to be presumed, for Walter break off his story, and pays the lady of the fawn the compliment of identifying her with the heroine and himself with the cub o' the sun,' although, as in the case of the tale within the tale, we are unable to comprehend the slightest parallelism between the illustration and the position illustrated. After a little more equally pertinent discourse, listened to without reproof by the lady, the poet somewhat abruptly, but certainly not without ample encouragement, declares it to be his intention forthwith to taste the bliss' of his companion's lips; but the lady draws back, and informs him for the first time that in a few days she will be the bride of another. The plighted bride, who seems to represent tempted, and suffering, but triumphant virtue, tears herself away, exclaiming, 'Walter, I am thine!' and promising to die shortly and to pass into daisies, which should wave recognition at his approach. Walter is much soured at this unlooked-for slip between the cup and the lip, and passes some time in despair and yearnings for a great poetic reputation. We then find our poet making one of a party at a manor.' The party consists of a Mr. Wilmott, his daughter Violet, and several young men. Miss Wilmott, who is represented as a person of good position and great personal charms, and who, it seems, is accustomed to make one at roystering bachelors' parties, is impatient at a pause in the conversation, and proposes a song. The young men sing a number of songs in praise of wine and women,' but these lyrics are too Anacreontic for extract in our pages. Walter, who is struck with the young lady's charms, repeats the stock artifice of telling an entirely mal-à-propos story of a poet who was in love, and Miss Wilmott, at its conclusion, inquires with charming naïveté,

'How look'd this youth?

Did he in voice or mien resemble you?

Was he about your age, wore he such curls?
Such eyes of dark sea-blue?'

Upon this hint, we suppose, he spake, for soon after we find the young lady reposing by the side of the poet, on her father's lawn, and bestowing, unsolicited, the favour of a kiss. All this, and what follows, as forcibly indicated by the simple exclamation 'Walter!' which closes the scene, may be very natural, for aught we know, under certain social conditions; but we altogether deny that the poet's desperate and enduring remorse consequent upon this little accident, has a shadow of meaning or verisimilitude. It seems, however, that this experience' has at last rendered him capable of a great poem. It is accordingly written and published, and, to use the expressive phrase of his friend

Edward, that was a hit!' Walter's poem, by the way, with such experience and culture as his seem to have been, and each word sincere as blood drops from the heart,' must have remarkably resembled the Life Drama.' At the end of the play, it appears to have occurred to the poet that his remorseful feelings, which have now endured for some years, and have answered their literary purpose, might as well, be allayed by a legitimate union with the debauched and deserted Violet, and the curtain falls with the hero's intimation that more great songs' are to be expected from him, now that he has completed his moral and intellectual education.

We assure our readers that this analysis of Mr. Smith's poem is a great effort of our indulgence, and that nothing but the unabridged work could convey a competent notion of its absolute lack of truth, actual or imaginative. Here and there, nevertheless, amidst this surprising display of ignorance of humanity,— an ignorance much too profound to be attributed to anything but a natural defect of feeling, and the power of observation which feeling gives, we are startled by a true thought, as

'He had no heart to grasp the fleeting hour,
Which, like a thief, steals by with silent foot,
In his closed hand the jewel of a life.'

Or by a piquant touch of description, as—

'I saw a misery perch'd

I' the melancholy corners of his mouth,
Like griffins on each side my father's gates!'

Or by a brilliant phrase, as—

'My drooping sails

Flap idly 'gainst the mast of mine intent,
I rot upon the waters when my prow
Should grate the golden isles.'

Perhaps the best passage of the same extent in this poem, is

the following,

The lark is singing in the blinding sky,

Hedges are white with May. The bridegroom sea
Is toying with the shore, his wedded bride,

And, in the fulness of his marriage joy,
He decorates her tawny brow with shells,
Retires a space, to see how fair she looks,
Then, proud, runs up to kiss her. All is fair!
All glad from grass to sun! Yet more I love
Than this, the shrinking day that sometimes comes
In winter's front, so fair 'mong its dark peers,
It seems a straggler from the files of June,

Which in its wanderings had lost its wits
And half its beauty; and, when it returned,
Finding its old companions gone away,

It join'd November's troop, then marching past;
And so the frail thing comes and greets the world
With a thin crazy smile, then bursts in tears,

And all the while it holds within its hands

A few half-wither'd flowers.'

There is in this and other passages a certain largeness of handling, and a command of words, which distinguish Mr. Smith from the older and more hopelessly spasmodic' poets; but these qualifications are impaired by the extraordinary incapacity he displays for regarding steadily, and recording sincerely, any scene, thought, or emotion which requires more than two or three lines for its expression. In this extract, for example, which is of much more than Mr. Smith's average precision, we find several glaring inaccuracies,-in a matter, too, of merely external nature, where accuracy is comparatively easy. The lark and the hedges white with May are in the worst possible keeping with the sea-shore, where the verses are supposed to be said; and the pretty lines about the sea do not in any way assist the description of a peculiarly fine summer's day, to which the remaining portion of the passage is intended to be an antithesis. The second half of the passage, like many other morsels in this poem, has a musical movement which would be remarkable had we not heard every inflexion of it in Shakspeare; and although the humour of the poet is expressed with great ingenuity and delicacy of language, the fanciful reaches the fantastic, and the impression left upon the mind is neither natural nor pleasing.

The worst feature about Balder' and the Life Drama' is, that what power they have is mature. These poems, the only works of the school which are not quite destitute of promise, are yet not at all like anything we remember of the early failures of true poets. Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and others of their order, began, it is true, by writing a good deal of trash, but the difference between the trash of such poets and that of those under our notice is, that the one kind is a mere falling short, whereas the other takes its rise in extravagant perversity. If, however, contrary to our expectation, the authors of 'Balder' and the Life Drama' ever take rank as poets, they will be among the readiest to acknowledge with us that there is no excuse for the man who publishes bad poetry, because there is none for the folly and conceit which cause him to mistake his vocation and capacity. Most certainly want of education will

not supply him with an excuse, for the plough and the sheephook have been the youthful occupation of many a true poet; and there never was a period in the history of literature and society at which an acquaintance with the best writers might be more easily obtained. That which is wanting to these aspirants is neither a knowledge of past excellence nor encouragement to their own deserts; but rather the sacred gift of invention and the faculty divine which intuitively reflects the face of nature and the life of man.

Mr. Bailey's Festus' is a dramatic poem more than twice as long as Paradise Lost.' It contains enough poetry to have setup a dozen minor poets, yet is Mr. Bailey no more than such a poet himself, and his work is just such a production as might have been looked for from a minor poet attempting to write the greatest poem of the world.

Really, Mr. Bailey should have had some respect for the angels, archangels, and all the company of heaven. He rushes in where Milton stumbled, and Dante feared to tread, and makes the cherubim and seraphim, not to mention higher names, vent volumes of such religion and philosophy as would be appropriate only in the mouth of the prophet of the Agapemone. Our readers have only to imagine (if they can) the effect of twenty thousand consecutive lines like the following, in order to obtain a tolerably just estimate of ' Festus.'

God.

Lucifer.

The earth shall not be when her Sabbath ends,
In the high close of order.

Heaven, farewell!

Hell is more bearable than nothingness.

Thrones. Thou, God, art Lord of Mercy; and Thy thoughts

Are high above the star-dust of the world!

The spheres themselves are but as shining noughts

Upon the mantle of the night impearled.

From rank to rank in Thearchy (sic) divine,

We angel raylets gladden in Thy sight;

Whose thousand thrones are holy in the heavens,
And hidden in Thy universal light.

Dominations. Between Creation and Destruction now
The lull of creatural action intervenes.

God rests; and the world is working out its week;
His hand is in his bosom, and at rest, &c.

Powers. Thy might is self-creative, and Thy works
Immortal, temporal, destructible,

Are ever in Thy sight and blessed there.
The heavens are in thy bosom, and thine eye
Is high o'er all existence; yea, the worlds
Are but Thy shining foot-prints upon space.
Princedoms. Eternal Lord! Thy strength compels the worlds

And bows the heads of ages; at Thy voice
Their unsubstantial essence wears away.

Virtues. All-favouring God! we glory but in Thee.

Ye heavens exalt, expand yourselves; they come,
The infinite generations, all divine,

Of Deity, our brethren and our friends, &c. &c.' Colloquies of this kind, sometimes thousands of lines long, are relieved by jaunty conversations on love, literature, theology, Shakspeare, and musical glasses, between Frank, Edward, Harry, Caroline, Helen, Marian, and other mortals, whose talk, for the most part, is very much what one may imagine would take place at a soirée of such persons as Mr. Dickens loves to describe. Yet strange to say, here, as in Balder' and the 'Life Drama,' we not unfrequently come upon a poetic passage which, for a moment, refreshes our weariness and checks our general feeling of unqualified dislike; as, for example, these lines about Another and a better world.'

'This is a world where every loveliest thing
Lasts longest; where decay lifts never head
Above the grossest forms, and matter here
Is all transparent substance; the flower fades not,
But every eve puts forth a fragrant light,
Till by degrees the spirit of each flower,
Essentially consuming the fair frame,
Refines itself to air.

The beautiful die never here: Death lies

A dreaming; he has nought to do: the babe
Plays with his darts.'

Or, again, this touchingly expressed dismissal of an unworthy lover:

'Go; I cannot choose

But love thee, and thy love refuse;

And if my brow grow lined while young,

And youth fly cheated from my cheek,

"Tis that there lies below my tongue
A word I will not speak :

For I would rather die than deem

Thou'rt not the glory thou didst seem.'

The writers to whom these remarks apply, although they have attracted far more than their proper share of attention, have by no means filled the whole poetical horizon during the last few seasons. Not to speak of Mr. and Mrs. Browning, and two or three others, who are scarcely new poets,' and therefore not within our present scope; we have Matthew Arnold, William Allingham, Owen Meredith, George Meredith, and V.,' all of whom are writers, not only of some promise '-a very dubious