowing fancies of the sky.”=

What are the glowing fancies of the sky? And what is the meaning of the two lines which almost immediately follow?=

```“A soulless thing, a spirit of the woods,

```He loves to commune with the fields and floods.”=

How can a soulless thing be a spirit? Then comes a panegyric on the Sunday. A baptism follows; after that a marriage: and we then proceed, in due course, to the visitation of the sick, and the burial of the dead.

Often as Death has been personified, Mr. Montgomery has found something new to say about him:=

```“O Death! thou dreadless vanquisher of earth,

```The Elements shrank blasted at thy birth!

```Careering round the world like tempest wind,

```Martyrs before, and victims strew’d behind

```Ages on ages cannot grapple thee,