In the meantime, here is a passage from another little ballad of mine, called Lenore, first published in 1830: How shall the ritual, then, be read? the requiem how be sung By you, by yours, the evil eye, by yours, the slanderous tongue That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young? And here is a passage from The Penance of Roland, by Henry B. Hirst, published in Graham's Magazine for January, 1848: Mine the tongue that wrought this evil, mine the false and slanderous tongue That done to death the Lady Gwineth-Oh, my soul is sadly wrong! "Demon! devil," groaned the warrior, "devil of the evil eye!" Now my objection to all this is not that Mr. Hirst has appropriated my property (I am fond of a nice phrase), but that he has not done it so cleverly as I could wish. Many a lecture, on literary topics have I given Mr. H.; and I confess that, in general, he has adopted my advice so implicitly that his poems, upon the whole, are little more than our conversations done into verse. "Steal, dear Endymion," I used to say to him, "for very well do I know you can't help it; and the more you put in your book that is not your own, why, the better your book will be; but be cautious and steal with an air. In regard to myself, you need give yourself no trouble about me. I shall always feel honored in being of use to you; and provided you purloin my poetry in a reputable manner, you are welcome to just as much of it as you (who are a very weak little man) can conveniently carry away." So far, let me confess, Mr. Hirst has behaved remarkably well in largely availing himself of the privilege thus accorded; but, in the case now at issue, he stands in need of some gentle rebuke. I do not object to his stealing my verses; but I do object to his stealing them in bad grammar. My quarrel with him is not, in short, that he did this thing, but that he has went and done did it. A William Wallace MONG our men of genius whom, because they are men of genius, we neglect, let me not fail to mention William Wallace, of Kentucky. Had Mr. W. been born under the wings of that ineffable buzzard, the North American Review, his unusual merits would long ago have been blazoned to the world, as the far inferior merits of Sprague, Dana, and others of like calibre have already been blazoned. Neither of these gentlemen has written a poem worthy to be compared with The Chant of a Soul, published in the Union Magazine for November, 1848. It is a noble composition throughout; imaginative, eloquent, full of dignity, and well sustained. It abounds in detached images of high merit; for example, Your early splendor's gone Like stars into a cloud withdrawn Like music laid asleep In dried up fountains. Enough, I am, and shall not choose to die. No matter what our future fate may be, And Truth, arising from yon deep, Is plain as a white statue on a tall, dark steep. Then The earth and heaven were fair, While only less than Gods seemed all my fellow men. Oh, the delight, the gladness, The sense, yet love, of madness, The glorious choral exultations, The far-off sounding of the banded nations, The wings of angels in melodious sweeps The very dead astir within their coffined deeps, The dreamy veil that wrapt the star and sod A swathe of purple, gold, and amethyst, And, luminous behind the billowing mist Something that looked to my young eyes like God. I admit that the defect charged by an envious critic upon Bayard Taylor-the sin of excessive rhetoricianism—is, in some measure, chargeable to Wallace. He now and then permits enthusiasm to hurry him into bombast; but at this point he is rapidly improving, and, if not disheartened by the cowardly neglect of those who dare not praise a poetical aspirant with genius and without influence, will soon rank as one of the very noblest of American poets. In fact, he is so now. E. P. Whipple and other Critics UR most analytic, if not altogether our best, critic (Mr. Whipple, perhaps, excepted) is Mr. William A. Jones, author of The Analyst. How he would write elaborate criticisms I cannot say; but his summary judgments of authors are, in general, discriminative and profound. In fact, his papers on Emerson and on Macaulay, published in Arcturus, are better than merely "profound," if we take the word in its now desecrated sense; for they are at once pointed, lucid, and just; as summaries, leaving nothing to be desired. Mr. Whipple has less analysis, and far less candor, as his depreciation of Jane Eyre will show; but he excels Mr. Jones in sensibility to beauty, and is thus the better critic of poetry. I have read nothing finer in its way than his eulogy on Tennyson. I say " eulogy," for the essay in question is unhappily little more; and Mr. Whipple's paper on Miss Barrett was nothing more. He has less discrimination than Mr. Jones, |