If my readers will allow me, in this age of crowded action and wild excitement, to detain them a little while on less absorbing topics, I will summon to their presence before the critical tribunal the exclusive and bigoted advocate of our new-light' poetry. Is there any other great excellence which you miss in those dear old writers of English undefiled,' and find in their loud-voiced and long-winded successors?

'Yes. I miss the powerful delineation of wild and dark and desperate spirits, whose thoughts were all fire and their hearts all passion; whose familiar angels were the tempest and the whirlwind; and the sum and power of whose feelings could be condensed only in one burning word, and that word were lightning!''

Bah! Excuse the blasphemous interjection. But really I have been so 'thrilled' and 'chilled;' my spirit has so often been 'furrowed' by the fiery share of passion, and 'harrowed' by scenes of unmitigated horror, in sympathizing with these wonderful beings, that my capacity for astonishment is utterly exhausted, and my blood now flows in calm and temperate seeming through its overlabored channels. Therefore I am sometimes profane enough to jeer at conceptions rising so far above my ideas of the possible, and sceptical enough to doubt the architectural skill of the windmill-wrights, whose verse-machines are whirled by an eternal hurricane of passion. Not so have I read Homer and Shakspeare, the patriarchs and autocrats of song. And I freely and gladly admit that you can find no such pictures in other great poets of the elder school. They had not that faculty. They never dreamed that beings had existed on this earth other than of the line of Adam. And are you quite sure that such men have lived and acted; moulded of this miracu

lous clay; embittered by demoniac scorn, and alive to all tender and exquisite emotions, with brows of blackest gloom and hearts of strangest moodiness; their souls electrified at the same moment by all the mightiest passions of Heaven and Hell; placed in the incomprehensible situation of the tempest-tossed ships of Æneas, on which all the four winds discharged at once their clashing fury?

'UNA Eurusque Notusque ruunt, creberque procellis
Africus?'

Have there been characters, can they exist in fact or in fancy, possessing at once all the ferocity of savages and all the gentleness of refined and highly intellectual beings; scowling defiance in the face of God, yet looking with fondest love on his creation, the feeble reflex of his glory, malignant as Satan, sullen as Moloch, sensual as Belial, implacable as Achilles, and chivalric as Orlando; disdaining all mankind, yet condescending to pursue their enemies with unrelenting wrath, and cherishing for some matchless Amarilli all the truth and tenderness of a Pastor Fido? Such beings have been held forth, to thrill and astonish the modern world, and have fed to repletion its morbid appetite for the monstrous. But who, on beholding an animal thus compounded of angels, men, beasts and devils, would not exclaim in the words of Horace on the imaginary woman-fish:

'Would you not laugh, O friends! at such a sight?

For my part, I should as soon admire the ensemble of a portrait in which the artist should attempt to combine in one countenance the features and expression of every face, fancied or real, 'that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth,' and should think it quite as natural.

Who cannot see that the stamina of much of our modern poetry resembles the matériel of half our recent novels; pathos manufactured to order, passion made to sell; emotion without motive and desperation without cause; in short, a thunder-storm of jarring elements, all sound and fury, signifying nothing? From this school arose the earlier heroes of the Bulwerian creation; the Pelhams and the Cliffords, odious compounds of Timon and Beau Brummell, in the portraiture of which the most captivating talent was employed to array vices, destructive of society itself, in the seductive garb of genius, poetry and courage, and to identify order and virtue with stupidity and meanness. Hence too have originated those kindred productions of meretricious genius, in which all the inventiveness of fancy, and all the power of pathos, and all the brilliancy of style, have been exhausted to bewilder the youthful head and demoralize the youthful heart. Who is not worn even to faintness by this incessant and unnatural excitement; and what serious thinker is not alarmed in seeing our youth growing up in this hot-bed of impetuous and irrational feeling, reaching a precocious and unhealthy growth, and going through society corrupted and corrupting, diffusing an influence as poisonous as the soil from which they sprung?

Who cannot perceive that these pestilent productions have infected romantic young minds with the idea that they must toil after misery as for a treasure; that to obtain the reputation of a genius they must be rebels to reason, and to reach the distinction of a hero they must renounce their allegiance to those laws of GOD and man which duller mortals are content to follow and be happy?

In the above remarks I, of course, allude chiefly to one of the most richly-gifted and deeply-fallen of all God's creatures, the most dazzling exemplar of the Satanic school' - the great and truly pitiable BYRON. That the poetic powers of this noble and unhappy bard were of a far higher order and more extended sway than those of any other man, who for the last century and a half has made the English language the vehicle of his musings, is a proposition which I think no sane man can dispute. For although it has of late become the fashion, among the elect and exclusive few, the indoctrinating mystagogues of the self-anointed critical priesthood, to elevate some of his contemporaries, and particularly Wordsworth, above him, it is but a fashion, the absurdity of which is almost too transparent to refute. I shall not deny that almost any of his modern rivals are more worthy of our intimacy on account of the more healthful influences they exert on the mind and heart. Nor shall I deny that in the descriptive, reflective and imaginative lines, Wordsworth is perhaps as entirely self-trained and original as Byron. But Wordsworth's descriptions, though perfectly natural, are too minutely labored, and are therefore decidedly inferior to Byron's sketches, which are bold, brief, rapid and graphic, almost beyond example; and his reflections and figures, new and beautiful as they are, are conveyed in less energetic language, are less informed by strong feeling, and of course are less vivid, less poetical. Byron, moreover, possessed many other powers of mind, to which Wordsworth had slight or no claim, and among which may be mentioned fertile invention, sparkling wit, scathing satire, melting pathos, and a depth of passion, at times misdirected, at times unnatural, at times delirious, yet burning and overwhelming like a fiery flood. Not to mention several truly wonderful passages, enchased in contexts so foul that I should be loth to indicate their exact locale to a pure, young mind; not to mention some of his minor powers, which in every sense are priceless gems; not to speak of many other portions of Childe Harold, which are all but unequalled; the entire poetical literature of England for the last one hundred and fifty years may be safely challenged to produce as many consecutive lines, that can at all compare in force and fervor with the first fifty stanzas of the Third Canto of Childe Harold. If, indeed, we consider that one half of that remarkable production was written before its author had seen twenty-four summers; that in the space of ten short years he poured forth all that flood of poems, of which many are of masterly power, though all the while his mind was largely unhinged by his own evil habits, and by the dark memories that pursued, and desolation that surrounded him; we can hardly doubt that in native vigor of intellect and in all but that necromantic pencil which could group and sketch the beings of

the 'unimaginable void,' as if they were friends and familiars, this self-tormenting poet was not one whit behind Milton himself, and as regards his later rivals was by Apollo's own unction,

'The grand NAPOLEON of the realms of rhyme.'

To assert, then, that the author of the Excursion, or of Thalaba, or of Christabel, could match the creator of Childe Harold and Manfred and Don Juan in the native gifts and faculties of genius, is to advance a startling paradox from a pure love of singularity.

But why, if his powers were so great, are not his poems as worthy of constant perusal, and as likely to attain an immortality, as those of the elder worthies, whose claims I uphold against him and his coadjutors? Because his chief productions are of the earth earthy,' and neither cautery nor exsection can remove the deep gangrene of vanity, selfishness, affectation, scepticism and rancor. A hard saying,' but capable of full substantiation. Methinks I behold a legion of Byronlings, with open throats, black ribands, and dependent collars, starting from their gin-and-water inspirations, cast glances big with annihilation at one who dares dispute the indestructibility of their pretended father. But I may inform these minnows, who swim in the wake and imitate the gambols of that huge Leviathan, that I too have had my day of adoration for their idol, when I thought that to doubt of his legitimate and lasting supremacy over the world of mind was blind stupidity and horrid sacrilege. Nay, even now, when that wild idolatry is past, and the sobering influence of years has enabled me to perceive the 'disastrous twilight shed' by this 'archangel ruined' upon the souls of men, his name is still a charm in my ear, and his more genuine tones a quickener to my blood. But how could one with embittered passions seething in his heart; with feelings blasted by their own pestiferous nature; with a spirit at war with his country and his race; with impulses irregular and at variance with themselves; how, in short, could one whose whole moral and intellectual being was lashed into stubborn and scornful rebellion against the laws of the universe and the very throne of God, produce a poem like the Paradise Lost, that 'pure, ethereal stream,' fresh with all humanity and bright with all religion? Yet, whatever be the depraved appetites of some, these qualities are altogether requisite to commend a work to the love and admiration of the universal mind. What! are not men created with earnest and trustful natures, with spirits orderly, though aspiring, and with hearts that, even when vitiated, still behold

'Virtue, in her shape how lovely!'

and still demand and revere her presence in others? Childe Harold is the offspring of a vigorous but unhealthy mind, and it is easy to foresee that, in spite of its original conception, bold tone, and numerous passages of almost unsurpassed sublimity and splendor, it contains within itself the causes of its own decay. Those thoughts, the lofty and the beautiful, which burst so gloriously upon us through the ice of a misanthropy, half-real, half-pretended, only prove how