We may name, then, Longfellow, Emerson, Bailey, Tennyson, and the Brownings, as the Dii Majorum Gentum of this modern class.

We name first the American poet, Longfellow. We know nothing whatever of his theoretical creed, but we are not blind to the marks of sincerity and of high-minded aspiration which pervade his poetry. He feels what Foster uniformly forgets or denies, the worth of man. He looks at the ruins of the human soul in a certain rich moonlight which softens many an asperity, fills up many a chasm, symmetrizes many a disproportion, and sheds a soft golden film, a gossamer of the night, over the whole. His eye, too, is anointed to see innumerable fine and fairy hands repairing the desolation, as well as beautifying its decay. "It is a little thing to be a man." Yes, comparativly it is; but whence springs the smallness? Surely from the greatness of the height whence we have fallen, and to which we are invited to aspire. Life and man, like the Jura in the presence of Mont Blanc, dwindle before a greater, which greater in this case is the grandeur of man's ideal of himself and of God. It is little to be, it is far less to doubt of man. Spring but this one leak, and what a black flood of skepticism rushes in -death is regarded with the avidity of a suicide, and it is well if the Foster does not darken into the Swift.

Hear Longfellow :

"Not enjoyment and not sorrow

Is our being's destined way;
But to live that each to-morrow
Finds us farther than to-day."

And again:

"Life is real, life is earnest,

And the grave is not its goal; 'Dust thou art, to dust returnest,'

Was not spoken of the soul."

Such manly lines, rising clear, loud, and bold, like the notes of Chanticleer, dissipate a thousand dismal dreams and terrors of the night. They are not the day, but they are its promise. What we miss in Longfellow is a decided acknow ledgment of the realization which such sentiments as his find in Christianity. His verses are torn from their proper

Christian context. Now, a few fresh leaves snapped from the bough may tell that spring has come, but we prefer the full tidings of the round tree itself.

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In Emerson we find, amid more power, originality, and perhaps equal sincerity, a more palpably vital defect. What the hope set before" him in his melancholy gospel is we cannot tell. In his "Threnody" he laments most sweetly and plaintively the loss of a favorite son, and hints at some obscure and mystic source of consolation, described in the words, that his child is "Lost in God, in Godhead found!" Alas! can he allow his child, with his glorious personality, to slide away into a vague, vast ocean, even as his own dreams among the "blackberry vines" did leave his soul, with no trace behind? Can he part with a son as with a thought? Can he believe that the soul which, as it looked through the "blue summer" of his child's eyes, seemed to span the mystic gulf 'tween God and man," is henceforth an unconscious nonentity, somewhere in the eternal spaces, but with no spring of return to him, and no prospect of encounter with him, save in the cold commerce of the waves of the Pantheistic deep? Or if he has, apart from this dreary dream, a principle of hope and comfort, is there no word in the ample tongue of Milton and Coleridge that can express this hope? and if there be, why does he delay to inform us what we are to substitute for the simple declaration, "Them that sleep in Jesus shall the Lord bring with him?" Indeed, over all Emerson's poems, and over those of many of his followers, there hangs a deep gloom. His fun, when he attempts to be humorous, is dull and feeble. It is the drone of the "humble bee," which is quite as melancholy as it is mirthful. He is never so eloquent as when expressing the feelings of one who, from the pursuits of ambition, and the company of men, has sought a sad solace in Nature, which yet without a God can only glare and glitter about his eye and imagination, but not touch his heart. His personal purity, which is that of a guarded dewdrop-has saved him from many pains and penalties; but we do think that it is the subtlety which so strangely mingles with the simplicity of his nature, like the eye of the basilisk looking out from the silvery plumage of the dove, which has veiled from many the fact that he is not a happy man.

No wonder although, according to a CERTAIN rumor Emerson does not fully sympathize with Bailey of "Festus." How can he? How can a man who manages his misery sẽ artfully that the deep scar looks like a badge of honor upon his bosom-who can regulate, turn, and wind his madness like a watch-sympathize with one who, with the power and precipitation of a thunder-shower, expresses his whole soul to the world in tumultuous verse? How stiff and measured the extravagances (madness prepense) of Emerson look beside Bailey's unpremeditated hallelujahs! In Emerson you hear a man crying down" to the idea of a personal deity, which is for ever rising in his truly poetical heart; to Bailey the universe is but a reflector for the face of a Saviour and God. In Emerson you find a nature, originally poetic and even devout, chilled and strangled by the frost of an imperfect philosophy (as though an eagle on his way to the sun were killed by the cold of our upper atmosphere); in "Festus" faith is the philosophy, hope is the science, and love the logic of the strain. In Emerson's verse, truth lurks like a guilty thing in single lines, which are rather pinfolds than panoramas; Bailey's broad nature luxuriates in long, interlinked, and magnificent passages, which rise and rise till no wing short of that of imagination can reach and rest upon their summit.

Leaving comparisons, we may simply say that, in the two qualities of impulse and earnestness, we have seldom read a work to be compared with "Festus." We care nothing for its theory-admit its many and monstrous faults—are not careful to answer the charge of imitation in its plan—but the vigor of individual thought, the amplitude of general view, and wealth of imagery-the rough strength of language, and, above all, the deep, sparkling, blood-power of spirit," so religious and so fervidly sincere, have compelled like a captive, our at first unwilling admiration. It now resounds in our ears like the Pan-pipe of a belated Titan from his lonely rock, at once bewailing the past, and calling, in no measured strains, for the advent of the future.

6.

Of Browning, Mrs. Browning, and Tennyson, we need hardly speak, so well are they known and so thoroughly appreciated by the lovers of poetry in Britain. Tennyson of the three is the most purely poetical, and perhaps the least

prophetic in spirit or purpose. He may be compared to Ariel in the “Tempest." Ariel can pluck up cedars by the roots, but prefers swinging in the blossom which hangs from the bough. He can back and bridle the fiery steed of the lightning, but prefers sucking in time and tune with the sucking bee. He can "flame amazement" over a crowded ship, but would rather fly on the bat's back in the still evenings of summer. From tasks at once mighty and delicate, requiring both infinite power and infinite tact, he springs gladly to the more congenial pursuits of an eternity of busy and merry idleness. So Tennyson, with powers which, as Carlyle once said, "might move the world," condescends sometimes to play tricks, to sing snatches, to waver in beautiful gyrations, like the down of the thistle, instead of going straight to his mark, like an arrow or a thunderbolt. In both the Brownings, but especially in the lady, we find a more powerful and condensed purpose, united to imagination of almost equal brilliance. There is in her no dallying with her theme-no drawing back from her pictures, as a painter does to try the effect-no "staying her thunder in midvolley." She is in evident and deep earnest. Each theme sits before her, as a ghost might be supposed to sit before a limner at once shuddering and admiring; and you fancy her, at the close, falling back exhausted and trembling, after her faculties had been tasked to their utmost in that unearthly sitting. Seldom has woman had a higher or more masculine message to deliver. Yet sorrow hovers over the sublimity of her strains, "like the soft shadow of an angel's wing," and the knowledge she has gained, and the power of moving us she exerts, have been bought at their weight, not in gold, but in fire.

It is pleasant, in some moods, to pass from these poets, with their passionate, or fierce, or heroic attitudes, to the blended ease and earnestness of Leigh Hunt. He stands among them like an oak amidst the surrounding pines, or birches, or sensitive plants, less tremulous, dark, drooping, or defiant, to every breath of heaven, but greener, ampler, calmer, albeit ready always to resist strong aggression, as well as to shade unassuming merit. If they aspire to the rank of prophets, he is a patriarch, seated and uttering gentle yet profound responses at his tent-door.

The highest compliment ever paid to Hunt is, perhaps, that of Byron, who, after a furious and vulgar diatribe against him, owns him to be a "good man." This may seem poor praise, but a cold shower-bath from Hecla were less astonishing than the acknowledgment of any human virtue from the mouth of a man who had set himself elaborately to erase each vestige of goodness from his own character, and had well nigh succeeded-who had nearly completed an exchange between his heart and the "nether millstone,"and whose praises of all but his personal friends came forth rare and reluctant, as do the audible groans of his proud spirit. Hunt's goodness and talent he always admittedand with regard to the charge of vulgarity, which now, at this distance of time, is the vulgar person of the two? Hunt's vulgarity is that of circumstances and education, Byron's was ingrained in his nature-and neither the Highlands, with their grandeur, nor Holland House, with its varied and brilliant converse, nor Italy, with the recherche society of its better classes, were able to erase the original stamp of the degraded and blackguard lord, which had been transmitted from generations downwards, till it was fortunate in his countenance to meet and contend with the blaze of genius and the pale impress of coming death.

In our notion, Thomas Macaulay is an infinitely more vulgar person than Leigh Hunt or even Lord Byron-if vulgarity mean the want of all those qualities which go to constitute a gentleman. Our readers, in illustration of this, may take the following anecdote, which we know to be correct. A writer who had, some year or two ago, rather severely, although with a friendly feeling, criticised Macaulay in one of our leading periodicals, chanced to read Croker's assault upon his "History of England" in the "Quarterly." Struck with its unfairness and with the animus which pervaded it, he wrote Mr. Macaulay a note, couched in the most respectful terms, not retracting his former statements, but expressing a manly sympathy with him under an unjust attack. He was not a little surprised to receive an extremely harsh and contemptuous reply, in which the Edinburgh exmember told his correspondent that he cared neither for his blame nor his praise. Had the writer been a clamorous petitioner for his pelf or his praise--had he approached him