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In the same soft and flowing style, and with the same unstudied fidelity to nature, is the grief of the gipsey husband painted when he comes and finds her dead. After the first fury of rage and despair is spent, he "weepeth like a child"—

And many a day by many a sunny bank,

Or forest pond, close fringed with rushes dank,
He wails, his clench'd hands on his eyelids prest;
Or by lone hedges, where the grass grows rank,

Stretched prone, as travelers deem, in idle rest,

Mourns for that murdered girl, the dove of his wild nest.

To such passages the woman's heart lends the rhetoric.

Generally the poem is written with considerable strength, in a good style, sustained, and sufficiently adorned, by the flowers of feeling. It shows an expansion of mind highly honourable to a lady placed as Mrs. Norton has been, and for which she, no doubt, is much indebted to her experience of sorrow. She has felt the need of faith and hope, of an enlargement of sympathy. The poem may be read through at once and without fatigue; this is much to say for an ethical poem, filling a large volume. It is, however, chiefly indebted for its celebrity to the circumstances of its authorship. A beautiful lady, celebrated in aristocratic circles, joins the democratic movement, now so widely spreading in light literature, and men hail the fact as a sign of the times. The poem is addressed to the " upper classes," and, even from its defects, calculated to win access to their minds. Its outward garb, too, is suited to attract their notice. The book is simply but beautifully got up, the two stanzas looking as if written for the page they fill, and in a pre-existent harmony with the frame-work and margin. There is only one ugly thing, and that frightfully ugly, the design for the frontispiece by Maclise. The Child of the Islands, represented by an infant form to whose frigid awkwardness there is no correspondence in the most degraded models that can be found in Nature for that age, with the

tamest of angels kneeling at his head and feet, angels that have not spirit and sweetness enough to pray away a fly, forms the centre. Around him are other figures of whom it is impossible to say whether they are goblins or fairies, come to curse or bless. The accessories are as bad as the main group, mean in conception, tame in execution. And the subject admitted of so beautiful and noble an illustration by Art! We marvel that a person of so refined taste as Mrs. Norton, and so warmly engaged in the subject, should have admitted this to its companionship.

We intended to have given some account of Prince and his poems, in this connection, but must now wait till another number, for we have spread our words over too much space already.

MISS BARRETT'S POEMS.

A DRAMA OF EXILE: AND OTHER POEMS. By ELIZABETH B. BARRETT, author of THE SERAPHIM AND OTHER POEMS. New-York: Henry G. Langley, No. 8 Astor House, 1845

WHAT happiness for the critic when, as in the present instance, his task is, mainly, how to express a cordial admiration; to indicate an intelligence of beauties, rather than regret for defects!

We have read these volumes with feelings of delight far warmer than the writer, in her sincerely modest preface, would seem to expect from any reader, and cannot hesitate to rank her, in vigour and nobleness of conception, depth of spiritual experience, and command of classic allusion, above any female writer the world has yet known.

In the first quality, especially, most female writers are deficient. They do not grasp a subject with simple energy, nor treat it with decision of touch. They are, in general, most remarkable for delicacy of feeling, and brilliancy or grace in

manner.

In delicacy of perception, Miss Barrett may vie with any of her sex. She has what is called a true woman's heart, although we must believe that men of a fine conscience and good organization will have such a heart no less. Signal instances occur to us in the cases of Spenser, Wordsworth and Tennyson. The woman who reads them will not find hardness or blindness as to the subtler workings of thoughts and affections.

If men are often deficient on this score; women, on the other hand, are apt to pay excessive attention to the slight tokens, the

little things of life. Thus, in conduct or writing, they tend to weary us by a morbid sentimentalism. From this fault Miss Barrett is wholly free. Personal feeling is in its place; enlightened by Reason, ennobled by Imagination. The earth is no despised resting place for the feet, the heaven bends wide above, rich in starry hopes, and the air flows around exhilarating and free.

The mournful, albeit we must own them tuneful, sisters of the lyre might hush many of their strains at this clear note from one who has felt and conquered the same difficulties.

PERPLEXED MUSIC.

"Experience, like a pale musician, holds
A dulcimer of patience in his hand:
Whence harmonies we cannot understand
Of God's will in his worlds the strain unfolds,
In sad perplexed minors. Deathly colds

Fall on us while we hear and countermand
Our sanguine heart back from the fancy land,
With nightingales in visionary wolds.

We murmur-'Where is any certain tune,
Or measured music in such notes as these?'

But angels leaning from the golden seat,

Are not so minded; their fine ear hath won

The issue of completed cadences;

And smiling down the stars, they whisper-SWEET."

We are accustomed now to much verse on moral subjects, such as follows the lead of Wordsworth and seeks to arrange moral convictions as melodies on the harp. But these tones are never deep, unless the experience of the poet, in the realms of intellect and emotion, be commensurate with his apprehension of truth. Wordsworth moves us when he writes an "Ode to Duty," or "Dion," because he could also write "Ruth," and the exquisitely tender poems on Matthew, in whom nature

"-for a favorite child Had tempered so the clay,

That every hour the heart ran wild,
Yet never went astray."

The trumpet call of Luther's 'Judgment Hymn' sounds from the depths of a nature capable of all human emotions, or it could not make the human ear vibrate as it does. The calm convictions expressed by Miss Barrett in the sonnets come with poetic force, because she was also capable of writing 'The Lost Bower,' 'The Romaunt of the Page,' 'Loved Once,' 'Bertha in the Lane,' and 'A Lay of the Early Rose.' These we select as the finest of the tender poems.

In the Drama of Exile' and the Vision of Poets,' where she aims at a Miltonic flight or Dantesque grasp-not in any spirit of rivalry or imitation, but because she is really possessed of a similar mental scope-her success is far below what we find in the poems of feeling and experience; for she has the vision of a great poet, but little in proportion of his plastic power. She is at home in the Universe; she sees its laws; she sympathises with its motions. She has the imagination all compact-the healthy archetypal plant from which all forms may be divined, and, so far as now existent, understood. Like Milton, she sees the angelic hosts in real presence; like Dante, she hears the spheral concords and shares the planetary motions. But she cannot, like Milton, marshal the angels so near the earth as to impart the presence other than by sympathy. He who is near her level of mind may, through the magnetic sympathy, see the angels with her. Others will feel only the grandeur and sweetness she expresses in these forms. Still less can she, like Dante, give, by a touch, the key which enables ourselves to play on the same instrument. She is singularly deficient in the power of compression. There are always far more words and verses than are needed to convey the meaning, and it is a great proof of her strength, that the thought still seems strong, when arrayed in a form so Briarean clumsy and many-handed.

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