One fault involves another so naturally in verse, that we find it difficult to distribute our examples. We accordingly give them, without classification, and necessarily for the most part without connection or comment. We must trust to the sense of the reader to distinguish the more negative fault of mere prosaicism or commonplace among the obtrusive sins of too familiar language, scolding, innuendoes, or simple disagreeableness in words.

Even as I write she tries her wonted spell.

I know not how it is with other men.

And wiled the bluebird to his whiff of song.

One morn of autumn lords it o'er the rest.
Shoved in for Tarsus and hitched back for Tyre.

A dish warmed-over at the feast of life,

And finds Twice stale, served with whatever sauce.

The flies and I its only customers.

I seem to have heard it said by learned folk
Who drench you with æsthetics till you feel

As if all beauty were a ghastly bore,
The faucet to let loose a wash of words.

Ovid in Pontus, puling for his Rome.

Far up the great bells wallowed in delight.

Each age must worship its own thought of God.

With subsidence continuous of the dregs.

(Pronounce the word subsidence properly, and scansion is impossible.)

For, though not recreant to my fathers' faith,

Its forms to me are weariness, and most

That drony vacuum of compulsory prayer,

Still pumping phrases for the Ineffable,

Though all the valves of memory gasp and wheeze.

In this brown-fisted rough, this shirt-sleeved Cid.

We, too, build Gothic contract-shams, because
Our deacons have discovered that it pays,
And pews sell better under vaulted roofs
Of plaster painted like an Indian squaw.

I fear not Thy withdrawal; more I fear,
Seeing, to know Thee not, hoodwinked with dreams
Of signs and wonders, while, unnoticed, Thou,
Walking Thy garden still, commun'st with men,
Missed in the commonplace of miracle.

Contrast the discordant notes of ill-timed insinuation that grate upon the spiritual sense of the reader in the invocation from which the last preceding extract is taken, at the close of "The Cathedral," with the faultless tone of reverence and humility and charity that makes the proëm to the "In Memoriam " the perfection of literary art. The difference may not be a moral difference between the two poets; but if not, then the difference in artistic faculty, or in artistic fidelity, is truly immense.

We set off against these unfavorable quotations a few of the felicities which go far toward retrieving, though they cannot retrieve, the compromised fortune of the poem.

The line,

Illuminate seclusion swung in air,

describes the fresh flower-bell lightly hung, as if unsupported, in the buoyant atmosphere, and secluding the "buccaneering bee" in a golden room, whose walls flush the admitted sunshine with radiant color of their own. This line had to us a sudden and singular, an almost phenomenal beauty, when it first met our eye. The instantaneous springing into existence before us of the thing described could hardly have had a more vivid and surprising effect of delight.

No falcon ever felt delight of wings
As when, an eyas, from the stolid cliff
Loosing himself, he followed his high heart
To swim on sunshine, masterless as wind;

Unconscious perverts of the Jesuit, Time.

*

* the calm Olympian height
Of ancient order feels its bases yield.

As sometimes, just ere sleep seals up the sense,
We hear our Mother call from deeps of time,
And, waking, find it vision,-none the less
The benediction bides, old skies return.

These quotations are too few to represent fairly the better side of the poem, but our limited space forbids us to add to them.

We have thought it not best to follow the general example, in suffering the blemishes which disfigure this poem to go unremarked. We have admired the more than exemplary meekness with which the religious press have received Mr. Lowell's thrusts at orthodox theology. We have actually seen the most offensive of these thrusts quoted in full in a well-known monthly repertory of periodical literature devoted especially to the interests of evangelical religion-and that not only without rebuke, but with extravagant editorial laudation of the poem, as the highest effort of American genius. A little more vigilance, or a good deal more independence, is loudly demanded at the hands of our journalistic custodians of literature and religion. Mr. Lowell, in virtue, partly, of his merit, but in virtue, as much, of his fortune, is likely to exercise no inconsiderable influence in setting the fashion of our current literary period. Alike in the interest of literature, and in the paramount interest of religion, it is important that faithful criticism should interpose its part to render that influence entirely wholesome and pure. American

letters ought not to be surrendered for even a moment, by default, to the unchastised sovereignty of a school of culture that should learn from Mr. Lowell, as master, to commit his mistakes upon principle, in the false conceit that they were thereby making their productions somehow more natural, or more original, or more manly, or more distinctively American. It is not necessary to coin outlandish words, to use vulgarisms, to be querulous, to be unmetrical, to be obscure, to introduce prosaicisms, to risk commonplaces, and to slant at evangelical religion, in order to be a true American poet. Bryant is not guilty in any of these things, and the young gods may be born, but they have not published their poetry, that are to take away Bryant's crown of easy supremacy among American poets.

Mr. Fields, we conclude, upon the whole, may have acted as a wise publisher in making a book of "The Cathedral." He, no doubt, acted also as a loyal, but not, we think, as a wise friend to Mr. Lowell, in thereby challenging a separate and serious criticism of the poem.

MR. LOWELL'S PROSE.

OR several reasons, Mr. Lowell's prose, as well as

FOR

his poetry, has almost altogether missed, hitherto, the homage of that sincere and serious criticism which alike his real merits, in either kind of composition, and the high rank to which the general consent of enlightened opinion has advanced him, should seem to have demanded. When he first began to publish, now nearly one whole literary age ago, he was greeted by the powers of criticism that then were with a certain condescension of notice, magisterial, to be sure, in tone, but kindly, as exercised toward a young man personally well known to his censors, and affectionately regarded by them, of whom good things were justly to be expected in the future, but to whom it would meantime be premature to pay the compliment of a very thorough examination of his claims to permanent regard. There followed a considerable period of nearly unbroken silence on the part of Mr. Lowell, during which a tradition of his genius and accomplishments made the tour of cultivated minds, traveling outward from Boston through the slowly widening circle of the fellowship of American letters.

By the time that he appeared again in print, Mr. Lowell had thus an assured welcome of generous acclamation already awaiting him from every organ of