And there is great abundance; so comes

MORN,

Plenishes all things, and completes the

world."

Listen to his description of England. It is elaborate, but the elaboration is successful:

The ever-surging peoples roll and roar
Perpetual, as around her cliffs the seas,
That only wash them whiter; and whose
mountains

Souls that from this mere footing of the earth
Lift their great virtues, through all clouds of
Fate,

Up to the very heavens, and make them rise,
To keep the gods above us."

At the foot of the page we find something far better:

"Balder. Is this blossom sweet?

Doctor. Most fragrant.

Balder. Yet I pluck'd it on a rock
Where common grass had died.

Learn this, my friend:
The secret that doth make a flower a flower,
So frames it, that to bloom is to be sweet,
And to receive to give. The flower can die,
But cannot change its nature, though the
earth

Starve it, and the reluctant air defraud;
No soil so sterile, and no living lot
So poor, but it hath somewhat still to spare
In bounteous odours. Charitable they
Who, be their having more or less, so have,
That less is more than need, and more is

less

Than the great heart's good-will."

We could select a hundred passages of equal merit; but, as faithful critics, are bound now to take notice, and that at some little length, of what we think the defects of this remarkable poem.

We think that the two main objections to "Balder" will be monotony and obscurity. We will not say of the hero, what an admirer of Yendys said of the Monk in "The Roman," that he is a great bore and humbug; but we will say that he talks too much and does too little. The poem is little else than one long sothis kind of mental dissection, however liloquy-a piece of thinking aloud; and masterly, begins, toward the end of 282 Are daughters, and Ophelia still more fair | pages, to fatigue the reader. "Balder'

"This dear English land! This happy England, loud with brooks and birds,

Shining with harvests, cool with dewy trees, And bloom'd from hill to dell; but whose best flowers

is in this respect a poem of the Manfred and Cain school, but is far longer, and thus palls more on the attention than they. A more fatal objection is the great obscurity of much in this poem. The story does not pervade it, as a clear road passes through a noble landscape, or climbs a lofty hill, distinct even in its windings, and forming a line of light, connecting province with province; it is a footpath piercing dark forests, and often muffled and lost amid their umbrage. The wailings of Balder toward the close become oppressive, inarticulate, and halffrenzied; and from the lack of interest connected with him as a person, seem unnatural, and produce pain rather than admiration. This obscurity of Yendys has been, as we hinted before, growing on him. We saw few traces of it in "The Roman." It began first to appear in some smaller poems he contributed to the Athenæum," and has, we trust, reached its climax in the latter pages and scenes of "Balder." It is produced partly by his love of personification and allegory-figures in which he often indeed greatly excels; partly by a diseased subtlety of introspective thought; partly by those fainting-fits to which his demon (like a very different being, Giant Despair in the Pilgrim") is subject at certain times, and partly by a pedantry of language, which is altogether unworthy of so masculine a genius.

Take two specimens of this last-mentioned fault:

"Adjusting every witness of the soul,
By such external warrants I do reach
Herself; the centre and untaken core
Of this enchanted castle, whose far lines
And strong circumvallations, in and in
Concentring, I have carried, but found not
The foe that makes them deadly; and I
stand

Before these most fair walls; and know he lies
Contain'd, and in the wont of savage war
Prowl round my scathless enemy, and plot,
Where, at what time, with what consum-
mate blow,

To storm his last retreat, and sack the sense
That dens her fierce decease."

all its exquisite touches, is considerably His description of the heroine, with spoiled by a similar unwise elaboration and intricacy of language:—

"But when the year was grown, And sweet by warmer sweet to nuptial June, Till, in a passion of roses, all the time The flowery adolescence slowly fill'd, Flush'd, and around the glowing heave made suit,

And onward through the rank and buxom days," &c.

There is a mixture of fine fancy with the quaintness and odd phraseology of what follows:

And if she were o'erlaid with lily leaves,
"She came in September,
And substantived by mere content of dews,
Or limb'd of flower-stalks and sweet pedicles,
Or made of golden dust from thigh of bees,
Or caught of morning mist, or the unseen
Material of an odour, her pure text
Could seem no more remote from the corrupt
And seething compound of our common flesh!"

A splendid passage near this is utterly spoiled by language as apparently affected as anything in Hunt's "Foliage,” or Keats' "Endymion:"

"Nature thus-
The poet Nature singing to herself—
Did make her in sheer love, having delight
Of all her work, and doing all for joy,
And built her like a temple wherein cost
Is absolute; dark beam and hidden raft
Shittim; each secret work and covert use
Fragrant and golden; all the virgin walls
Pure, and within, without, prive and apert
Enrich'd to God."

The second is worse, with the exception From buried plinth to viewless pinnacle, of the first four lines:

She audibly remember'd, they who heard
Believed the Muse no fable. As that star
Unsullied from the skies, out of the shrine
Of her dear beauty beautifully came
The beautiful, untinged by any taint

Coleridge (in his "Love") have alone of our poets adequately represented. Shelley, like Yendys, is too spiritual; Keats, like Smith, is too sensuous. Shakspere, we think, makes woman too much the handmaid, instead of the companion, of man: his yielding, bending shadow, not his sister and friend:—

"Stronger Shakspere felt for man alone."

Ere closing this critique, we have to men

tion one or two conclusions in reference to Yendys' genius, which this book has deeply impressed on our mind. First, his forte is not the drama or the lyrical poem. The lyrics in this poem are nu

Of mortal dwelling, neither flush'd nor merous, but none of them equal to Smith's

pale,

Pure in the naked loveliness of heaven-
Such and so graced was she."

"Garden and Child," or to his own "Winter Night" in "The Roman;" none of them entirely worthy of his genius. Nor Smith and Yendys differ very materially is he strikingly dramatic in the managein their conception of woman. Smith's fe- ment of his scenes and situations. He males are houris in a Mahometan heaven; should give us next, either a great prose those of Yendys are angels in the Para- work, developing his peculiar theory of dise of our God. Smith's emblem of things, in the bold, rich, and eloquent woman is a rich and luscious rose, bend- style of those articles he contributed to ing to every breath of wind, and wooing "The Palladium," "The Sun," and "The every eye; that of Yendys is a star look- Eclectic;" or he should bind himself up ing across gulfs of space and galaxies of to the task he has already in his eye, that splendour, to one chosen earthly lover, of constructing a great epic poem. whose eyes alone respond to the mystic know no writer of the age who, if he will messages of the celestial bride. Smith's but clarify somewhat his style, and select idea of love, though not impure, is pas- some stern, high, continuous narrative for sionate; that of Yendys is more Platonic his theme, is so sure to succeed in this than Plato's own. We think that the forsaken walk of the Titans. The poet true, the human, the poetic, and the who has coped with the Coliseum, the Christian idea of love, includes and com- most magnificent production of man's art, pounds the sensuous and the spiritual and with Chamouni, the grandest of God's elements into one—a tertium quid-earthly works, need shrink from no topic, diviner, shall we say? because more com- however lofty; nay, the loftier his theme plete than either; and which Milton and the better.

We

ALEXANDER SMITH.

THERE is something exceedingly sweet long is he to continue to shine? Such but solemn in the strain of thought sug-are questions which are alike applicable gested by the appearance of a new and to the planet and to the poet. A new true poet. Well is his uprise often compared to that of a new star arising in the midnight. What is he? whence has he come? whither is he going? and how

poet, like a new planet, is another proof of the continued existence of the creative energy of the "Father of Spirits." He is a new messenger and mediator between

the Infinite and the race of man. Whether-works which, nevertheless, a world so rising or falling, retreating or culminat- long as it lies in wickedness shall never ing, in aphelion or in perihelion, he is willingly let die? continually an instructor to his kind. Alas! it is too late; elpyaoro, as the There is never a moment when he is not seen by some one, and when to be seen is, of course, to shine. And if his mission be thoroughly accomplished, the men of future ages are permitted either to share in the shadow of his splendour, or to fill their empty urns with the relict radiance of his beams.

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"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;"

so a poet, a king of beauty, is for ever a joy or a terror; a gulf of glory opening above, or an abyss of torment and mystery gaping below.

Greek play has it. The shaft of genius once ejaculated can be recalled no more, be it aimed at Satan or at God. And hence in our day the peculiar propriety, nay, necessity, of prefacing or winding up our praise of poetic power by such a stern caution to its possessor as this:-"Be thou sure that thy word, whether that of an angel or a fiend, whether openly or secretly blasphemous, whether loyal or rebellious to the existence of a God and of his great laws, whether in favour of the alternative Despair or the alternative Revelation, the only two possible, shall endure with the endurance of earth, and shall remain on thy head either a halo of horror or a crown of glory."

'Tis verily a fearful gift that of poetic genius; and fearful, especially, through the immortality which waits upon all its genuine inspirations, whatever be their Claiming, as we do, something of a pamoral purpose and tendency. Thus, aternal interest in Alexander Smith, we Marlowe is as immortal as a Milton-a propose, in the remainder of this paper, Congreve as a Goldsmith-a Byron or first characterising his peculiar powers, Burns as a Wordsworth or James Mont- and secondly, adding to this estimate gomery-an Edgar Poe as a Longfellow our most sincere and friendly counsel as or a Lowell. Just look at the dreadful, to their future exercise. the unquenchable, the infernal life of It is a labour of love; for ever since Poe's Lyrics and Tales. No one can the straggling, scratching MS., along with read these without shuddering, without its accompanying letter, reached our still pity, and sorrow, and condemnation of study, we have loved the author of the the author, without a half-muttered mur- Life Drama;" and all the more since mur of inquiry at his Maker-"Why this we met him in his quiet yet distinct, moawful anomaly in Thy works?" And yet dest yet manly personality. And perhaps no one can avoid reading them, and read- the opportunities of observation which ing them again, and hanging over their have been thus afforded may qualify us lurid and lightning-blasted pages, and for speaking with greater certainty and thinking that this wondrous being wanted satisfaction, both to ourselves and others, only two things to have made him the than the majority of his critics, about the master of American minds-virtue and principal elements of his genius. happiness. And there steals in another We may first, however, glance at some thought, which deepens the melancholy of the charges which even his friendly and eternises the interest-what would critics have brought against him. Poe Now give to have lived another life has been accused of over sensuousness. than he did, and to have devoted his in- The true answer to this is to state his estimable powers to other works than the youth. He is only twenty-five years of convulsive preparation of such terrible age, and wrote all those parts of the poem trifles-such nocturna nugæ· -as con- to which objections have been made when stitute his remains? And still more em- he was two or three years younger. Every phatically, what would Swift and Byron youth of genius must be sensuous; and now exchange for the liberty of suppress-if he write poetry, ought, in truth to his ing their fouler and more malignant works own nature, to express it there. Of course

He

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we distinguish between the sensuous and to answer in this matter, except by again the sensual. Smith is never sensual; and referring to his age. All young poets are his most glowing descriptions, no more imitators. Poetry," says Aristotle, "is than those in the "Song of Songs," tend imitation." It begins with imitation, to excite lascivious feelings. Female and it continues in imitation, and with beauty is a natural object of admiration, imitation it ends. The difference beand a young poet filled with this passion- tween the various stages only is, that in ate feeling, were a mere hypocrite if he boyhood and early youth poets imitate did not voice it forth in verse, and, both other poets, and that in manhood they as an artist and as an honest man, will pass from the study of models which they feel himself compelled to do so. Had may admire to error and extravagance, Wordsworth himself written poetry at to that great original, which, without that period of his life to which he after-blame, excites an infinite and endless wards so beautifully refers in the lines

"O happy time of youthful lovers,

O balmy time, in which a love-knot on a lady's brow

Seem'd fairer than the fairest star in

heaven".

devotion. That Smith has read and admired, and learned of Keats, and Shelley, and Tennyson, and many others, is obvious; but it is obvious, also, that he has read his own heart still more closely, and has learned still more from the book of nature. Every page contains allusions it had perhaps been scarcely less richly to his favourite authors; but every page, flesh-coloured than the "Life Drama." too, contains evidences of a rich native In general, however, the true poet, as he vein. The man who preserves his idioadvances in his life and in his career, will syncrasy amid much reading of the poets, become less and less sensuous in feeling is more to be praised than he who, in and in song. Woman's form will retreat horror at plagiarism, draws a cordon farther back in the sky of his fancy, and sanitaire around himself, and refuses to woman's ideal will come more promi-cultivate acquaintance with the great nently forward; she will "die in the classics of his age and country. A true flesh, to be raised in the spirit;" and original is often most so when he is imithis inevitable process, through which tating or even translating others. So even Moore passed, and Keats was pass-Smith has marvellously improved some ing at his death, shall yet be realised in of the few figures he has borrowed. The Alexander Smith, if he continue to live, and his critics consent to wait. If our readers will compare Shelley's conception of woman, in his juvenile novels "Zastrozzi" and the "Rosicrucian," with Bea- A still more common objection is a trice Cenci, or the graceful imaginary fe- certain monotony of figure which marks male forms which play like creatures of his poetry. He draws, it is said, all his the elements in the "Prometheus," he imagery from the stars, the sea, the sun, will find another striking instance of and the moon. Now we think we can what we mean. In some cases, perhaps, not only defend him in this, but deduce the process may be reversed, and the from it an argument in favour of the young poet who began with the ideal power and truth of his genius. may, in after life, descend to the real, bad or mediocre poet could have meddled and drown his early dream of spiritual with these old objects without failure? love in sensuous admiration and desire. Nothing in general so vapid as odes to But these we think are rare, and are ac- the moon, or sonnets on the sea. counted for as much from physical as Smith has lifted up his daring rod to the from mental causes. heavens, and extracted new and rich imagination from their unfading fires. He has once more laid a poet's hand upon

Smith has been called an imitator, or even a plagiarist. We are not careful

objects shown are sometimes the same as in other authors, but he has cast on them the mellowing, softening, and spiritualising moonlight of his own genius.

What

But