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,