Distant and low, I can in thine see Him
Who looks upon thee from His glorious throne,
And mindes the Covenant ’twixt All and One.”
What a knot of the gray fathers!
“Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot!”
Our readers will see whence Campbell stole, and how he spoiled in the stealing (by omitting the word “youthful”), the well-known line in his “Rainbow”—
“How came the world’s gray fathers forth
To view the sacred sign.”
Campbell did not disdain to take this, and no one will say much against him, though it looks ill, occurring in a poem on the rainbow; but we cannot so easily forgive him for saying that “Vaughan is one of the harshest even of the inferior order of conceit, having some few scattered thoughts that meet our eye amidst his harsh pages, like wild flowers on a barren heath.”
“Rules and Lessons” is his longest and one of his best poems; but we must send our readers to the book itself, where they will find much to make them grateful to “The Silurist” and to Mr. Pickering, who has already done such good service for the best of our elder literature.