Day "L. E. L.'s Question moens - Wine of Cyprus

"Sleeping and Watching "A Portrait "The Mournful Mother -and "A Valediction" although all burning with divine fire, manifested only in scintillations, have nothing in them idiosyncratic. "The House of Clouds" and "The Lost Bower are superlatively lovely, and show the vast powers of the poet in the field best adapted to their legitimate display:- the themes, here, could not be improved. The former poem is purely imaginative; the latter is unobjectionably because unobtrusively suggestive of a moral, and is, perhaps, upon the whole, the most admirable composition in the two volumes : or, if it is not, then "The Lay of the Brown Rosarie' is. In this last the ballad-character is elevated etherealized and thus made to afford scope ideality at once the richest and most vigorous in the world. The peculiar foibles of the author are here too, dropped bodily, as a mantle, in the tumultuous movement and excitement of the narrative.

for an

II.

Miss Barrett has need only of real self-interest in her subjects, to do justice to her subjects and to herself. On the other hand, "A Rhapsody of Life's Progress," although gleaming with cold coruscations, is the least meritorious, because the most philosophical, effusion of the whole : this, we say, in flat contradiction of the "spoudaiotaton kai philosophikotaton genos of Aristotle. "The Cry of the Human" is singularly effective, not more from the vigour and ghastly passion of its thought, than from the artistically-con

ceived arabesquerie of its rhythm. The Cry of the Children," similar, although superior in tone and handling, is full of a nervous unflinching energy a horror sublime in its simplicity of which a far greater than Dante might have been proud.

"Bertha in the

Lane," a rich ballad, very singularly excepted from the wholesale commendation of the Democratic Review," as "perhaps not one of the best," and designated by Blackwood, on the contrary, as “ decidedly the finest poem of the collection," is not the very best, we think, only because mere pathos, however exquisite, cannot be ranked with the loftiest exhibitions of the ideal. Of Lady Geraldine's Courtship," the magazine last quoted observes that "some pith is put forth in its passionate parts." We will not pause to examine the delicacy or lucidity of the metaphor embraced in the "putting forth of some pith; , but unless by "some pith" itself, is intended the utmost conceivable intensity and vigour, then the critic is merely damning with faint praise. With the exception of Tennyson's "Locksley Hall," we have never perused a poem combining so much of the fiercest passion with so much of the most ethereal fancy, as the "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," of Miss Barrett. We are forced to admit, however, that the latter work is a very palpable imitation of the former, which it surpasses in plot or rather in thesis, as much as it falls below it in artistical management, and a certain calm energy lustrous and indomitable — such as we might imagine in a broad river of molten gold.

It is in the "Lady Geraldine" that the critic of Blackwood is again put at fault in the comprehension of a couple of passages. He confesses his inability

"to make out the construction of the words,

all that

spirits pure and ardent are cast out of love and reverence, because chancing not to hold.' There are comparatively few American school-boys who could not parse it. The prosaic construction would run thus: all that (wealth understood) because chancing not to hold which, (or on account of not holding which) all pure and ardent spirits are cast out of love and reverence. "" The "which" is involved in the

relative pronoun "that

:

the second word of the sentence. All that we know is, that Miss Barrett is right here is a parallel phrase, meaning—all that (which) we know," etc. The fact is, that the accusation of imperfect grammar would have been more safely, if more generally, urged: in descending to particular exceptions, the reviewer has been doing little more than exposing himself at all points.

Turning aside, however, from grammar, he declares his incapacity to fathom the meaning of

She has halls and she has castles, and the resonant steameagles

Follow far on the directing of her floating dove-like

hand

With a thunderous vapour trailing underneath the starry

vigils,

So to mark upon the blasted heaven the measure of her land.

Now it must be understood that he is profoundly serious in his declaration - he really does not apprehend the thought designed - and he is even more than profoundly serious, too, in intending these his own comments upon his own stolidity, for wit: "We thought that steam-coaches generally followed the directing of no hand except the stoker's, but it, cer

VOL. XII. - 2

tainly, is always much liker a raven than a dove." After this, who shall question the infallibility of Christopher North ? We presume there are very few of our readers who will not easily appreciate the richly imaginative conception of the poetess: The Lady Geraldine is supposed to be standing in her own door, (positively not on the top of an engine), and thence. pointing, with her floating dove-like hand," to the lines of vapour, from the "resonant steam-eagles,' that designate upon the blasted heaven," the remote boundaries of her domain. But, perhaps, we are guilty of a very gross absurdity ourselves, in commenting at all upon the whimsicalities of a reviewer who can deliberately select for special animadversion the second of the four verses we here copy:

Eyes, he said, now throbbing through me! are ye eyes that did undo me?

Shining eyes like antique jewels set in Parian statuestone!

Underneath that calm white forehead are ye ever burning torrid

O'er the desolate sand desert of my heart and life

undone ?

The ghost of the Great Frederic might, to be sure, quote at us, in his own Latin, his favorite adage, De gustibus non est disputandus; but, when we take into consideration the moral designed, the weirdness of effect intended, and the historical adaptation of the fact alluded to, in the line italicized, (a fact of which it is by no means impossible that the critic is ignorant,) we cannot refrain from expressing our conviction - and we here express it in the teeth of the whole horde of the Ambrosianians - that from the entire range of poetical

literature there shall not, in a century, be produced a

than this very image, in this very verse, which the most noted magazine of Europe has so especially and so contemptuously condemned.

"The Lady Geraldine is, we think, the only poem of its author which is not deficient, considered as an artistical whole. Her constructive ability, as we have already suggested, is either not very remarkable, or has never been properly brought into play: — in truth, her genius is too impetuous for the minuter technicalities of that elaborate Art so needful in the building up of pyramids for immortality. This deficiency,

then -if there be any such is her chief weakness. Her other foibles, although some of them are, in fact, glaring, glare, nevertheless, to no very material ill purpose. There are none which she will not readily dismiss in her future works. She retains them now, perhaps, because unaware of their existence.

Her affectations are unquestionably many, and generally inexcusable. We may, perhaps, tolerate such words as "blé," "chrysm," "nympholeptic," "œnomel," and "chrysopras"-they have at least the merit either of distinct meaning, or of terse and sonorous expression; -but what can be well said in defence of the unnecessary nonsense of "'ware" for "aware of "'bide," for "abide" of "'gins," for "begins of "las" for "alas of "oftly,' ofter," and "oftest," for "often," "more often," and most often or of "erelong” in the sense of "long ago"? That there is authority for the mere words proves nothing; those who employed them in their day would not employ them if writing