which the reader desires to devote to the pursuit of the main drift of what calls itself a single poem, simplex et unum, is so incessantly called off to look at this and look at that; when, for example, we would fain follow the thought and feeling of Violet and of Walter, we are with such peremptory and frequent eagerness summoned to observe how like the sky is to x and the stars are to y, that on the whole, though there is a real continuity of purpose, we cannot be surprised that the critic of the London Examiner failed to detect it. Keats and Shelley, and Coleridge, perhaps, before them, with their extravagant love for Elizabethan phraseology, have led to this mischief. Has not Tennyson followed a little too much in their train ? Coleridge, we suppose, would have maintained it to be an excellence in the “ myriad-minded” dramatist, that he so often diverts us from the natural course of thought, feeling, and narrative, to see how curiously two trifles resemble each other, or that, in a passage of deep pathos, he still finds time to apprise us of a paronomasia. But faults which disfigure Shakspeare are not beauties in a modern volume.

I rot upon the waters when my prow

Should grate the golden isles may be a very Elizabethan, but is certainly rather a vicious expression. Force and condensation are good, but it is possible to combine them with purity of phrase. One of the most successful delineations in the whole poem is contained in the following passage, which introduces scene VII.

[A balcony overlooking the sea.]
The lark is singing in the blinding sky,
Hedges are white with May. The bridegroom sea
Is toying with the shore, his wedded bride,
And in the fulness of his marriage joy,
He decorates her tawny front with shells —
Retires a space to see how fair she looks,
Then proud, runs up to kiss her. All is fair, —
All glad, from grass to sun. Yet more I love
Than this, the shrinking day that sometimes comes
In winter's front, so fair ’mongst its dark peers,

It seems a straggler from the files of June,
VOL. LXXVII.— NO. 160.

Which in its wanderings had lost its wits,
And half its beauty, and when it returned,
Finding its old companions gone away,
It joined November's troop, then marching past;
And so the frail thing comes, and greets the world
With a thin crazy smile, then bursts in tears —
And all the while it holds within its hand

A few half-withered flowers ; — I love and pity it. It may be the fault of our point of view; but certainly we do not find even here that happy, unimpeded sequence which is the charm of really good writers. Is there not something incongruous in the effect of the immediate juxtaposition of these two images? We have lost, it may be, that impetuosity, that élan, which lifts the young reader over hedge and ditch at flying leaps, across country, — or we should not perhaps entertain any offence, or even surprise, at being transferred per saltum from the one field to the other. But we could almost ask, was the passage, so beautiful, though perhaps a little prolonged, about the June day in November, written consecutively, and in one flow, with the previous, and also beautiful one about ocean and his bride. We dare say it was; but it does not read, somehow, in the same straight line with it,

Tantum series juncturaque pollet. We venture, too, to record a perhaps hypercritical objection to “the blinding sky” in this particular collocation. Perhaps in the first line of a scene, while the reader has not yet warmed to his duty, simplicity should be especially observed ;- a single image, without any repeated reflection, so to speak, in a second mirror, should suffice. The following, which open scene XI., are better.

“ Summer hath murmured with her leafy lips
Around my home, and I have heard her not;
I've missed the process of three several years
From shaking wind flowers to the tarnished gold

That rustles sere on Autumn's aged limbs.” Except the two last lines. Our author will not keep his eye steady upon the thing before him; he goes off, and distracts us, and breaks the impression he had begun to succeed in giving, by bidding us look now at something else. Some

simpler epithets than shaking, and some plainer language than tarnished gold or aged limbs, would have done the work better. We are quite prepared to believe that these faults and these disagreeables have personally been necessities to the writer, are awkwardnesses of growth, of which the full stature may show no trace. He should be assured, however, that though the rude vigor of the style of his Life-Drama may attract upon the first reading, yet in any case, it is not the sort of writing which people recur to with pleasure and fall back upon with satisfaction. It may be a groundless fancy, yet we do fancy, that there is a whole hemisphere, so to say, of the English language which he has left unvisited. His diction feels to us, as if between Milton and Burns he had not read, and between Shakspeare and Keats had seldo admired. Certainly there is but little inspiration in the compositions of the last century; yet English was really best and most naturally written, when there was, perhaps, least to write about. To obtain a real command of the language, some familiarity with the prose writers, at any rate, of that period, is almost essential; and to write out, as a mere daily task, passages, for example, of Goldsmith, would do a versecomposer of the nineteenth century as much good, we believe, as the study of Beaumont and Fletcher.

If our readers wish to view real timidity, real shrinking from actual things, real fear of living, let them open the little volume of Sidney Walker's Poetical Remains. The school-fellow and college friend of Praed, marked from his earliest youth by his poetic temper and faculty, he passed fifty-one years, mostly in isolation and poverty, shivering upon the brink, trembling and hesitating upon the threshold of life. Fearful to affirm any thing, lest it haply might be false; to do any thing, because so probably it might be sin; to speak, lest he should lie; almost, we might say, to feel, lest it should be a deception, - so he sat, crouching and cowering, in the dismal London back-street lodging, over the embers of a wasting and dying fire, the true image of his own vitality. “I am vext,” is his weak complaining cry,

With many thoughts, the kindly spirit of hope
Is sick within me ; fretting care and strife

With my own heart, have ta'en from solitude
Its natural calm, while in the intercourse
Of daily life, and by the household hearth,
The silence of the unapproving eye
Falls on my heart; censure and disbelief,
And pitying smiles, and prophecies of ill
From friendly lips, like ever dropping dews,
Chilling the inward spirit of resolve,
Weigh me to earth.

Come, therefore ! like the Moon,
When she, with white and silent steps, doth climb
O’er the vext sea; shine on me once again,
Serene remembrance !

They go, and I remain. Their steps are free
To tread the halls and groves, in thought alone
To me accessible, my home erewhile
Heart-loved, and in their summer quiet still
As beautiful, as when of old, returned
From London's never-ebbing multitude
And everlasting cataract of sound,
Midst the broad silent courts of Trinity
I stood and paused ; so strange, and strangely sweet
The night-like stillness of that noontide scene
Sank on my startled ear.

Those days are past;
And like a homeless school-boy left behind,
When all his mates are free to sport their fill,
Through the long midsummer, I sit and strive
To cheat my hope-sick heart with memory.

'Tis utter night; over all Nature's works
Silence and rest are spread ; yet still the tramp
Of busy feet, the roll of wheels, the hum
Of passing tongues — one endless din confused
Of sounds that have no meaning for the heart,
Marring the beauty of the tranquil hour,
Press on my sleepless ear. Sole genial voice,
The restless flame that flickers on the hearth,
Heard indistinctly through the tumult, soothes
My soul with its companionable sound,
And tales of other days. Thither I turn

My weary sense for refuge; as a child
In a strange home, with unaccustomed sights
Perplexed, and unknown voices, if it spy
Some well-remembered face, with eager joy
Flies to the sure protection, and clings close
Round the beloved knees.

Except some translations, of which one from the Persæ of Æschylus, describing the morning of Salamis, and three of the three finest fragments of Ennius, may be recommended, — there is hardly any thing that is not of this sad personal kind:

Ah, woe is me, that I am forced to wrong
With my vain griefs and moans importunate
The beauty of fair silence! all too long
Has this sad strife endured, this wild debate
'Twixt feeble will and adamantine fate :
When will it end? what new and vital power
Forth walking midst the spirit's desolate
And ruined places, there shall plant the flower
Of hope and natural joy, and build for peace a bower.

Vagitus et ingens, Infantumque animæ flentes in limine primo. Amongst these it is not well to linger long. The flowers of hope and natural joy and simple feeling, the reader will find growing abundantly in the pages of William Allingham, a young Irish poet, whose vein of poetic thought and pure felicitous diction has won him the praise of good judges in England. We have already, we believe, overstepped the limits which can be allowed to the levities of verse; otherwise we would gladly quote from his charming tale of " The Music Master.” The volume, however, is already not unknown in America. It would have been better, certainly, for more perfect elaboration of several of the minor pieces, and perhaps for the entire omission of a considerable number. The “ Serenade” begins well,

Oh! hearing sleep, and sleeping hear,
The while we dare to call thee dear,