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sitely beautiful than this delicate creation. It appears like the utterance of a dream. In "The Spanish Student," the affluence of his imagination in images of grace, grandeur, and beauty, is most strikingly manifested. He scatters his wealth, in this production, with a careless munificence, calculated to astonish the "barren rascals" of rhyme. The objection to it, as a play, is its lack of skill or power in the dramatic exhibition of character. But read merely as a poem cast in the form of dialogue, it is one of the most beautiful in American literature. None of his other pieces so well illustrates all his poetical qualities,-his imagination, his fancy, his sentiment, and his manner. It seems to com

prehend the whole extent of his genius.

To write good comic verse is a different thing from writing good comic poetry. A jest or a sharp saying may be easily made to rhyme; but to blend ludicrous ideas with fancy and imagination, and display in their conception and expression the same poetic qualities usually exercised in serious composition, is a rare distinction. Among American poets, we know of no one who excels Holmes in this difficult branch of the art. Many of his pleasant lyrics seem not so much the offspring of wit, as of fancy and sentiment turned in a humorous direction. His manner of satirizing the foibles, follies, vanities, and affectations of conventional life is altogether peculiar and original. He looks at folly and pretension from the highest pinnacle of scorn. They never provoke his indignation, for to him they are too mean to justify anger, and hardly worthy of petulance. His light, glancing irony and fleering sarcasm are the more effective, from the impertinence of his benevolent sympathies. He wonders, hopes, wishes, titters, and cries with his victims. He practices on them the legerdemain of contempt. He kills with a sly stab, and proceeds on his way as if "no

thing in particular" had happened. He picks his teeth which cool unconcern, while looking down on the captives of his wit, as if their destruction conferred no honor upon himself, and was unimportant to the rest of mankind. He makes them ridicule themselves, by giving a voice to their motions and manners. He translates the conceited smirk of the coxcomb into felicitous words. The vacant look and trite talk of the bore he links with subtle analogies. He justifies the egotist unto himself by a series of mocking sophisms. He expresses the voiceless folly and affectation of the ignorant and brainless by cunningly contrived phrases and apt imagery. He idealizes nonsense, pertness, and aspiring dulness. The movement of his wit is so swift, that its presence is known only when it strikes. He will sometimes, as it were, blind the eyes of his victims with diamond dust, and then pelt them pitilessly with scoffing com. pliments. He passes from the sharp, stinging gibe to the most grotesque exaggerations of drollery, with a bewildering rapidity.

"Old

Holmes is also a poet of sentiment and passion. Ironsides," ""The Steamboat," "Qui Vive," and numerous passages of "Poetry," display a lyrical fire and inspiration which should not be allowed to decay for want of care and fuel. In those poems of fancy and sentiment, where the exceeding richness and softness of his diction seem trembling on the verge of meretricious ornament, he is preserved from slipping into Della Cruscanism by the manly energy of his nature and his keen perception of the ridiculous. Those who know him only as a comic lyrist, as the libellous laureate of chirping folly and presumptious egotism, would be sur prised at the clear sweetness and skylark thrill of his serious and sentimental compositions.

Of Willis G. Clark, Mr. Griswold writes :-"His metri

cal writings are all distinguished for a graceful and elegant diction, thoughts morally and poetically beautiful, and chaste and appropriate imagery." This praise is substantiaThere is much purity

ted by the extracts which follow it. and strength of feeling in many of Mr. Clark's poems. Though not marked by much power of imagination, they are replete with fancy and sentiment, and have often a searching pathos and a mournful beauty which find their way quietly to the heart.

C. P. Cranch has worked with some success in the transcendental vein. The "Hours," "Stanzas," "My Thoughts," are specimens of the resul's of his labors. William Pitt Palmer, whose name we see occasionally flitting through the periodical world, has written a poem on "Light,” in the stanza of Shelley's Cloud," far superior in diction and imagery to a large portion of our miscellaneous poetry. Mr. Griswold would have done well to place him in the body of the volume, instead of the Appendix. He is worthy of a more prominent station than he occupies.

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John Greenleaf Whittier is one of our most characteristic poets. Few excel him in warmth of temperament. Old John Dennis, the Gifford of Queen Anne's time, describes genius as caused "by a furious joy and pride of soul on the conception of an extraordinary hint. Many men have their hints, without their motions of fury and pride of soul, because they want fire enough to agitate their spirits; and these we call cold writers. Others, who have a great deal of fire, but have not excellent organs, feel the forementioned motions, without the extraordinary hints, and these we call fustian writers." Whittier has this "furious joy" and pride of soul," even when the "hints" are not extraordinary; but he never falls into absolute rant and fustian. A common thought comes from his pen "rammed with life."

He seems, in some of his lyrics, to pour out his blood with his lines. There is a rush of passion in his verse, which sweeps every thing along with it. His fancy and imagination can hardly keep pace with their fiery companion. His vehement sensibility will not allow the inventive faculties fully to complete what they may have commenced. The stormy qualities of his mind, acting at the suggestions of conscience, produce a kind of military morality which uses all the deadly arms of verbal warfare. When well intrenched in abstract right, he always assumes a hostile attitude towards the champions or exponents of abstract wrong. He aims to give his song "a rude martial tone,—a blow in every thought." His invective is merciless and undistinguishing; he almost screams with rage and indignation. Occasionally, the extreme bitterness and fierceness of his declamation degenerate into mere shrewishness and scolding. Of late, he has somewhat pruned the rank luxuriance of his style. The "Lines on the Death of Lucy Hooper," Raphael," ""Follen," " Memories," among the poems in his last published volume, are indications that his mind is not without subtle imagination and delicate feeling, as well as truculent strength and fierce energy. There is much spiritual beauty in these little compositions. It is difficult to conceive how the man who can pour out such torrents of passionate feeling, and who evidently loves to see his words. tipped with fire, can at the same time write such graceful and thoughtful stanzas as these :——

66

"A beautiful and happy girl

With step as soft as summer air,
And fresh young lip and brow of pearl,
Shadowed by many a careless curl,

Of unconfined and flowing hair:

A seeming child in every thing,

Save thoughtful brow and ripening charms,
As Nature wears the smile of Spring

When sinking into Summer's arms.

"How thrills once more the lengthening chain
Of memory at the thought of thee!
Old hopes, that long in dust have lain,
Old dreams, come thronging back again,
And boyhood lives again in me;

I feel its glow upon my cheek,

Its fulness of the heart is mine,
As when I learned to hear thee speak,
Or raised my doubtful eye to thine.

"I hear again thy low replies,

I feel thy arm within my own,
And timidly again uprise

The fringed lids of hazel eyes,

With soft brown tresses overblown.

Ah! memories of sweet summer eves,
Of moonlit wave and willowy way,

Of stars and flowers and dewy leaves,
And smiles and tones more dear than they!

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Whittier has the soul of a great poet, and we should not be surprised if he attained the height of excellence in his art. The faults of his mind, springing from excessive flu.

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