"Yes, let my fancy fondly wrap
My youth in its decline,

And riot in the rosy lap

Of thoughts that once were mine,
And give the worm my little store,

When the last reader reads no more!"

Now this is exquisite poetry. It melts into the heart like the melody of a dream when that heart is aching; and had our author written nothing else we should not soon forget him. The verse beginning

'And when my name no more is heard,'

is perfect; and what Coleridge says of Shakspeare, that you cannot add or diminish by a word to advantage, is true here. Would any one believe after reading the above beautiful poem, that the same pen could trace the following, speaking of an old man—

"My grandmamma has said,-
Poor old lady, she is dead,

Long ago,

That he had a Roman nose,

And his cheek was like a rose
In the snow.

"But now his nose is thin,

And it rests upon his chin
Like a staff,

And a crook is in his back,
And a melancholy crack
In his laugh.

"I know it is a sin

For me to sit and grin

At him here;

But the old three-cornered hat,

And the breeches, and all that,
Are so queer!"

or this, of a girl's losing her lover:

'Down fell that pretty innocent as falls a snow white lamb,
Her hair drooped round her pallid cheeks like sea-weed on a clam ;'

or this, entitled

' THE HEIGHT OF THE RIDICULOUS.'

"I wrote some lines once on a time
In wondrous merry mood,
And thought, as usual, men would say
They were exceeding good.

"They were so queer, so very queer,
I laughed as I would die;

Albeit, in the general way,
A sober man am I.

C I called my servant, and he came ;
How kind it was of him,

To mind a slender man like me,
He of the mighty limb.

"These to the printer,' I exclaimed,
And, in my humorous way,
I added (as a trifling jest,)
'There'll be the devil to pay.'

"He took the paper, and I watched,
And saw him peep within;
At the first line he read, his face
Was all upon the grin.

"He read the next; the grin grew broad,

And shot from ear to ear;

He read the third; a chuckling noise

I now began to hear.

"The fourth; he broke into a roar;

The fifth; his waistband split;

The sixth; he burst five buttons off,

And tumbled in a fit.

"Ten days and nights, with sleepless eye,

I watched that wretched man,

And since, I never dare to write

As funny as I can."

Ye ghosts of Momus! look at it. The fellow holding his sides, frothing like a puppy got the hydrophobia, and the breeches flying. There's a scene for you to give tragedy the hysterics, or set the carved face on a brass door-knocker grinning. Well done, Mr. Holmes.

We take occasion here to defend ourselves for not having quoted more; especially as the book is made up of such opposites, and would have illustrated our subject as we went along. But we altogether object to this, and hold it to be a grievous error in reviewing. If we were writing for columns that could afford to pay well, we would do so perhaps; the thing helps to fill out, which is the reason doubtless why reviewers dose us so, and that their papers generally are worth nothing. Reviewers take no pains to analyze books, sum up the subjects, and give you the mind brought out there; but it is dashing helter skelter, plastering here and daubing there, a few high flown words, about so much censure, concluding the whole with copious extracts, and this they call a review and get a dollar a page for it, quotha-pah! we object to this. We are young, truly, and should therefore be modest. But we deem a review the spot for a reviewer's wits, not the reviewed altogether; that he who does not come to the work with this view had better let it alone; and that

he were far better employed teaching adults black letter lines, or the initiatory mysteries of the horn-book. A review of a work ought to be a discussion of the principles of the work, which the author has chosen to show his judgment on; always allowing, of course, sufficient room to do the author justice, and give the public just so much knowledge as they shall be able to judge whether or not to buy him. This we believe the proper object of reviews ; such would be instructing; the points and principles of a volume may be condensed into a few pages, and a discussion take place over them that should elicit much information.

We come now to the most disagreeable part of our work, viz. to censure; but, by the way, we think the why and wherefore' of our fault-finding will be that which reviews generally have passed over. We shall not stop to point out certain obscurities we have heard urged, though they may be urged perhaps with some propriety. There are a few passages which require to be re-read to be understood clearly; but when the reader will explain certain passages in Milton, and hundreds of them in Byron we can point him to, why then let him blame Mr. Holmes if he chooses. Nor shall we stop to mention an evident failure, in the winding up of one or two of the humorous pieces. A humorous composition, one that hits, one that gets hold of you, one that makes you laugh in resolution's spite;' such a poem must open ambiguously, begin to smoke in the middle, and go off with a flash. As a general thing he is very successful. As a specimen of genuine English humor we instance 'The Music Grinders,' and the Oysterman,' and for one evincing the true Elian spirit, we instance The Song of the Tread-mill.' In fact this little morceau gave us as much pleasure as some of Lamb's finest. We wish the last verse was better however-still, it is tart, pithy, But the conclusion of the Mysterious and gloriously humorous. Visitor' is altogether unworthy the body of that poem; and, as we understand it, the lines to the Portrait of a Lady,' are but little better. But for all this we are well compensated on the whole by the rest of the book, so we let it go. But what we have to blame our poet for is, a fault which himself has confessed, viz. the admission of certain confessedly mediocre poems, to fill out the volume. Our remarks shall be rather severe here, as the thing particularly offends us. In the preface he says, 'having written comparatively little, and nothing of late years until within a few months, I could ill afford to be over nice in my selection.' Now this is a most odious confession-odious because a man of his genius has no business to make it, and odious because the last part of the statement is false. He can afford to be nice in his selection: however, if he cannot, he has no business to select at all. The thought appendaged, also, that the publisher must be gratified, is abominable-just as if, in building up the cause of literature, the object is to well line the pockets of book-sellers. This is twisting things about with a ven

C

geance. We always thought, that the supporting of publishers was a matter altogether incidental to the great work of advancing intelligence, and that the credit of writing a sound book took the precedence of the printing it. However it is one of the improvements of the age. We'll wager our poet any thing that we can pick out the very pieces inserted to swell the volume. What right have 'La Grisette,' 'A Souvenir,' 'My Companions,' 'The proud Pedestrian,' and Evening, by a tailor'-what right have these by the side of the splendid opening on the fourth page, 'The last Reader,' 'The last Leaf,' To a Katydid,' 'The dying Seneca,' and twenty others we could mention? There never was such a coupling since the days of Job. It may be said, a man has a right to do what he likes with his own-we deny it totally and forever. A man who can write good poetry, has no more business to write bad, than a man whose character is up for truth telling, gets a charter thereby to lie when he chooses. The man who professes to be good, and the man who has written a good book, have both committed themselves; and by the very necessity of the case, become thereupon the more amenable to exact criticism. Every deviation for the wrong, subtracts just so much from the sum total of the right; and the literary man will be just so far degrade in public opinion, as the adjunct of just so much good writing had lifted him. Besides, a man owes the public civility at least; and, in our opinion, he fails as far who gives you a bad book as if he spit in your face. However, these remarks apply to every poet in the country-one excepted-therefore let our poet forget not that he suffers in good company. The truth of it is, we like Mr. Holmes; like his manner and method, and that too exceedingly, therefore we don't like to see him make himself unlikeable. We would have all our poets as fastidious as Halleck is: for if a man has written well, though he write no more, there will always be supposed the ability remaining; and we believe mind is valued generally as we value good land, rather by its capability to produce than the quantity of production.

Mr. Holmes has done well in this-his first volume we believe— and we hope soon to see him in another. His fresh and manly style of writing, we hesitate not in saying is very creditable to our literature, and will help refute the notion so vigorously cried up by a class of us, that this country is no place for poetry.

We cannot forbear indulging in a few reflections here on the present state of our poetry in this particular. As to the charge that we have no poetry that our country cannot produce it-that the elements of it are not here-that we must have ruined temples, dilapidated towers, and a dark and dim antiquity to back them-as to all this, we oppose the answer ;-go up among our loftiest mountainsamong their caves, and crags, and precipices-seat yourself on the ruggedest peak of the huge Allegany-see the long sweep of wide and rolling forest tops around you-mark their knotted arms twisted

up in many a wild convolution-think of that long and mighty line of dead warriors slumbering beneath them-imagine to yourself the wars and blood-shed, strifes and commotions also, before the axe of the white man came among them-then send your eye away beyond these forests-see our mighty lakes flashing here, our sweeping prairies and lone savannas stretching there-hear our mountain streams, our cataracts, and the fearful dash of the ocean as it breaks against our country-look at all these, and then if you can, say we lack the elements of poetry. The truth of it is, there is no lack of matter, if we had the spirit to give it life-there is no lack of material, if we only had the power to mould it into beauty. The fanes and crumbling palaces of Europe-grassed as they are and matted with the vines of centuries-rendered sacred by a splendid ancestry-and aided by that rich and solemn awe which tradition flings about them-with all these, they cannot boast the fire and force and freedom, which burst upon us in our own country-which burst upon us in our scenery' which burst upon us in our history-which burst upon us in our liberty-which burst upon us in our great and glorious institutionswhich, by the consent of all, are the wonder of mankind. We admit they were fitted for other days-we admit that the mind, slumbering under the darkness and despotism of a galling superstition, must be fired at such altars—but we will not admit, that in a day of freedom like this, and in a country of freedom like this-in a day and in a country of social, moral, and political freedom, beyond what the world has known-that in such a day, and under such circumstances, our poetry must be trammeled likewise-and that the human mind can find nothing to feed on, but the poor dust and ashes of a besotted by-gone age. There is a class of minds who are always wrong-there is a class of minds who are always in darknessthere is a class of minds who are always clinging to the ignorance of the past-who can see nothing in the wonders and improvements of the age, beyond a useless innovation-the evidence rather of the imbecility than the glory of mankind. But the march of the great mass will be onward in spite of them-the mind will wake up though it be fettered like Prometheus-that living something, that yearning hope, that undefined mystery in us which speaks of immortality, will struggle and struggle upward-till at length having emerged from the superstition of ages, it will claim its splendid birth-right. Then shall begin that glorious period of the world-then shall begin a school more brilliant than the past-then shall the lyre find a hand that can sweep it like a master-and a brighter congregation of stars may then bend over our hemisphere, than the world has yet known. Let us hurl back then the charge of our literary imbecility-let us not tamely bear these jests as they come venomed from a foreign press; but let us, feeling our strength, boldly march to the conflict, and trust we may yet stand as high in a literary point of view, as we now stand renowned for our patriotic virtue.

Yale College.