[Born at Glasgow, 1777. Died at Boulogne, 1844. Aged 67.]
The poetical career of Thomas Campbell began when he was twenty years
old, and was completed before he was thirty-three. He wrote nothing
subsequently to this age worthy of his fame. His earliest work, the
“Pleasures of Hope,” composed in youth, at once established his claim to
be ranked amongst the foremost poets of his time. It brimmed with
promise; and not the least singular circumstance in connexion with
Thomas Campbell’s life is, that the excessive expectation raised by his
first appeal was never satisfactorily fulfilled. The poetic faculty
burned in the “Pleasures of Hope,” which was full of melody, pathos,
animated description, and impassioned sentiment. All needful ardour was
there. There were also to be noted the faults of a youthful
pen--redundancy of diction and incorrectness. Ten years after the
“Pleasures of Hope” he published “Gertrude of Wyoming.” The impulsive
quality was already subdued by elaborate art; and although extreme
beauty and tenderness were here and there in the poem, correctness was
still wanting. Your spirit was entranced with verses, than which, in the
English language, you could find none better, simpler, and sweeter. Yet
for one such verse that was borne away from “Gertrude of Wyoming” a
hundred were forgotten which were not its peers. Campbell had momentary,
true, intense conceptions, and fineness of fancy; he exhibited
felicities of thought and expression that fastened instantly on every
memory; his, too, was an ear of poetical sensibility to the music of
language; but woe to the verse if his poetic utterance came not of an
inspiration--by a seizing theme. “Ye Mariners of England,” “The
Soldier’s Dream,” “The Battle of Hohenlinden,” constituted such themes,
and these small poems of Campbell are consequently abiding treasures in
the literature of the nation.
[By E. H. Baily, R.A. Executed in 1827.]