The Palace and Park by Phillips, Forbes, Latham, Owen, Scharf, and Shenton

[Born at Glasgow, 1777. Died at Boulogne, 1844. Aged 67.] The poetical career of Thomas Campbell began when he was twenty years old, and was completed before he was thirty-three. He wrote nothing subsequently to this age worthy of his fame. His earliest work, the “Pleasures of Hope,” composed in youth, at once established his claim to be ranked amongst the foremost poets of his time. It brimmed with promise; and not the least singular circumstance in connexion with Thomas Campbell’s life is, that the excessive expectation raised by his first appeal was never satisfactorily fulfilled. The poetic faculty burned in the “Pleasures of Hope,” which was full of melody, pathos, animated description, and impassioned sentiment. All needful ardour was there. There were also to be noted the faults of a youthful pen--redundancy of diction and incorrectness. Ten years after the “Pleasures of Hope” he published “Gertrude of Wyoming.” The impulsive quality was already subdued by elaborate art; and although extreme beauty and tenderness were here and there in the poem, correctness was still wanting. Your spirit was entranced with verses, than which, in the English language, you could find none better, simpler, and sweeter. Yet for one such verse that was borne away from “Gertrude of Wyoming” a hundred were forgotten which were not its peers. Campbell had momentary, true, intense conceptions, and fineness of fancy; he exhibited felicities of thought and expression that fastened instantly on every memory; his, too, was an ear of poetical sensibility to the music of language; but woe to the verse if his poetic utterance came not of an inspiration--by a seizing theme. “Ye Mariners of England,” “The Soldier’s Dream,” “The Battle of Hohenlinden,” constituted such themes, and these small poems of Campbell are consequently abiding treasures in the literature of the nation. [By E. H. Baily, R.A. Executed in 1827.]