of the beauties of the "poetlings" of the present day, when they are trying all they can. Here is a powerful aspiration which might have been placed in the mouth of Leicester or Sir Walter Raleigh in Sheridan's immortal Spanish Armada, or rather of Whiskerandos or the Beefeater aspiring to the hand of the

divine Tilburina.

O may my spirit on hope's ladder climb

From hungry nothing up to star-pack'd space,
Thence strain on tip-toe, to thy love beyond
The only heaven I ask !-P. 78.

The following is delicious:

Her father's veins ran noble blood,
His hall rose mid the trees;

Like a sun-beam she came and went
Mid the white cottages.

He pour'd his frenzy forth in song,
Bright heir of tears and praises!
Now resteth that unquiet heart

Beneath the quiet daisies.-Pp. 22, 23.

Is it possible to read this and avoid thinking of that pathetic epitaph:

Here I lies, and my spirit at ASE is,

With the tips of my toes and the end of my nose
Turn'd up to the roots of the daisies?

Canning, in ridicule of a poet who crowded his verse with similes wherein there was no similarity, imitated him thus :

As Sampson lost his strength

By cutting off his hair,

So I repair my strength

By breathing Hampstead air.

This would be no burlesque upon Alexander Smith. Take the following:

I am so cursed, and wear within my soul A pang as fierce as Dives, drowsed with wine, Lipping his leman in luxurious dreams.-P. 3. Does any reader see the similitude? The subject is not one that will bear analysis; but we confess that even if we knew exactly how a "pang" were "worn" we should not have looked for a pattern pang in such a set of circumstances. We have not space, however, to follow out this peculiarity of our author; but although there are many pretty images, there is not one true or happy simile in the whole volume.

Page 11. We read of a startled lover upon whom a "Thought comes streaming.

The poet's spirit taking captive the spheres "to wring their riches out," is a bold conception. In the next stanza he says, or sings: I'll wing me through creation like a bee, And taste the gleaming spheres.

This is bolder still. We fear the young gentleman has not yet learned that the moon is not made of green cheese, and that he speculates upon it as an edible. But perhaps we come under the following description :

Most souls are shut

By sense from grandeur, as a man who snores, Night-capped and wrapt in blankets to the nose, Is shut out from the night which, like a sea, Breaketh for ever on a strand of stars.-P. 17. Perhaps so; but the rattle of Mr. Smith's nonsense makes it difficult for any poor soul to sleep.

We shall give a few more specimens of this class of writing. Let them speak for themselves to those who have taste and judgment, or even common perception.

When the dark dumb earth
Lay on her back and watch'd the shining stars.-P. 19.
A poet sat in his antique room,

His lamp the valley king'd.-P. 21.
From his heart he unclasp'd his love,
Amid the trembling trees,
And sent it to the Lady Blanche

On winged poesies.-Ibid.

The trees were gazing up into the sky,

Their bare arms stretch'd in prayer for the snows.—

Why should trees pray for snows?

As a sun-steed wild-eyed, and meteor-maned, Neighing the reeling stars, is 'bove a hack With sluggish veins of mud.—Ibid.

P. 24.

As a stern swordsman grasps his keenest blade.-P. 25.

If he did he would certainly cut his fingers. Were she plain night I'd pack her with my stars.-P. 42.

Assuredly, if he had any he might pack his "stars"-French or Guelphic-and also his garters, in his portmanteau; but packing his lady with stars suggests the idea of a dindon aux truffes, which we should decidedly prefer to a dame aux étoiles.

Here is a notion for the Peace Society :-
this quiet land of health
By gentle pagans filled, whose red blood ran
Healthy and cool as milk-pure, simple men.-

All shook and trembled in unstedfast light,
And from the centre blazed the angry sun,
Stern as the unlashed eye of God, a glare

O'er evening city with its boom of sin.-P. 52. We have heard of various booms, including the boom of the bittern, and the boomerang; but the "boom of sin" is a new boom, made expressly for the author's Argo.

Here for hours we hang

O'er the fine pants and trembles of a line.-Pp. 52, 53. This must be a clothes-line. Bard of Moses! What is meant, p. 59, by Indian darks? Is it, can it be, an abbreviation for "darkies ?" P. 63

Mad spoomings to the frighted stars

To fledge with music, wings of heavy noon,
I'll sing some verses that he sent to me :-Ibid.
Thy faintest smile out-prices the swelled wombs
Of fleets, rich glutted.-Pp. 72, 73.

Here it is evident that Mr. Smith had a quaintly exquisite passage in Shakspeare's Midsummer Night's Dream "dim-visaged"

that the author had read the lines of Shelley to an Indian air, and Phillips' immortal translation of the φαινεταί μοι κήνος ἴσος θεοῖσιν. But how faint a reflex is contained in Walter's thirty-two lines:

I clasp thy waist, I feel thy bosom's beat:
O kiss me into faintness sweet and dim!
Thou leanest to me as a swelling peach,
Full-juiced and mellow, leaneth to the taker's reach.
Thy hair is loosen'd by that kiss you gave:
It floods my shoulders o'er;
Another yet!

I feel thy clasping arms; my cheek is wet
With thy rich tears. One kiss! sweet, sweet,
Another yet!"—P. 129.

Mr. Smith's "Another yet!" cannot fail to suggest the

"Da mî basia mille, deinde centum

Dein mille altera, dein secunda centum
Dein usque altera mille-

Of Catullus. But how poor and diluted is
his strain to that which the ancients sang.
Who that remembers the following would

It must be remembered that he is babbling of 66 Indian morn." Let us see.

an

Tita. His mother was a vot'ress of my order;
And in the spicèd Indian air, by night
Full often hath she gossip'd by my side;
And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands,
Marking the embark'd traders on the flood,
When we have laugh'd to see the sails conceive,
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind:
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
(Following her womb, then rich with my young
squire),

Would imitate, and sail upon the land
As from a voyage, rich with merchandize."-
Mid. Night's Dream, Act ii. Sc. 2.

But Mr. Smith swells his ships in a different manner. He would burst their holds,

not fill their sails; and the result would be the loss of all Messrs. Green's and Lindsay's vessels, and the ruin of many gentlemen at "Lloyds." To stand up in the ruins of a man's own heart must be a difficult process, which we should imagine even Mr. Bunn would scarcely contemplate; yet Mr. Smith shrinks not from such a metaphysical catastrophe:

If thy rich heart is like a palace shattered, Stand up amid the ruins of thy heart. Surely this was borrowed from one of Castlereagh's vivid catachreses? "To give the hydra-head of rebellion a rap over the knuckles" is nothing to it.

At p. 127 there is a very warm lyric which reminds us of some in Mr. Bailey's "Festus." It is extremely intense. There is a pretty line in it :

Thy large dark eyes are wide upon my brow. But we cannot say more of it than that it is

weakness

Qualis nox fuit illa, di diæque

Quam mollis torus. Hausimus calentes

Et transfudimus hinc et illinc labellis
Errantes animas.

Let those who like this style of poetry, if Spanish scholars, betake themselves to Garcilasso de la Vega; or, if simply classical, there is Tibullus

Et dare anhelatim pugnantibus oscula labris,
Oscula;

or Claudian's couplet :

labris animum conciliantibus Alternum rapiat morsus anhelitum.

These are true poet-laureates of the kissthese and others, from Ovid and Johannes Secundus to Hafiz and Anacreon Moore. Mr. Smith cannot afford to enter the lists with them. Do we exaggerate his aim? Let us see.

By the sea-shore and the ships,
'Neath the stars, I sat with Clari;
Her silken boddice was unlaced,

My arm was trembling round her waist;
I pluck'd the joys upon her lips—
Joys, though pluck'd, still grow again.

*

*

* A teaspoonful of Cornelius Gallius against an Imperial quart of amatory "Life Drama.”

Pande, puella, genas roseas
Perfusas rubro purpurea Tyricae ;
Porrige labra, labra corallina;
Da columbatim mitia basia
Sugis amentis partem animi.
Which we will endeavour to render thus-

Let thy soft cheek of Tyrian bloom,
Now deepen in its warm perfume;
To mine thy lips' wet coral stretch,
My sobbing breath I scarce can fetch :
Sweetly repeat the billing bliss,
You drink my soul in every kiss.

Oh, that death would let me tarry,
Like a dewdrop on a flower,
Ever on those lips.-Pp. 60, 61.

We submit that, in reference to classical pruriencies, these lines are as vulgarly suggestive as ordinary Poses plastiques compared to the statues of Praxiteles, or the idealisations of the divine Titian. As to the "sea-shore and the ships," it must, yes, it must have been at Brighton where the poet "sat with Clari." Our author's love-songs are, however, about equal to one in a foolish novel we reviewed not long since, entitled Blondelle, which created some interest in London circles by its licentious impertinence.

It is a poor apology for all this stuff that Mr. Smith can write a great deal better when he confines himself to sense, grammar, and good morals.

WALTER (to his mistress).

Thou noble soul,

Teach me, if thou art nearer God than I!
My life was a long dream when I awoke
Duty stood like an angel in my path,
And seem'd so terrible, I could have turned
Into my yesterdays, and wandered back
To distant childhood, and gone out to God
By the gate of birth, not death. Lift, lift me up
By thy sweet inspiration, as the tide

Lifts up a stranded boat upon the beach.

I will go forth 'mong men, not mailed in scorn,
But in the armour of a pure intent.
Great duties and great songs,

And whether crowned or crownless, when I fall
It matters not, so as God's work is done.
I've learn'd to prize the quiet lightning deed,
Not the applauding thunder at its heels
Which men call Fame.-P. 201,

Had Mr. Smith written all like this, he would, it is possible, have received less sudden praise, but he would have been more of a poet. He might have remained "crownless;" but is the wreath he has won by the nonsense he has written worth the purchase of a summernoon?

The length at which we have reviewed this "poet," is not so much out of compliment or blame to him, as reproach to his critics. It is difficult to determine whether he sins through youth and want of discipline, or from poverty of imagination; as one who vainly cuts himself with knives that his god may come. In either case, we may be permitted to remark, since the effect is the same, that if poetry be not precisely the felicitous utterance of common ideas, it does not consist in disguising abstruse thoughts in tortured language. This is the fault and the stumbling-block of the day. Poets fancy it difficult to say any thing new. They do not know that the wondrous power of transposition exhibited by colours, notes of music, and figures, are applicable to words and ideas. They should forget their readers

66

No one may

more, and write less for effect. hope successfully to win the Muse by falling into a fit and frothing at the mouth, though he may for a time impose upon the vulgar. He who would snatch fame from the stars must not be ever on the stretch to avoid mediocrity ander Smith as others have done would only by artificial extravagance. To praise Alexbe to betray him into further imperfections. of blasphemy and bathos, and to plunge into It might urge his Pegasus to bolt over plains the dirty waters of licentiousness. Let him ponder over the fate of Icarus, who approached sun, moon, and stars too nearly, until the first melted all the wax from his wings, and he fell into the very "seas "whose beauties he fancied himself securely admiring. Poor Keats is said to have been killed by a cruel article in a venerable contemporary. We believe that had his constitution been good he would have survived the infliction. Alexander Smith incurs an opposite danger. It is enough to turn the head of any young person aspiring to be a poet. At present we are hardly prepared to say whether he be likely hereafter to become one or not. He has, it is true, occasionally given by no means ordinary evidences of power. So have others in their generation, who have been meteors rather than stars, and shone like the fireworks of a night rather than those glorious beacons streaming from past to future with a steady light. Above all, let him read books and look on men and nature. Even genius must have knowledge to work with: the kaleidoscope cannot form new images without its bits of glass and coloured beads. It is too painfully apparent, at present that our poet is illiterate illiterate in books, in nature, and in mankind.

All we know

Let us assure Mr. Smith that the persons most likely to attack him ere long are the very same who have so extravagantly lauded his crude Life Drama. Their doing so will be the best sign of his improvement and the earliest symptom of his corrected taste. at present is, that the rubbish part of Shelley was simple obscurity; that Byron, Campbell, Grey, Pope, Milton, Shakspeare, or Spenser, never wrote such trash as that which he has perpetrated, and which may be found heaped through his Life Drama, with but few diamonds, mostly of indifferent water, scattered here and there upon it.

If Alexander Smith become a man and a poet, he may yet live to thank us. We assure him that we heartily wish him well, and shall be the first to greet, with warm admiration, what we still hope to see a better and nobler effort, worthy of a poetical mind.