poem, the entire body of his poetry is ethical and deeply imbued with the manner and cast of mind distinguishable in the great English Bards, the elder and later. This is no disparagement; moral verse (of all others) allows most of imitation, and is least marked by nationality: thus we think of Cowper, and Crabbe, and Wordsworth, in reading Dana; we think of them as fellow-workers in the same field. Dana

is no copyist, if he does employ, to a certain degree, the manner of Cowper, which we think we perceive he does, in Factitious Life;' of Crabbe, in 'The Changes of Home,' and of Wordsworth in almost all the remaining pieces in the volume; except, perhaps, in 'Thoughts on the Soul,' which might have been written (all the speculative portion of it; indeed all but a few lines in the second page, in the more familiar vein of later writers) by Sir John Davies himself who furnishes a text for the poet. Dana's poem is like the verse of the Elizabethan writer, equally close, full of thought and austere. The characteristic sentiment of Dana these poems are full of: he imbues all nature with his peculiar feeling and purity, and solemn fancy, as with an atmosphere of meditation and religious musing. Wordsworth has not in England worthier disciples of his school than Dana and Bryant, and they have done some things that no other of the followers of the great English poet have ever attempted. Critically to speak of Mr. Dana, he is truly eldest apprentice in the school of art,' over which Coleridge and Crabbe and Wordsworth preside. With the soul and heart of a poet, Mr. Dana has more of the speculative intellect than mere imagination or fancy, not that he is deficient in either.

The critic's esthetical views are strongly tinged with his ethetical doctrines, and a turn for moralising, and vein of speculation runs through all of his critical papers, and forms the

basis (as it were) of his critical opinions-with Plato and the highest spiritual philosophy, he seeks to unite invariably the good and the beautiful; he is not easy in their disunion, cannot properly admit their severance. Moral Beauty, the highest object of our love and admiration, is the sole beauty with him. Hence, our critic, like a true poet, includes in the scope of his admiration, the highest qualities both of writing and manliness; he would not take into his regard minor and lighter graces, unaccompanied by purity and religion.

Himself a poet, and skilled in the mysteries of versification, no less than in the subtle windings of the heart, and the affections, Mr Dana is admirably well qualified to judge of poetry, both as an artist and a thinker. To say nothing of his original capacity for the office of critic, with a judgment clear and refined, powerful imagination, depth and fineness of feeling, high, healthy and moral sentiment, purified by the practice of the manly virtues, and a life of single-hearted purpose, the poet has, besides the general cultivation of his qualities, mastered the old English literature, and the entire fruitful province of old English poetry, in particular. The structure and elaboration of the author's style prove this; his language and expression is uncommonly choice and select, full of meaning, perfectly simple and unaffected, and yet to a scholar's eye full of richness and discrimination; not the finest but the justest terms are used; nor is the manner above, but precisely equal to the matter, the latter is as abundant and copious as the former is refined and judicious. Much of Mr. Dana's prose (not in his Tales so much as in his Essays and Reviews) has all the sweetness and fluent rhetorical amplitude of Taylor and the old Divines, carried sometimes almost to redundance. In direct narrative, our author can be rigidly concise, and produce a powerful effect in description, also by a few touches.

VIII.

TALES OF THE SOUTH AND WEST.

ENGLISH critics have noticed, as a trait in American literature now becoming a veritable something, the facility of invention and power, with skill of execution, of our writers of fiction. American tales are at a premium at this present writing, in London and Edinburgh, and are employed to eke out the pages of some of the most flourishing of their magazines. From English critics of the present dynasty have come some of the most generous praises of American authors, as from Jerrold, Miss Barrett, and even Dickens, who at first copied Irving.

The article on American works of fiction, in the Foreign and Colonial Quarterly Review, some years since, was much the honestest and most liberal piece of criticism we have seen on American romance; but its excellence lies in its general judgment almost wholly; inasmuch as many capital writers are not even mentioned, while inferior scribes occupy their place, to their exclusion. Such sins of omission and commission can result only from ignorance of their works. Dr. Bird, Mr. Ware, and Mr. Carlton receive a just sentence; while we read not a word respecting Mr. Dana, Judge Hall, Mr. Poe, Mr. Simms, authors certainly entitled to honorable

mention.

Not to speak of the finish, the humor, the delicate grace of Irving, in his Dutch and English tales; without referring to the fine invention, aerial fancy, and purely original vein of Hawthorne, in his admirable fancy sketches and admirable pictures of New England romance, that practical mingling of shrewdness and mysticism; entirely excluding the domestic

histories of Mr. Dana, so earnest and true, instinct with genuine passion, and with its rare accompaniment, deep, rich, marrowy" sentiment, the very breath of our intellectual and sensitive life; and leaving entirely out of question the powerful fictions of Brown and Cooper, we still can point to a large body of writers of fiction, tales, "minature novels," (which Schelegel thought the best form of the novel,) and narrative sketches, affording convincing proof, if any could be wanting, that imagination, at least adequate to the production of a prose fiction of the first class, and creative power, are not wanting here, and which, employed on American themes, whether of history, character or manners, legend or landscape, cannot fail to give to our literature a national character, which, indeed, it is every day acquiring.

Thus, besides the genuine originals we have mentioned, we have to fill out a good list of tale writers; Miss Leslie, a sort of modernized Miss Burney on a smaller scale, and like her, expert in strong satire of vulgarity; Miss Sedgwick, pleasing in her home pictures and tales for children; and pre-eminent among American female writers, Mrs. Kirkland, the cleverest sketcher of western manners we have, and the best western raconteur, at the same time; not in the same line with Judge Hall or any other western writer, but in a class unique and individual. Of the two Neals, John has tact and power; Joseph, humor, (of the broadest,) and copiousness. The Portland writer is expert in a love-history or life-assurance story; while the Philadelphian is best in city scenes of local and burlesque humor. Briggs is quite at home in a satirical tale, with his ingenuity, tact, keen observation and dry humor. Hoffman can throw off a better hunting or sporting story than any writer we have,. Mathews has both humor and pathetic skill, and in his Motley Book has done some excellent things.

Sands left some laughable pieces, verging on caricature. The critic in the Quarterly referred to, says, and says handsomely, though truly: "We rarely, if ever, take up an American Annual or Magazine, without finding some one contribution individually racy, and without any peer or prototype on this side of the ocean." With the same critic we hardly agree, that though more unpretending in form than the regular novel, the list of tale writers, in their attempts, "contains more characteristic excellence than is to be found in the library of accredited novels." We have no one capital novel except the Pilot; all Cooper's fictions, admirable as they are in scenes and particular descriptions, being confessedly, even according to Mr. Simms, Cooper's heartiest critic, excellent only in those passages, and abounding in faults elsewhere.

Many of these tales have a sectional character and reputation. They are, professedly, so in their choice of subject and back-grounds. It is a history of love or hate, to be sure; but the locality is laid in Illinois, Michigan or South Carolina, with the scenery peculiar to those regions. It is a lovehistory, but of planter, Indian, negro, or early settler, and the interest varies accordingly. European readers cannot be supposed to read with sufficient knowledge, or with analogous feeling of patriotic interest, and hence these national and local narratives lose for them a striking and peculiar charm. To us, Americans, for this reason, they offer a very strong attraction, independent of the genius involved in the conception of them, or the artistic skill employed in their execution.

We have for the West, Judge Hall and Mrs. Kirkland ; for the South, Mr. Simms; for New England, Mr. Hawthorne; Dutch New York has her Irving; for revolutionary historical novelist, Cooper; Philadelphia has her Brown; Virginia, Wirt.