These works have steadily extended his fame; and amid the truest enjoyment of that fame, Mr. Rogers has lived a long and honored, and, singularly for a poet, fortunate life. His wealth and position in society, not less than his wealth and position in the world of mind, have drawn around him all the distinguished characters of his time; and his house, filled from top to bottom with evidences of his taste, and of his means of indulging it, has been the resort of most of those who have given its intellectual stamp to the age. Amid the great struggles and events of that period, the wars, the revolutions, and the social contests which have communicated their fiery elements to the spirit of genius, and produced works of a like extreme character, the mind of Rogers, calm and self-balanced, has pursued its course, apparently uninfluenced by all that moved around him. With human nature, and human life in general, he sympathized; but the love of the true and beautiful in it has prevailed over the contagion of the vast and violent: he has dealt rather with the pure and touching incidents of existence, than with the passionate and the tragic. Many, on this account, have been disposed to attribute to him a want of power and greatness, forgetting that the predominating character of his taste has inevitably decided the character of his subjects, and that to these subjects he has given all the power and beauty which they were capable of. Mr. Rogers is a great master in his own department. In him taste lives as strongly as genius. He is a poetic artist. The beautiful and the refined mingle themselves with the structure as inseparably as with the material of his compositions. He knows that there is greatness in the broad champagne, with its woods and towns, as well as in the huge and splendid mountain; in the lofty but pure and placid sky, as well as in the stormy ocean. It is not the creator only of the Laocoon in all his agonies, that is a great artist—the Apollo Belvedere, and the Venus de Medicis, and the Mourning Psyche, calm in most perfect repose, or depressed with grief, equally demonstrate the hand of a master. There is often the most consummate display of genius in the stillest statue. Poussin or Claude are not the less admirable because they do not affect the robust horrors of Rubens, or the wildness of Salvator. In Rogers, the true, the pathetic, all those feelings, and sentiments, and associations, that are dear to us as life itself, are evolved with a skill that is unrivaled; and the language is elaborated to a perfection that resembles the finish of a beautiful picture, or the music to inimitable words. If we need the excitement of impetuous emotions, we would turn to Byron; if the influence of calm, and soothing, and harmonizing ones, we would sit down to Rogers. Each is eminent in his own department, each will exercise the supremacy of his genius upon us.
In the Pleasures of Memory we are forcibly reminded of Goldsmith and the Deserted Village. We feel how deeply the genius of that exquisite writer had affected the mind of Rogers in his youth. There is a striking similarity of style, of imagery, and of subject. It is not a deserted village, but a deserted mansion, which is described, and where we are led to sympathize with all that is picturesque in nature, and dear to the heart in domestic life.
"Mark yon old mansion peering through the trees,
Whose hollow turret woos the whistling breeze.
That casement, arched with ivy's brownest shade,
First to these eyes the light of heaven conveyed.
The moldering gateway shows the grass-grown court,
Once the calm scene of many a simple sport;
When nature pleased, for life itself was new,
And the heart promised what the fancy drew.