Chapter XI: Front Matter (11)

"Still young and fine! but what is still in view
We slight as old and soil'd, though fresh and new.
How bright wert thou, when Shem's admiring eye
Thy burnisht, flaming Arch did first descry!
When Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot,
The youthful world's gray fathers in one knot,
Did with intentive looks watch every hour
For thy new light, and trembled at each shower!
When thou dost shine darkness looks white and fair,
Forms turn to Musick, clouds to smiles and air:
Rain gently spends his honey-drops, and pours
Balm on the cleft earth, milk on grass and flowers.
Bright pledge of peace and Sunshine! the sure tye
Of thy Lord's hand, the object[47] of His eye!
When I behold thee, though my light be dim,
Distant and low, I can in thine see Him
Who looks upon thee from His glorious throne,
And mindes the Covenant 'twixt _All_ and _One_."

[47] Gen. ix. 16.

What a knot of the gray fathers!

"Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot!"

Our readers will see whence Campbell stole, and how he spoiled in the stealing (by omitting the word "youthful"), the well-known line in his "Rainbow"--

"How came the world's gray fathers forth
To view the sacred sign."

Campbell did not disdain to take this, and no one will say much against him, though it looks ill, occurring in a poem on the rainbow; but we cannot so easily forgive him for saying that "Vaughan is one of the harshest even of the inferior order of conceit, having some few scattered thoughts that meet our eye amidst his harsh pages, like wild flowers on a barren heath."

"Rules and Lessons" is his longest and one of his best poems; but we must send our readers to the book itself, where they will find much to make them grateful to "The Silurist" and to Mr. Pickering, who has already done such good service for the best of our elder literature.

We have said little about the deep godliness, the spiritual Christianity, with which every poem is penetrated and quickened. Those who can detect and relish this best, will not be the worse pleased at our saying little about it. Vaughan's religion is deep, lively, personal, tender, kindly, impassioned, temperate, central. His religion grows up, effloresces into the ideas and forms of poetry as naturally, as noiselessly, as beautifully as the life of the unseen seed finds its way up into the "bright consummate flower."

* * * * *

Of "IX. Poems by V.," we would say with the _Quarterly_, {baia men alla RHODA}. They combine rare excellences; the concentration, the finish, the gravity of a man's thought, with the tenderness, the insight, the constitutional sorrowfulness of a woman's--her purity, her passionateness, her delicate and keen sense and expression. We confess we would rather have been the author of any one of the nine poems in this little volume, than of the somewhat tremendous, absurd, raw, loud, and fuliginous "Festus," with his many thousands of lines and his amazing reputation, his bad English, bad religion, bad philosophy, and very bad jokes--his "buttered thunder" (this is his own phrase), and his poor devil of a Lucifer--we would, we repeat (having in this our _subita ac saeva indignatio_ run ourselves a little out of breath), as much rather keep company with "V." than with Mr. Bailey, as we would prefer going to sea for _pleasure_, in a trim little yacht, with its free motions, its quiet, its cleanliness, to taking a state berth in some Fire-King steamer of one thousand horse-power, with his mighty and troublous throb, his smoke, his exasperated steam, his clangor, and fire and fury, his oils and smells.

Had we time, and were this the fit place, we could, we think, make something out of this comparison of the boat with its sail and its rudder, and the unseen, wayward, serviceable winds playing about it, inspiring it, and swaying its course,--and the iron steamer, with its machinery, its coarse energy, its noises and philosophy, its ungainly build and gait, its perilousness from within; and we think we could show how much of what Aristotle, Lord Jeffrey, Charles Lamb, or Edmund Burke would have called genuine poetry there is in the slender "V.," and how little in the big "Festus." We have made repeated attempts, but we cannot get through this poem. It beats us. We must want the _Festus_ sense. Some of our best friends, with whom we generally agree on such matters, are distressed for us, and repeat long passages with great energy and apparent intelligence and satisfaction. Meanwhile, having read the six pages of public opinion at the end of the third and People's edition, we take it for granted that it is a great performance, that, to use one of the author's own words, there is a mighty "_somethingness_" about it--and we can entirely acquiesce in the quotation from _The Sunday Times_, that they "read it with astonishment, and closed it with bewilderment." It would appear from these opinions, which from their intensity, variety, and number (upwards of 50), are curious signs of the times, that Mr. Bailey has not so much improved on, as happily superseded the authors of Job and Ecclesiastes, of the Divine Comedy, of Paradise Lost and Regained, of Dr. Faustus, Hamlet, and Faust, of Don Juan, the Course of Time, St. Leon, the Jolly Beggars, and the Loves of the Angels.

He is more sublime and simple than Job--more royally witty and wise, more to the quick and the point than Solomon--more picturesque, more intense, more pathetic than Dante--more Miltonic (we have no other word) than Milton--more dreadful, more curiously blasphemous, more sonorous than Marlowe--more worldly-wise and clever, and intellectually _svelt_ than Goethe. More passionate, more eloquent, more impudent than Byron--more orthodox, more edifying, more precocious than Pollok--more absorptive and inveterate than Godwin; and more hearty and tender, more of love and manhood all compact than Burns--more gay than Moore--more {myrianous} than Shakspeare.

It may be so. We have made repeated and resolute incursions in various directions into his torrid zone, but have always come out greatly scorched and stunned and affronted. Never before did we come across such an amount of energetic and tremendous words, going "sounding on their dim and perilous way," like a cataract at midnight--not flowing like a stream, nor leaping like a clear waterfall, but always among breakers--roaring and tearing and tempesting with a sort of transcendental din; and then what power of energizing and speaking, and philosophizing and preaching, and laughing and joking and love-making, _in vacuo_! As far as we can judge, and as far as we can keep our senses in such a region, it seems to us not a poem at all, hardly even poetical--but rather the materials for a poem, made up of science, religion, and love, the (very raw) materials of a structure--as if the bricks and mortar, and lath and plaster, and furniture, and fire and fuel and meat and drink, and inhabitants male and female, of a house were all mixed "through other" in one enormous _imbroglio_. It is a sort of fire-mist, out of which poetry, like a star, might by curdling, condensation, crystallization, have been developed, after much purging, refining, and cooling, much time and pains. Mr. Bailey is, we believe, still a young man full of energy--full, we doubt not, of great and good aims; let him read over a passage, we dare say he knows it well, in the second book of Milton on Church Government, he will there, among many other things worthy of his regard, find that "the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's thoughts from within," which is the haunt and main region of his song, may be "painted out and described" with "_a solid and treatable smoothness_." If he paint out and describe after this manner, he may yet more than make up for this sin of his youth; and let him take our word for it and fling away nine tenths of his adjectives, and in the words of Old Shirley--

"Compose his poem clean without 'em.
A row of stately SUBSTANTIVES would march
Like Switzers, and bear all the fields before 'em;
Carry their weight; show fair, like Deeds enroll'd;
Not Writs, that are first made and after filed.
Thence first came up the title of Blank Verse;--
You know, sir, what Blank signifies;--when the sense,
First framed, is tied with adjectives like points,
Hang 't, 'tis pedantic vulgar poetry.
_Let children, when they versify, stick here
And there, these piddling words for want of matter.
Poets write masculine numbers._"

Here are some of "V.'s" Roses--

THE GRAVE.

"I stood within the grave's o'ershadowing vault;
Gloomy and damp it stretch'd its vast domain;
Shades were its boundary; for my strain'd eye sought
For other limit to its width in vain.

"Faint from the entrance came a daylight ray,
And distant sound of living men and things;
This, in th' encountering darkness pass'd away,
That, took the tone in which a mourner sings.

"I lit a torch at a sepulchral lamp,
Which shot a thread of light amid the gloom;
And feebly burning 'gainst the rolling damp,
I bore it through the regions of the tomb.

"Around me stretch'd the slumbers of the dead,
_Whereof the silence ached upon my ear;_
More and more noiseless did I make my tread,
And yet its echoes chill'd my heart with fear.

"The former men of every age and place,
From all their wand'rings gather'd, round me lay;
The dust of wither'd Empires did I trace,
And stood 'mid Generations pass'd away.

"I saw whole cities, that in flood or fire,
Or famine or the plague, gave up their breath;
Whole armies whom a day beheld expire,
Swept by ten thousands to the arms of Death.

"I saw the old world's white and wave-swept bones
A giant heap of creatures that had been;
Far and confused the broken skeletons
Lay strewn beyond mine eye's remotest ken.

"Death's various shrines--the Urn, the Stone, the Lamp--
Were scatter'd round, confused, amid the dead;
Symbols and Types were mould'ring in the damp,
Their shapes were waning and their meaning fled.

"Unspoken tongues, perchance in praise or woe,
Were character'd on tablets Time had swept;
_And deep were half their letters hid below
The thick small dust of those they once had wept._

"No hand was here to wipe the dust away,
No reader of the writing traced beneath;
No spirit sitting by its form of clay;
No sigh nor sound from all the heaps of Death.

"_One place alone had ceased to hold its prey;
A form had press'd it and was there no more;
The garments of the Grave beside it lay,
Where once they wrapp'd him on the rocky floor._

"_He only with returning footsteps broke
Th' eternal calm wherewith the Tomb was bound;_
_Among the sleeping Dead alone He woke,
And bless'd with outstretch'd hands the host around._

"_Well is it that such blessing hovers here,
To soothe each sad survivor of the throng,
Who haunt the portals of the solemn sphere,
And pour their woe the loaded air along._

"_They to the verge have follow'd what they love,
And on th' insuperable threshold stand;
With cherish'd names its speechless calm reprove,
And stretch in the abyss their ungrasp'd hand._

"But vainly there they seek their soul's relief,
And of th' obdurate Grave its prey implore;
Till Death himself shall medicine their grief,
Closing their eyes by those they wept before.

"All that have died, the Earth's whole race, repose
Where Death collects his Treasures, heap on heap;
O'er each one's busy day, the nightshades close;
Its Actors, Sufferers, Schools, Kings, Armies--sleep."

The lines in italics are of the highest quality, both in thought and word; the allusion to Him who by dying abolished death, seems to us wonderfully fine--sudden, simple,--it brings to our mind the lines already quoted from Vaughan:--

"But there was One
Who search'd it quite through to and fro,
And then returning like the Sun,
Discover'd all that there is done."

What a rich line this is!

"And pour their woe the loaded air along."

"The insuperable threshold!"

Do our readers remember the dying Corinne's words? _Je mourrais seule--au reste, ce moment se passe de secours; nos amis ne peuvent nous suivre que jusqu'au_ _seuil de la vie. La, commencent des pensees dont le trouble et la profondeur ne sauraient se confier._

We have only space for one more--verses entitled "Heart's-Ease."

HEART'S-EASE.

"Oh, Heart's-Ease, dost thou lie within that flower?
How shall I draw thee thence?--so much I need
The healing aid of thine enshrined power
To veil the past--and bid the time good speed!

"I gather it--it withers on my breast;
The heart's-ease dies when it is laid on mine;
Methinks there is no shape by Joy possess'd,
Would better fare than thou, upon that shrine.

"Take from me things gone by--oh! change the past--
Renew the lost--restore me the decay'd,--
Bring back the days whose tide has ebb'd so fast--
Give form again to the fantastic shade!

"My hope, that never grew to certainty,--
My youth, that perish'd in its vain desire,--
My fond ambition, crush'd ere it could be
Aught save a self-consuming, wasted fire:

"Bring these anew, and set me once again
In the delusion of Life's Infancy--
I was not happy, but I knew not then
That happy I was never doom'd to be.

"Till these things are, and powers divine descend--
Love, kindness, joy, and hope, to gild my day,
In vain the emblem leaves towards me bend,
Thy Spirit, Heart's-Ease, is too far away!"

We would fain have given two poems entitled "Bessy" and "Youth and Age." Everything in this little volume is select and good. Sensibility and sense in right measure and proportion and keeping, and in pure, strong classical language; no intemperance of thought or phrase. Why does not "V." write more?

We do not very well know how to introduce our friend Mr. Ellison, "The Bornnatural," who addresses his "Madmoments to the Light-headed of Society at large." We feel as a father, a mother, or other near of kin would at introducing an ungainly gifted and much loved son or kinsman, who had the knack of putting his worst foot foremost, and making himself _imprimis_ ridiculous.

There is something wrong in all awkwardness, a want of nature _somewhere_, and we feel affronted even still, after we have taken the Bornnatural[48] to our heart, and admire and love him, at his absurd gratuitous self-befoolment. The book is at first sight one farrago of oddities and offences--coarse foreign paper--bad printing--italics broad-cast over every page--the words run into each other in a way we are glad to say is as yet quite original, making such extraordinary monsters of words as these--beingsriddle--sunbeammotes--gooddeed--midjune-- summerair--selffavor--seraphechoes--puredeedprompter--barkskeel, &c. Now we like Anglo-Saxon and the polygamous German,[49] but we like better the well of English undefiled--a well, by the by, much oftener spoken of than drawn from; but to fashion such words as these words are, is as monstrous as for a painter to _compose_ an animal not out of the elements, but out of the entire bodies of several, of an ass, for instance, a cock and a crocodile, so as to produce an outrageous individual, with whom even a duck-billed Platypus would think twice before he fraternized--ornithorynchous and paradoxical though he be, poor fellow.

[48] In his Preface he explains the title Bornnatural, as meaning
"one who inherits the natural sentiments and tastes to which
he was born, still artunsullied and customfree."

[49] _ex. gr._--_Konstantinopolitanischerdudelsackspfeifergeselle_.
Here is a word as long as the sea-serpent--but, like it,
having a head and tail, being what lawyers call _unum
quid_--not an up and down series of infatuated _phocae_, as
Professor Owen somewhat insolently asserts. Here is what the
Bornnatural would have made of it--

_A Constantinopolitanbagpiperoutofhisapprenticeship_.

And yet our Bornnatural's two thick and closely small-printed volumes are as full of poetry as is an "impassioned grape" of its noble liquor.

He is a true poet. But he has not the art of _singling_ his thoughts, an art as useful in composition as in husbandry, as necessary for young fancies as young turnips. Those who have seen our turnip fields in early summer, with the hoers at their work, will understand our reference. If any one wishes to read these really remarkable volumes, we would advise them to begin with "Season Changes" and "Emma, a Tale." We give two Odes on Psyche, which are as nearly perfect as anything out of Milton or Tennyson.

The story is the well-known one of Psyche and Cupid, told at such length, and with so much beauty and pathos and picturesqueness by Apuleius, in his "Golden Ass." Psyche is the human soul--a beautiful young woman. Cupid is spiritual, heavenly love--a comely youth. They are married, and live in perfect happiness, but by a strange decree of fate, he comes and goes unseen, tarrying only for the night; and he has told her, that if she looks on him with her bodily eye, if she tries to break through the darkness in which they dwell, then he must leave her, and forever. Her two sisters--Anger and Desire, tempt Psyche. She yields to their evil counsel, and thus it fares with her:--

ODE TO PSYCHE.

"1. Let not a sigh be breathed, or he is flown!
With tiptoe stealth she glides, and throbbing breast,
Towards the bed, like one who dares not own
Her purpose, and half shrinks, yet cannot rest
From her rash Essay: in one trembling hand
She bears a lamp, which sparkles on a sword;
In the dim light she seems a wandering dream
Of loveliness: 'tis Psyche and her Lord,
Her yet unseen, who slumbers like a beam
Of moonlight, vanishing as soon as scann'd!

"2. One Moment, and all bliss hath fled her heart,
Like windstole odours from the rosebud's cell,
Or as the earthdashed dewdrop which no art
Can e'er replace: alas! we learn fullwell
How beautiful the Past when it is o'er,
But with scal'd eyes we hurry to the brink,
Blind as the waterfall: oh, stay thy feet,
Thou rash one, be content to know no more
Of bliss than thy heart teaches thee, nor think
The sensual eye can grasp a form more sweet--

"3. Than that which for itself the soul should chuse
For higher adoration; but in vain!
Onward she moves, and as the lamp's faint hues
Flicker around, her charmed eyeballs strain,
For there he lies in undreamt loveliness!
Softly she steals towards him, and bends o'er
His slumberlidded eyes, as a lily droops
Faint o'er a folded rose: one caress
She would but dares not take, and as she stood,
An oildrop from the lamp fell burning sore!

"4. Thereat sleepfray'd, dreamlike the God takes Wing
And soars to his own skies, while Psyche strives
To clasp his foot, and fain thereon would cling,
But falls insensate;

* * * * *

Psyche! thou shouldst have taken that high gift
Of Love as it was meant, that mystery
Did ask thy faith, the Gods do test our worth,
And ere they grant high boons our heart would sift!

"5. Hadst thou no divine Vision of thine own?
Didst thou not see the Object of thy Love
Clothed with a Beauty to dull clay unknown?
And could not that bright Image, far above
The Reach of sere Decay, content thy Thought?
Which with its glory would have wrapp'd thee round,
To the Gravesbrink, untouched by Age or Pain!
Alas! we mar what Fancy's Womb has brought
Forth of most beautiful, and to the Bound
Of Sense reduce the Helen of the Brain!"

What a picture! Psyche, pale with love and fear, bending in the uncertain light, over her lord, with the rich flush of health and sleep and manhood on his cheek, "_as a lily droops faint o'er a folded rose!_" We remember nothing anywhere finer than this.

ODE TO PSYCHE.

"1. Why stand'st thou thus at Gaze
In the faint Tapersrays,
With strained Eyeballs fixed upon that Bed?
Has he then flown away,
Lost, like a Star in Day,
Or like a Pearl in Depths unfathomed?
Alas! thou hast done very ill,
Thus with thine Eyes the Vision of thy Soul to kill!

"2. Thought'st thou that earthly Light
Could then assist thy Sight,
Or that the Limits of Reality
Could grasp Things fairer than
Imagination's Span,
Who communes with the Angels of the Sky,
Thou graspest at the Rainbow, and
Wouldst make it as the Zone with which thy Waist is spanned.

"3. And what find'st thou in his Stead?
Only the empty Bed!

* * * * *

Thou sought'st the Earthly and therefore
The heavenly is gone, for that must ever soar!

"4. For the bright World of
Pure and boundless Love
What hast thou found? alas! a narrow room!
Put out that Light,
Restore thy Soul its Sight,
For better 'tis to dwell in outward Gloom,
Than thus, by the vile Body's eye,
To rob the Soul of its Infinity!

"5. Love, Love has Wings, and he
Soon out of Sight will flee,
Lost in far Ether to the sensual Eye,
But the Soul's Vision true
Can track him, yea, up to
The Presence and the Throne of the Most High:
For thence he is, and tho' he dwell below,
To the Soul only he his genuine Form will show!"

Mr. Ellison was a boy of twenty-three when he wrote this. That, with so much command of expression and of measure, he should run waste and formless and even void, as he does in other parts of his volumes, is very mysterious and very distressing.

* * * * *

How we became possessed of the poetical Epistle from "E. V. K. to his Friend in Town," is more easily asked than answered. We avow ourselves in the matter to have acted for once on M. Proudhon's maxim--"_La propriete c'est le vol._" We merely say, in our defence, that it is a shame in "E. V. K.," be he who he may, to hide his talent in a napkin, or keep it for his friends alone. It is just such men and such poets as he that we most need at present, sober-minded and sound-minded and well-balanced, whose genius is subject to their judgment, and who have genius and judgment to begin with--a part of the poetical stock in trade with which many of our living writers are not largely furnished. The Epistle is obviously written quite off-hand, but it is the off-hand of a master, both as to material and workmanship. He is of the good old manly, classical school. His thoughts have settled and cleared themselves before forming into the mould of verse. They are in the style of Stewart Rose's _vers de societe_, but have more of the graphic force and deep feeling and fine humor of Crabbe and Cowper in their substance, with a something of their own which is to us quite as delightful. But our readers may judge. After upbraiding, with much wit, a certain faithless town-friend for not making out his visit, he thus describes his residence:--

"Though its charms be few,
The place will please you, and may profit too;--
My house, upon the hillside built, looks down
On a neat harbor and a lively town.
Apart, 'mid screen of trees, it stands, just where
We see the popular bustle, but not share.
Full in our front is spread a varied scene--
A royal ruin, gray, or clothed with green,
Church spires, tower, docks, streets, terraces, and trees,
Back'd by green fields, which mount by due degrees
Into brown uplands, stretching high away
To where, by silent tarns, the wild deer stray.
Below, with gentle tide, the Atlantic Sea
Laves the curved beach, and fills the cheerful quay,
Where frequent glides the sail, and dips the oar,
And smoking steamer halts with hissing roar."

Then follows a long passage of great eloquence, truth, and wit, directed against the feverish, affected, unwholesome life in town, before which he fears

"Even he, my friend, the man whom once I knew,
Surrounded by blue women and pale men,"

has fallen a victim; and then concludes with these lines, which it would not be easy to match for everything that constitutes good poetry. As he writes he chides himself for suspecting his friend; and at that moment (it seems to have been written on Christmas day) he hears the song of a thrush, and forthwith he "bursts into a song," as full-voiced, as native, as sweet and strong, as that of his bright-eyed feathered friend.

"But, hark that sound! the mavis! can it be?
Once more! It is. High perched on yon bare tree,
He starts the wondering winter with his trill;
Or by that sweet sun westering o'er the hill
Allured, or for he thinks melodious mirth
Due to the holy season of Christ's birth.--
And hark! as his clear fluting fills the air,
Low broken notes and twitterings you may hear
From other emulous birds, the brakes among;
Fain would they also burst into a song;
But winter warns, and muffling up their throats,
They liquid--for the spring--preserve their notes.
O sweet preluding! having heard that strain,
How dare I lift my dissonant voice again?
Let me be still, let me enjoy the time,
Bothering myself or thee no more with rugged rhyme."

This author must not be allowed to "muffle up _his_ throat," and keep his notes for some imaginary and far-off spring. He has not the excuse of the mavis. He must give us more of his own "clear fluting." Let him, with that keen, kindly and thoughtful eye, look from his retreat, as Cowper did, upon the restless, noisy world he has left, seeing the popular bustle, not sharing it, and let his pen record in such verses as these what his understanding and his affections think and feel and his imagination informs, and we shall have something in verse not unlike the letters from Olney. There is one line which deserves to be immortalized over the cherished bins of our wine-fanciers, where repose their

"Dear prisoned spirits of the impassioned grape."

What is good makes us think of what is better, as well, and it is to be hoped more, than of what is worse. There is no sweetness so sweet as that of a large and deep nature; there is no knowledge so good, so strengthening as that of a great mind, which is forever filling itself afresh. "Out of the eater comes forth meat; out of the strong comes forth sweetness." Here is one of such "_dulcedines verae_"--the sweetness of a strong man:--

"Now came still evening on, and twilight gray
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompany'd; for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests,
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleased: now glow'd the firmament
With living saphirs; Hesperus that led
The starry host rode brightest, till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen unveil'd her peerless light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw."

Were we inclined to do anything but enjoy this and be thankful--giving ourselves up to its gentleness, informing ourselves with its quietness and beauty,--we would note the simplicity, the neutral tints, the quietness of its language, the "sober livery" in which its thoughts are clad. In the first thirty-eight words, twenty-nine are monosyllables. Then there is the gradual way in which the crowning fantasy is introduced. It comes upon us at once, and yet not wholly unexpected; it "sweetly creeps" into our "study of imagination;" it lives and moves, but it is a moving that is "delicate;" it flows in upon us _incredibili lenitate_. "Evening" is a matter of fact, and its stillness too--a time of the day; and "twilight" is little more. We feel the first touch of spiritual life in "_her_ sober livery," and bolder and deeper in "all things _clad_." Still we are not deep, the real is not yet transfigured and transformed, and we are brought back into it after being told that "Silence accompanied," by the explanatory "for," and the bit of sweet natural history of the beasts and birds. The mind dilates and is moved, its eye detained over the picture; and then comes that rich, "thick warbled note"--"_all but the wakeful nightingale_;" this fills and informs the ear, making it also "of apprehension more quick," and we are prepared now for the great idea coming "into the eye and prospect of our soul"--SILENCE WAS PLEASED! There is nothing in all poetry above this. Still evening and twilight gray are now Beings, coming on, and walking over the earth like queens, "with Silence,"

"Admiration's speaking'st tongue,"

as their pleased companion. All is "calm and free," and "full of life," it is a "Holy Time." What a picture!--what simplicity of means! what largeness and perfectness of effect!--what knowledge and love of nature! what supreme art!--what modesty and submission! what self-possession!--what plainness, what selectness of speech! "As is the height, so is the depth. The intensities must be at once opposite and equal. As the liberty, so the reverence for law. As the independence, so must be the seeing and the service, and the submission to the Supreme Will. As the ideal genius and the originality, so must be the resignation to the real world, the sympathy and the intercommunion with Nature."--_Coleridge's Posthumous Tract "The Idea of Life."_

* * * * *

Since writing the above, our friend "E. V. K." has shown himself curiously unaffected by "that last infirmity of noble minds,"--his "clear spirit" heeds all too little its urgent "spur." The following sonnets are all we can pilfer from him. They are worth the stealing:--

AN ARGUMENT IN RHYME.