, in
The Grave
. They resemble each other in their want of a plot, a hinge, a "back-bone," both being collections of loosely-strung moral sketches, with no unity but that of spirit, as also in the homely force and boldness of the writing; and if Pollok in aught differ from Blair, it is partly in the length of his poem and its elaboration, and partly in that feverish, hectic heat, and that morbid intensity and fury of temperament, which are the sources of much of Pollok's strength, and of more of his weakness. No poem on any similar subject, in our time, can be named with Blair's, except perhaps Bryant's
Thanatopsis
. The moral tendency, however, and religious tone of the two poems are entirely different.
Thanatopsis
looks at the Grave solely in its physical and poetical aspects. It never mentions either the Resurrection or the Future State. An Indian would have coloured his poem on the sepulchre with finer and fierier lines, like the stamp of autumn on the fallen leaf. The main idea in it (an idea probably suggested by a line in
The Grave
—
"What is this world?
What but a spacious burial-place unwall'd?"