Fell soft about his temples; manhood's blossom
Not yet had sprouted on his chin, but freshly
Curved the fair cheek, and full the red lip's parting,
Like a loose bow that just has launched its arrow;
His large blue eyes, with joy dilate and beamy,
Were clear as the unshadowed Grecian heaven;
Dewy and sleek, his dimpled shoulder rounded
To the white arms and whiter breast beneath them.
Downward, the supple lines had less of softness;
His back was like a god's; his loins were moulded
As if some pulse of power began to waken ;
The springy fulness of his thighs, outswerving,
Sloped to his knee, and, lightly dropping downward,
Drew the curved lines that breathe, in rest, of mo-
tion."

The lines we have italicised, we have never seen surpassed; and we doubt if a truer, more vigorous, more terse, and at the same time a more poetical description of manly beauty and strength was ever given. The closing lines of this poem are full of rhetorical beauty:

"The sunset died behind the crags of Imbros. Argo was tugging at her chain; for freshly Blew the swift breeze, and leaped the restless

billows.

We do not remember having looked through a book of poems for several years back, without noticing very clearly the influence of Tennyson. Mr. Tennyson, besides taking rank as the most popular poet of the day, has also become, in a most eminent degree, a study for poets; and his many excellences and defects, his graces and his subtleties, his niceties and his obscuritiessomewhat changed in form, it is true, by the peculiarities of each mind through which they are transmitted-are fast being poured through a hundred channels into the vast and never-filled reservoir of current poetry. In asserting thus much, we intend to accuse no one of plagiarism; for although Mr. Tennyson's poetical property has often been most violently outraged, we are happy to say that neither has Mr. Taylor, nor any other of those writers mentioned in his company a few pages back, been guilty of this inexcusable criminality. Nor are we speaking now so much of imitation as of an acquiescence in that subtle influence which is ever diffused from the productions of a master in

VOL. IX. NO. I. NEW SERIES.

any art, and which, within reasonable limits, may be accepted not only without dishonesty or servility, but, on the contrary, with positive advantage. Poetry, like philosophy, has its epochs and its changes. If Pope had he was the head and the most eminent never lived, the school of poetry of which example, would undoubtedly have flourished through its appointed time, to give place to another equally inevitable. The poetry of the Lakers seems to have sprung up in half a dozen minds at once; and in several writers of the present day whom we might name, both English and American, often unthinkingly styled imitators, the Tennysonian vein appears as natural and as unstrained as if their own genius had been its prime originator. We cannot better illustrate our meaning than by quoting a few stanzas from one of Mr. Taylor's finest poems, which the reader will see are not plagiarisms, not imitations, but are, on the other hand, eminently original, and which remind us not so much of Tennyson himself, as of the existence of those fine trains of thought which are shared in common by the best poets of the day, and which will hereafter be noticed as one of the chief characteristics of the poetry of this particular era. The poem is entitled "The Metempsychosis of the Pine:”—

"As when the haze of some wan moonlight makes Familiar fields a land of mystery, When all is changed, and some new presence wakes

In flower, and bush, and tree, "Another life the life of day o'erwhelms;

The past from present consciousness takes hue, And we remember vast and cloudy realms Our feet have wandered through;

"So, oft, some moonlight of the mind makes dumb The stir of outer thought; wide open seems The gate where, through strange sympathies, have

come

3

Some time since, when Mr. Taylor commenced to write, public attention was called to his eminent command of sonorous and poetical language, to the rhythmic sweep of his stanzas, and to the superior rhetorical merit of all his compositions. These qualities were insisted on, at the expense of his imagination and his sentiment, until finally those readers who were more disposed to yield to critical opinions than to abide by their own convictions, allowed themselves to believe that he was nothing more than a rhetorician, who, after having rung the changes upon a certain number of poetical words, would cease to write any thing either readable or remarkable. This is not the first instance in which some one distinguishing excellence of an author has operated unfavorably to his general fame; has either usurped the place of all his other merits, or has been made to hide them from sight; and we are glad, therefore, to see Mr. Taylor's poems in a collected form, so that their various qualities may be readily perceived, compared and estimated. We have no fear that his claims to a brilliant if not a spiritual imagination, a delicate and yet a healthy sentiment, a keen perception, and ready powers of description, will suffer with any candid reader, simply because he possesses the advantage of being able to express as strongly as he feels. To us it seems a proof of careful study, and of mastery of the poetical art, to have the faculty of writing verses in which there shall not be one unmistakable idea, in which every thought shall present itself to the reader in a clear and precise form, and which shall all be knit together by verbal melody and metrical precision.

Perhaps, in the piece we are about to quote, certain critics might find so much of rhetoric that their eyes would become blinded to the many other qualities of fine poetry which it contains; but before we are convinced that we have been betrayed by sounding words into a weakness of judgment, we must be shown as many stanzas of contemporaneous poetry containing more of poet

ieal fire and manliness of sentiment:

"THE HARP: AN ODE.

And when, at night, the horns of mead foamed

over,

And torches flared around the wassail board, It breathed no song of maid nor sigh of lover, It rang aloud the triumphs of the sword! It mocked the thunders of the ice-ribbed ocean, With clenched hands beating back the dragon's prow;

It gave Berseker arms their battle-motion, And swelled the red veins on the Viking' brow!

II.

"No myrtle, plucked in dalliance, ever sheathed it
To melt the savage ardor of its flow;
The only gauds wherewith its lord enwreathed it,
The lusty fir and Druid mistletoe.

Thus bound, it kept the old, accustomed cadence Whether it pealed through slumberous ilex bowers,

In stormy wooing of Byzantine maidens, Whether Genseric's conquering march it chanted. Or shook Trinacria's languid lap of flowers;

Till cloudy Atlas rang with Gothic staves, Or, where gray Calpe's pillared feet are planted, Died grandly out upon the unknown waves!

Silent in other lands, what hand shall make them Leap as of old, to shape the songs of ours! Here, while the sapless bulk of Europe moulders, Springs the rich blood to hero-veins unsealed,Source of that Will, that on its fearless shoulders Would bear the world's fate lightly as a shield; Here moves a larger life, to grander measures Beneath our sky and through our forests rung.

Why sleeps the harp, forgetful of its treasures, Buried in songs that never yet were sung!

"Great solemn songs, that with majestic sounding Should swell the nation's heart, from sea to

sea;

Informed with power, with earnest hope abound

ing,

And prophecies of triumph yet to be!

We owe no apology to our readers for having quoted this fine lyric at length, although we find ourselves, in consequence, obliged to omit one or two other pieces marked for quotation, among which we may mention "Taurus" and "The Waves." We have, perhaps, protracted this paper unnecessarily, and have allowed ourselves to dwell on certain points that seemed to us to demand attention, without making due allowance for the very slender patience of most readers toward poetical criticisms. For it has come to be considered among the reading public that criticisms are written more to show the ability of the writer than to explain the beauties or expose the faults of the poet; and are often neither more nor less than races against time and space, in which he is the winner who covers the greatest amount of paper with the smallest expenditure of time, content to let his production share the usual fate of those critical articles in which every periodical imagines itself in duty bound to indulge.

Thus, of the many reviews of Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Shelley, Campbell and Tennyson that have lately appeared in American magazines, how many are supposed to have been written out of admiration for these very distinguished writers, and how many have been thought worthy of being read by the public for whom they were written? Is it not a settled conclusion that books of poems are the hobby-horses of brain and pocket-needy writers, on which they may mount at any time, and so gallop through the pages of a periodical to the pockets of its publisher? Nay, when American poets are remembered by the critic, and their merits sedulously put forward in the columns of a review, is it not thought that the writer is performing this service to national literature in consideration of value received from interested parties, and that for a similar gratuity he would at any moment perform a like favor for the proprietors of the "Ready Relief," or the "Balsam of Tolu?"

But in whatever light our readers may be disposed to regard this feeble attempt to do justice to a poet of whom our countrymen should be proud, we are satisfied that we have not mistaken those evidences of genius and ambitious energy which are exhibited in the works of Mr. Taylor. We feel that, with a select number of similarly gifted writers, he is coming before us more prominently, year by year, to claim the place which a forerunning generation must soon vacate, and which is by right his own. It remains for us to acknowledge merit where such acknowledgment is due; to extend our sympathies to real genius all the more heartily, because it is the production of our own soil, and draws its inspiration from the air we daily breathe; and to show our own writers that, if we will not protect them by law, we will at least give them an equal share of attention with their foreign brethren.