The account of David's object—
'To further knowledge, silence vice,
And plant perpetual paradise,
When God had calmed the world.'
Of David's Sabbath—
''Twas then his thoughts self-conquest pruned,
And heavenly melancholy tuned,
To bless and bear the rest.'
One of David's themes—
'The multitudinous abyss,
Where secrecy remains in bliss,
And wisdom hides her skill.'
And, not to multiply instances to repletion, this stanza about gems—
'Of gems—their virtue and their price,
Which, hid in earth from man's device,
Their darts of lustre sheath;
The jasper of the master's stamp,
The topaz blazing like a lamp,
Among the mines beneath.'
Incoherence and extravagance we find here and there; but it is not the flutter of weakness, it is the fury of power: from the very stumble of the rushing steed, sparks are kindled. And, even as Baretti, when he read the Rambler, in Italy, thought within himself, If such are the lighter productions of the English mind, what must be the grander and sterner efforts of its genius? and formed, consequently, a strong desire to visit that country; so might he have reasoned, If such poems as 'David' issue from England's very madhouses, what must be the writings of its saner and nobler poetic souls? and thus might he, from the parallax of a Smart, have been able to rise toward the ideal altitudes of a Shakspeare or a Milton. Indeed, there are portions of the 'Song to David,' which a Milton or a Shakspeare has never surpassed. The blaze of the meteor often eclipses the light of
'The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.'