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presently tread him under their feet. The present success of the Idea is doubtful. The Interests of the South will demand the extension of slavery,* the Interests of the party now com

*The following extract, from the Charleston Mercury, shows the feeling of the South."Pursuant to a call, a mecting of the citizens of Orangeburg district was held to-day, 6th November, in the court house, which was well filled on the occasion. Gen. D. F. Jamison then rose, and moved the appointment of a committee of twenty-five, to take into consideration the continued agitation by Congress of the question of Slavery; the Committee, through their chairman, Gen. Jamison, made the following Report: "The time has arrived when the slaveholding States of the confederacy must take decided action upon the continued attacks of the North against their domestic institutions, or submit in silence to that humiliating position in the opinions of mankind that longer acquiescence must inevitably reduce them to. The agitation of the subject of Slavery commenced in the fanatical murmurings of a few scattered abolitionists, to whom it was a long time confined; but now it has swelled into a torrent of popular opinion at the North; it has invaded the fireside and the church, the press and the halls of legislation; it has seized upon the deliberations of Congress, and at this moment is sapping the foundations, and about to overthrow the fairest political structure that the ingenuity of man has ever devised.

The overt efforts of abolitionism were confined for a long period to annoying applications to Congress, under color of the pretended right of petition; it has since directed the whole weight of its malign influence against the annexation of Texas, and had well nigh cost to the country the loss of that important province; but emboldened by success and the inaction of the South, in an unjust and selfish spirit of national agrarianism it would now appropriate the whole public domain. It might well have been supposed that the undisturbed possession of the whole of Oregon territory would have satisfied the non-slaveholding States. This they now hold, by the incorporation of the ordinance of 1787 into the bill of the last session for establishing a territorial government for Oregon. That provision, however, was not sustained by them from any apprehension that the territory could ever be settled from the States of the South, but it was intended as a gratuitous insult to the Southern people, and a malignant and unjustifiable attack upon the institution of Slavery.

"We are called upon to give up the whole public domain to the fanatical cravings of abolitionism, and the unholy lust of political power. A territory, acquired by the whole country for the use of all, where treasure has been squandered like chaff, and Southern blood poured out like water, is sought to be appropriated by one section, because the other chooses to adhere to an institution held not only under the guaranties that brought this confederacy into existence, but under the highest sanction of Heaven. Should we quietly fold our hands under this assumption on the part of the non-slaveholding States, the fate of the South is sealed, the institution of Slavery is gone, and its existence is but a question of time. Your committee are unwilling

to anticipate what will be the result of the combined wisdom and joint action of the Southern portion of the Confederacy on this question; but as an initiatory step to a concert of action on the part of the people of South Carolina, they respectfully recommend, for the adoption of this meeting, the following resolutions:

Resolved, That the continued agitation of the question of Slavery, by the people of the non-slaveholding States, by their legislatures, and by their representatives in Congress, exhibits not only a want of national courtesy, which should always exist between kindred States, but is a palpable violation of good faith towards the slaveholding States, who adopted the present Constitution in order to form a more perfect union.'

ing into power will demand their peculiar boon. So another compromise is to be feared, and the extension of slavery yet further west. But the ultimate triumph of the Genius of Freedom is certain. In Europe it shakes the earth with mighty tread; thrones fall before its conquering feet. While in the eastern continent kings, armies, emperors, are impotent before that Power, shall a hundred thousand slave-holders stay it here with a bit of parchment?

ART. VIII.

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SHORT REVIEWS AND NOTICES.

1.- Endymion: A Tale of Greece. By HENRY B. HIRST, Author of the "Penance of Roland," "The Funeral of Time," and other Poems. Boston. William D. Ticknor & Co. 1848. IDEAL LOVE! The story of the mortal swain who wooed a Goddess and was loved by her! Endymion and the Moon! The Grecian tale cannot grow obsolete so long as human hearts and poetry and love are facts of life. Every youth whose soul was ever kindled with the love of beauty, and ever yearned with boundless aspiration, has or has had an Endymion in him, and reads the tale with as much trembling interest as he might the secret of his own heart, were he to find it in the public print, some morning, delicately told, so as to flatter rather than betray. The deepest consciousness, the fairest imaginings, the loftiest ambition, the profoundest, tenderest joy, the deepest tragedy, and wildest unrest, indeed the whole problem, metaphysical and moral, of human life and destiny, are exquisitely involved in this antique fable. It is classic for ever. Happy the artist or the poet who

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“Resolved, That while we acquiesce in adopting the boundary between the slaveholding and non-slaveholding States known as the Missouri Compromise line, we will not submit to any further restriction upon the rights of any Southern man to carry his property and his institutions into territory acquired by Southern treasure and by Southern blood.

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Resolved, That should the Wilmot Proviso, or any other restriction, be applied by Congress to the territories of the United States, south of 36 deg. 30 min. north latitude, we recommend to our Representative in Congress, as the decided opinion of this portion of his district, to leave his seat in that body, and return home.

Resolved, That we respectfully suggest to both houses of the Legislature of South Carolina, to adopt a similar recommendation as to our Senators in Congress from this State.

Resolved, That upon the return home of our Senators and Representatives in Congress, the Legislature of South Carolina should be forthwith assembled to adopt such measures as the exigency may demand.

"The Resolutions were then submitted, seriatim, and, together with the Report, were unanimously adopted."

can reproduce it to us in its living beauty! Keats adopted it, and almost breathed out his own passionate life in it. Now a rival has sprung up, verily an American Endymion, and more Grecian than the other, however you may find them compare in other respects. Take, for instance, the very first stanzas:

"Through a deep dell with mossy hemlocks girded —
A dell by many a sylvan Dryad prest, -
Which Latmos' lofty crest

Flung half in shadow - where the red deer herded
While mellow murmurs shook the forests gray-
Endymion took his way.

'Like clustering sun-light fell his yellow tresses,
With purple fillet, scarce confining, bound,
Winding their flow around

A snowy throat that thrilled to their caresses,
And trembling on a breast as lucid white
As sea-foam in the night.

"His fluted tunic swelling, yielding, floated,
Moulded to every motion of his form,
And with the contact warm,

Round charms on which the Satyrs might have gloated
Had he been buskined nymph; but, being man,

They loved him like to Pan."

We break off here abruptly, for no reason but the unreasonableness of offering selections, specimens, where every stanza is essential to the picture. In this style it goes on, richer and more beautiful at every step; every verse as polished, every image as distinct, every suggestion brief and direct, standing in organic unity with every other, and all bathed in the warmest atmosphere of beauty. The hero stands before you, bold and beautiful and statuesque. Yet we must dismember the living whole, by tearing from their setting and presenting a stanza or two more, to show Endymion bathing in that crystal lake, as the beach rises over him wistfully watching.

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Endymion yet was heated: sudden turning,

He loosed the clusters of his hyacinth hair,
And shook them on the air;

Laid down his pipes; unbound his girdle, burning
The while with August heat; his tunic now
He drew above his brow.

"There, in the moon light radiantly gleaming,
Lovely as morn he rose; the swelling veins
Seeming like purple stains

Along his limbs, which, like a star's, were streaming
Serenest light, as lustrously he stood,
Reflected in the flood.

"And now, her purple zenith reaching, brighter
Than ever before, reclined the Queen of Night,
Enchanted with the sight

Of one whose pure and perfect form was whiter
Than Indian pearl, her bosom's frozen snow
Melting in passion's glow.

"Slowly Endymion bent, the light Elysian
Flooding his figure. Kneeling on one knee
He loosed his sandals, lea

And lake and wood-land glittering on his vision,
A fairy landscape, bright and beautiful
With Venus at her full.

"His milky feet gleaming in emerald grasses;

The moon-beams trembling on his whiter neck;
His breast without a speck;

While the dense woods around, the mossy masses
Of rudest rock, the bronzed and Titan trees
Looking on Latmian leas,

"Assumed from him an aspect soft and holy;
For, like a naked God, the shepherd youth
Stood in his simple truth.

At last, with gentle steps retiring slowly,
He paused beside a rude, rough laurel brake,
A bow-shot from the lake.

"White-footed, then he passed the crimson clover
Like a swift meteor gleaming on the night,
Streaming in silver light,

His arms uplifted and his hands flung over
His noble head; a single spring he gave,
Then flashed beneath the wave.

"Down, as he sank, a flood of yellow glory

Shot from the moon, as if the moon had drooped
And on the mountain stooped;

And soon the sphere itself, grown gray and hoary,
Its essence gone, slid slowly 'neath a cloud
That wrapped it like a shroud.

"Then, like a ghost of some unwedded maiden,

On whose pale lips life seemed to strive with death,
Hushing, as 'twere her breath,

A glorious figure, wreathed with vapor laden
With delicate odors, stood with yearning eyes,
Waiting Endymion's rise:

"Endymion rose and on the water lying

Flung out his arms, sank, rose and sank again;
Pale Dian in her pain,

(For it was Dian's self who watched him,) sighing, While gazing on him, and her breath came short And heavy from her heart.

"She saw not Eros, who on rosy pinion

Hung in the willow's shadow-did not feel

His subtle, searching steel

Piercing her very soul, though his dominion

Her breast had grown; and what to her was heaven
If from Endymion riven?

"Nothing; for love flowed in her, like a river,

Flooding the banks of wisdom; and her soul,
Losing its self-control,

Waved with a vague, uncertain, tremulous quiver;
And, like a lily in the storm, at last

She sank 'neath passion's blast."

These stanzas are a fair sample of the style of the whole four cantos, cantos which only disappoint you by their brevity and win you back to re-perusal. Glossy and symmetrically rounded are they as the Grecian marble, clipping with their wise bounds a wealth of beauty not easily exhausted. Hence we call the poem Grecian, because it is not diffuse and limitless like Keats's, but so direct, bold, simple, and objective. Here the creative impulse does not overflow its banks, as in the case of Keats; it is confined within its own severe symmetric channel, and observes the unity of Art. The imagination of this poet does not riot, as Keats did, and pursue in its vague and greedy plan the whole subterranean, sub-marine labyrinth and wilderness of kindred mythology, exhausting you with the very fever of Endymion's dream. It beholds Endymion and sets his marble form before you.

As to Mr. Hirst's peculiar treatment of the story, his making a Roman of his hero, and bringing him back to a repentant practicality before the dénouement, we will not quarrel with him, for he so clings to the dream in the dismissing of it, that really we feel its empire reëstablished. Keats solves the knot more to our mind however, who makes him find the goddess in the mortal bride.

Our rambling remarks are not a criticism. We mean them for a recognition, which we hope they may convey to our readers, of a genuine poem. Indeed, a more artistic, vital, and substantial product of the poetic temperament has seldom, if ever, made its appearance among this practical people. It has the healthy glow of a creative genius, thoroughly aroused and self-possessed. Its rhythmic form is a sure sign of life; spontaneous music true to severest laws of the great world-vibration. Its pulse is vigorous and full. The measure of the stanza is most apt, and stimulates the right mood; we dismiss one after the other as reluctantly as we do the waves which ripple up upon the pebbly beach, and beautiful often as gems are the single words, pictures in themselves, which are strung together in those musical series.

The Complete

2.- Se Jin Kwei Chung Tung Tseuen Cheuen. History of Se Jin Kwei; or, the Conquest of Corea. A Novel. Translated from the Chinese, by STANISLAS HERNITZ, late Attaché of the United States Mission to China, Member of the "Institut Historique de Paris," of the American Oriental Society, &c., &c., &c.

THE above is the title of a work making four small volumes in the original Chinese, which has been translated by the accomplished interpreter to the American Legation to China; but not yet published or even printed. Some of our readers may remem

NO. V.

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