```“The sentinel stars set their watch in the sky.”=
The thought is good, and has a very striking propriety where Mr.
Campbell has placed it, in the mouth of a soldier telling his dream.
But, though Shakspeare assures us that “every true man’s apparel fits
your thief,” it is by no means the case, as we have already seen, that
every true poet’s similitude fits your plagiarist. Let us see how Mr.
Robert Montgomery uses the image.=
```“Ye quenchless stars! so eloquently bright,
```Untroubled sentries of the shadowy night,
```While half the world is lapp’d in downy dreams,
```And round the lattice creep your midnight beams,
```How sweet to gaze upon your placid eyes,
```In lambent beauty looking from the skies.”=
Certainly the ideas of eloquence, of untroubled repose, of placid eyes,
of the lambent beauty on which it is sweet to gaze, harmonise admirably
with the idea of a sentry.
We would not be understood, however, to say, that Mr. Robert Montgomery
cannot make similitudes for himself. A very few lines further on, we
find one which has every mark of originality, and on which, we will be
bound, none of the poets whom he has plundered will ever think of making
reprisals=
```“The soul, aspiring, pants its source to mount,
```As streams meander level with their fount.”=
We take this to be, on the whole, the worst similitude in the world. In
the first place, no stream meanders, or can possibly meander, level with
its fount. In the next place, if streams did meander level with
their founts, no two motions can be less like each other than that of
meandering level and that of mounting upwards.
We have then an apostrophe to the Deity, couched in terms which, in any
writer who dealt in meanings, we should call profane, but to which we
suppose Mr. Robert Montgomery attaches no idea whatever:=
```“Yes I pause and think, within one fleeting hour,
```How vast a universe obeys Thy power;
```Unseen, but felt, Thine interfused control
```Works in each atom, and pervades the whole;
```Expands the blossom, and erects the tree,
```Conducts each vapour, and commands each sea,
```Beams in each ray, bids whirlwinds be unfurl’d,
```Unrols the thunder, and upheaves a world!”=
No field-preacher surely ever carried his irreverent familiarity so
far as to bid the Supreme Being stop and think on the importance of the
interests which are under His care. The grotesque indecency of such an
address throws into shade the subordinate absurdities of the passage,
the unfurling of whirlwinds, the unrolling of thunder, and the upheaving
of worlds.