So when Coleridge writes a love poem, "Genevieve;" Wordsworth a metaphysical ode, “The Intimations of Immortality;" Shelley a "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty;" and Tennyson a protest against worldliness and aristocratic pride, as in "LocksleyHall" and "Lady Clara Vere de Vere," they all produce remarkable poems, because they do their and poetry's best, and because they find out the heart of the mystery, and show us that alone. Herein do they differ from Whittier, who rarely goes below the surface. True, he generally makes his mark as with a whip of steel, and sometimes cuts into his subject till its blood spouts; but, for the most part, he is too furious and passionate to see what he is doing, and to do his work well; his brain whirls with indignation, and his eyes are blind with tears. He lacks repose, the first essential of greatness. He does not say much that is quotable and rememberable; nothing that "refuses to be forgotten." Men of much less real ability have accomplished much more because they have been calmer, and have blotted and corrected more. Whittier does not blot and correct enough, does not concentrate and crystallize his thoughts, but gives them to the world just as they flow from his own mind. Not that he writes incorrectly, or that he does not finish his compositions in a certain way; but rather that he gives them to us in the first draft. He is too great a master of the technicalities of-writing, too fine a rhetorician, not to write well at first. However bold and free they may otherwise be, his thoughts are always trammeled with rhetoric; there is a certain kind of finish about them which stands instead of the true artistic finish.

Take any of Whittier's poems, select one at random, and find if you can its proper beginning, middle, and end. Stanzas might change places with each other, or be omitted altogether; the order of the thoughts might be reversed-his strongest and best thoughts often come first-the whole poem, in fact, might stand upon its head and be as good as ever.

In common with many other of our native authors, Whittier has endeavored to create an American literature, and has, comparatively speaking, failed, or at least failed in his most ambitious efforts. His American poems, those which embody the early legends and traditions of the country,

are not among his happiest, especially those on Indian subjects. "Mogg Megone," the longest, he himself considers only a framework for sketches of the scenery of New-England and of its early settlers. In portraying the Indian character he has followed the delineations of Church, Mayhew, Charlevoix, and Roger Williams, and, in so doing, has discarded the romance which poets and novelists have thrown around the ill-fated red man. And this, in our opinion, is the cause of his failure. Selecting subjects not of themselves poetical-subjects which only a great poet could make poetical by first making them beautiful and romantic-he at once proceeds to strip them of any little romance or beauty which may have gathered around them from tradition or age, and shows them to us in their naked truth and deformity. To be true to nature he is essentially false to art, forgetting the golden rule—

"What would offend the eye in a good picture The painter casts discreetly in the shade."

Volume after volume of Indian poetry has been written in this country, and no single one has yet made its mark. There is the "Yamoyden" of Sands and his friend Eastman, the "Powhattan" of Seba Smith, the "Tecumseh" of Colton, the "Frontenac" of Street—not to mention Hosmer, and a thousand other nameless scribblers with their forgotten absurdities. Hardly a year passes without adding to the heap of rubbish. For our part we do not believe that there is naturally any poetry around the North American Indians. Pathless forests, full of savage beasts and still more savage men—the former howling and roaring in their dens and caves, the latter shouting war-whoops and brandishing tomahawks, making war upon each other for pastime, scalping the wounded, mangling the slain, and torturing the living enemy by slow fires, and such like savage cruelties, diversifying their enjoyments by beating the helpless squaws and innocent papoose, and, of late years, by drinking fire-water till they become idiotic or crazed-there is not, we say, much poetry around such barbarity and darkness.

Again, what poetry is there in the Indian names with which our poets disfigure their rhymes? Where is the beauty or fitness of such uncouth words as Winnipisseogee, Agioochook, Ammonoosuck,

Pemigewasset, Umbagog, Uncanoonuc, Sachekantacket, Babboosuc, Sondagordee, Squamscott, Piscataquog, and others equally barbarous, in " Mogg Megone" And

and "The Bridal of Pennacook." yet these poems are not without merit, and that of no ordinary kind; their language is strong and rhetorical, their descriptions of natural scenery fresh and in keeping, while the human picturesqueness, if we may use the phrase, is admirable. How distinct, and yet how soft and poetical the following picture :

'Shooting around the winding shores
Of narrow capes, and isles which lie
Slumbering to Ocean's lullaby,
With birchen bark and glancing oars

The red men to their fishing go;
While from their planting-ground is borne
The treasure of the golden corn

By laughing girls, whose dark eyes glow
Wild through the locks that o'er them flow.
The wrinkled squaw, whose toil is done,
Sits on her bearskin in the sun,
Watching the huskers with a smile
For each full ear which swells the pile;
And the old chief, who never more
May bend the bow or pull the oar,
Smokes gravely in his wigwam door,
Or stoutly shapes, with ax of stone,
The arrow-head from flint and bone."

But even better than this is the murder of Mogg Megone, at the close of the first canto of that poem :

"Ruth starts erect-with bloodshot eye,
And lips drawn tight across her teeth,
Showing their lock'd embrace beneath
In the red fire-light-Mogg must die!
Give me the knife!' The outlaw turns,
Shuddering in heart and limb, away—
But fitfully there the hearth-fire burns

And he sees on the wall strange shadows play;
A lifted arm, a tremulous blade,
Are dimly pictured in light and shade,
Plunging down in the darkness! Hark, that cry!
Again and again he sees it fall,

That shadowy arm down the lighted wall! He hears quick footsteps, a shape flits by! The door on its rusted hinges creaks;Ruth, daughter Ruth!' the outlaw shrieks, But no sound comes back; he is standing alone By the mangled corpse of Mogg Megone!" In the lines italicized Whittier held the key of the mystery, and had he been aware of the fact, and capable of using it, he had been from that moment qualified to write a true Indian poem. Not the murder itself, but the shadow about the murder made the tragedy; and not the Indians, but the shadow around the Indians makes the poem. Tennyson could write a fine Indian poem because he could give it the requisite shadow. Witness "The Lotos Eaters:"

"And round about the keel with faces pale, Dark faces pale against that rosy flame, The mild-eyed, melancholy Lotos Eaters came."

There is nothing "mild-eyed” or “melancholy" about our book-Indians; no paling of dark faces, and no rosy flames; but rather extra coats of lamp-black, and a background of darkness, only lighted by burning towns and villages. None of our writers, save Bryant, know how to deal with them; for while all the others place them in their foregrounds, sharp and distinct, he removes them into his background, and into dimness and obscurity. And herein he is wise; for the more they recede from us the more poetical do they become, the mist of distance becoming a halo around them. What was common, and even repulsive, when near, becomes grand and sublime when remote and obscure; for remoteness and obscurity are the essential elements of the sublime.

But whatever might be the poetical merits of "Mogg Megone" and "The Bridal of Pennacock," the measure in which they are written the octosyllabic measure of Scott and Byron's romances—would at last prove fatal to them, as it has already to nearly every poem written in it. The facility, the "fatal facility," with which it can be written, is proof positive that it is not the measure for either a great or beautiful poem.

Something different from either of these two poems, though partaking of the elements of both, as far as prose can,—and far superior to both, if not to any book of the class to which it belongs,—is the "Leaves from Margaret Smith's Journal." The foundation of this school of literary forgeries, viz., the supposed finding of antique journals and other private memoranda, illustrating the past, was begun by the publication of "The Diary of Lady Willoughby," and followed up by "The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell," relating to the life and character of Milton, and "The Household of Sir Thomas More," relating to the life and death of Henry the Eighth's famous Lord Chancellor.

The name of the author or authors of this series we know not, nor whether they preceded Margaret Smith. Be this as it may, they are not a whit superior, exquisite as they certainly are, to our dear New-England maid, and her simple and earnest delineation of men and man

withstand it singly, if no man will help him, regardless of wealth and fame, and all other private considerations-such a man, we say, is a great man; great in victory, and great in defeat. Many fine things could be said in his praise; we ourselves could round off florid rhetorical paragraphs, and fill up the proper adjectives, but we decline so doing; the idea is best in its bare simplicity,—

"And is, when unadorn'd, adorn'd the most."

What Whittier has accomplished in matters of reform, it is impossible to say. All human words and actions are merely seed; the harvest is not yet; but it will come by-and-by, however stony the soil. As for what he has attempted to accomplish, to give even a tolerable idea of it-its name is legion—would require more space than our limits allow. Briefly, he has warred against evil in whatever disguise he has seen it-in the form of old persecution, as in the case of the Puritans and Quakers; in the form of slavery, the world over, but more especially here in America; in the form of sectarianism, arraying creed against creed, and setting creed itself above man; in the form of capital punishment, and all kinds of revenge, and we know not what else, in the shape of politics, and other miscellaneous trifles. Be sure Whittier has not seen an evil without warring against it with all his might; fighting in verse and prose, and in a noble life-the last the best of all. Whittier's last volume of poems, "The Songs of Labor," is, in our opinion, his best. It contains fewer faults and greater excellences; is in a higher and purer school of art, and much nearer our ideal of what poetry should be. Not, indeed, of the highest order, but bearing the same relation to it that the master-pieces of the Flemish school of painting do to the master-pieces of the Italian. Selecting commonplace themes, such as ship-building, shoemaking, cattle-driving, fishing, husking corn, and the felling and towing of timber, he makes them poetical by the fertility of their clustering associations, and the condensed picturesqueness of his imagination. Never before-so far as we can remember in the mass of our poetic memories-did poet stoop so low and rise so high. The Flemish fidelity of Crabbe, the master of this species of writing, is dull and tame in comparison; for he rare

ly gives anything but detail, while Whittier, giving us the same detail, gives us something with it—a softened and mellowed light, and an autumnal richness of coloring. Not the mere fact of ship-building and cattle-driving is so poetical, but the associations which cluster around them :—

"From far-off hills the panting team
For us is toiling near;

For us the raftsmen down the stream
Their island barges steer.
Rings out for us the axman's stroke
In forests old and still,-
For us the century-circled oak
Falls crashing down the hill.

"We see them slowly climb the hill,
Or slow behind it sinking;
Or thronging close, from roadside rill,
Or sunny lakelet drinking.
Now crowding on the narrow road,
In thick and struggling masses,
They glare upon the teamster's load
Or rattling coach that passes.

"Anon with top of horn and tail,

And paw of hoof and bellow,
They leap some farmer's broken pale,
O'er meadow-close, or fallow:
Forth comes the startled good-man; forth
Wife, children, house-dog, sally,
Till once more on their dusty path
The baffled truants rally."

volume are that addressed to Pius the
But, perhaps, the two best poems in the
Ninth, and that on the death of Ebenezer
Elliott. As we have already remarked,
the satire of Whittier is merciless;
in the poem to Pius it seems to have
reached its height, and is in the best
taste-strong, nervous, and classical. The
funeral dirge of Elliott is very noble and
So should
beautiful, full of fire and tears.
a man like Elliott be mourned, and by one
who so much resembles him-the Elliott
of America-John Greenleaf Whittier.

PRAISE AND PRACTICE.—One of the greatest evils of the world is, men praise rather than practice virtue. The praise of honest industry is on every tongue, but it is very rare that the worker is respected more than the drone.

THE COTTAGE HOME. MINE be a cot beside a hill:

A bee-hive's hum shall soothe mine ear; A willowy brook that turns a mill,

With many a fall, shall linger near. The swallow oft, beneath my thatch, Shall twitter from the clay-built nest; Oft shall the pilgrim lift the latch,

And share my meal-a welcome guest. Around my ivied porch shall spring

Each fragrant flower that drinks the dew; And Lucy, at her wheel, shall sing, In russet gown and apron blue.-Rogers.

[For the National Magazine.]
IN MEMORIAM-E. A. B.
My heart aches while, to win relief,
I weave an idyl for my grief.
I feel her near me, yet I know
The leaves crept o'er her long ago.
I cannot think of a fair thing
Unless some hint of her it bring;
Each silver dream and form of
grace
Is soften'd by her tender face.

That face was very fair to see,
So lustrous with her purity.
It had no roses-but the hue

Of lilies, brighten'd with their dew,

You saw the warm thought flushing through!

Her heart did Nature nurse and teach
With soothing scenes and tender speech.
The holy sky bent near to her;
She saw a spirit in the stir

Of dewy woods. The rills that beat
Their mosses with voluptuous feet,
Went dripping music through her thought.
Sweet impulse came to her unsought
From graceful things-and beauty took
A holy meaning in her look.

As angels wander, so went she

In quiet and humility.

The casual gazer could not guess

Of half her vailed loveliness.

The tenderness and sympathy,

The beauty of sincerity,

Quaint thoughts, that nestled fresh and sweet Where only love's responses beat.

True woman was she day by day,

In toil, and hope, and victory.
But best of all, her Saviour led
Her into ways love-garlanded.
Her life was hid with things unseen,
By faith made holy and serene.
She knew what only they can know,
Who live above, but dwell below.

The days are long-we wait and wait,
Patient, but very desolate;

Yet know the good Lord did the best
In giving our beloved rest.

NEW-YORK, 1852.