affected; we regret his coarseness, and detest his Protestantism; but we confess his rare genius, his satirical wit, his strong masculine sense, and have a profound respect for his political sagacity and wisdom. The political policy he advocated, and which the Whig Addison opposed, was wise and profound, and England is the sufferer to-day, and will be the greater sufferer hereafter, for having rejected it. His policy was to save the independence of the crown, to guard against parliamentary despotism, and protect and strengthen the country population against the urban population, that is, prevent the government from falling into the hands of fund-holders, stock-jobbers, merchants, and manufacturers, a population that lacks stability, and fluctuates with the fluctuations of trade and the state of the markets, not only at home, but also abroad. Mr. D'Israeli, if we understand him, is attempting to revive this policy, but we fear it is too late; the Reform Bill and the late Sir Robert Peel's free-trade measures, together with the changes as to the balance of property produced in Great Britain by the marvellous development of commerce and manufactures during the last sixty years, have given the preponderance hopelessly, we are inclined to believe, to the urban system, so zealously defended by Addison in the time of Swift. England's opportunity of recovering from the sad effects of the rebellion and revolution of the seventeenth century was lost when she called in the present House of Hanover, instead of the legitimate heir of her throne, and she must, we fear, reap the consequences of her wickedness and folly. Sacred rights are never violated with impunity, and the injured in the long run are sure to be avenged.

Mr. Dana rates Wordsworth as a poet higher than we have been in the habit of doing. Our early dislike of Wordsworth may have proceeded from our early admiration of Byron, and perhaps, since we have ceased to admire Byron, we ought to overcome our distaste for Wordsworth. Wordsworth did not lack the poetic temperament, and he has written, for an Anglican, some very good poetry. Many of his sonnets, we acknowledge, are very beautiful, although we dislike sonnets, as we do hexameters, in English, and we cannot deny that they produce the effect of true poetry on the mind and heart of the reader. He wrote, too, with an honest aim, and with such religious thought and feeling as he could have without being a Catholic. But he remains always too near the ground, and never rises above a respectable Greek or Roman gentile, save in words. His philosophy is, perhaps, higher and broader

than that of Locke and Paley, but it is still low and narrow, and now and then even verges upon pantheism. He is too much of an idolater of nature to please us, and we grow weary, half to death, of his interminable descriptions of natural scenery, mountain and lake, hill and dale, park and paddock, woodland and meadow, clouds and sunsets, especially in his Excursion. We can endure no poetry that gives us any description of nature, or merely natural objects, any farther than it subserves the action of the piece. All description, introduced for description's sake, however beautiful in itself, is a blemish. In poetry, in eloquence, in painting, in every species of art, the moral must predominate, be the principal, and the merely natural only the accessory, and must never, as Cole's pictures of the Voyage of Life, overlay the moral. Wordsworth seems to us to have formed a tolerably just conception of what poetry should be, but to have labored all his long life in the nearly vain attempt to realize it. He made poetry step down from her stilts, and walk on her own natural feet and legs, and so far he did good service, but we are afraid that he will have to answer for not a few of the sins of the more recent schools of the Brownings, the Barretts, the Tennysons, the Lowells, and their fellows, with which our present youthful generation is so grievously afflicted.

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Of Mr. Dana's poems and tales, we can offer only a brief criticism. As a poet, he steers clear of the literary faults we have, rightly or wrongly, charged upon Wordsworth. He has a quick eye for external beauty, and he gives us some exquisite pictures of nature, but they never divert our attention from the action of the piece, or mar its unity, but for the most part help on, and deepen the impression intended. He does not appear to have learned that rhythm is unessential to poetry, or that mere feeling without thought, clear and distinct thought, is the chief element in the composition of a poet. It is pretty evident, therefore, that his poems were written some years ago, and that he did not anticipate our recent discoveries. His rhythm is always good, and his poetical language is natural, easy, and, for aught we can see, is used as properly, as simply, as plainly, and as intelligibly as if he were talking prose. To us this is a great merit, but in these days it may be thought a defect. His diction is choice, and his style, clear, strong, terse, energetic, and free from all exaggeration and diffuseness. In his Buccaneer he compresses as much meaning into a single line as our younger poets succeed in getting into a score of

stanzas.

In nothing he has written in his poems or in his Idle Man, the general title of the collection of tales, is there any thing that transgresses good taste, or ordinary morality, as understood by the better class of our Protestant countrymen. They are both marked by a certain moral aim, a certain religiousness, and, so far as words go, express a reverence for and belief in Christianity. Yet we feel when reading them that the author has never been really elevated above the natural order, and that the sphere in which he lives and moves lies far below the supernatural into which Divine grace elevates us, and in which are the secret springs of the Christian's life. The only sanctity we recognize in his works is forensic and imputed, not infused and intrinsic. Hence they fail to express the higher order of beauty, and to produce the effect we have always the right to demand of all productions claiming to be artistic. The supernatural in The Buccaneer is terrible, but neither beautiful nor sublime, - for it is infernal, not celestial; demoniacal, not divine. And bad as Mat Lee was, we should have been better satisfied, since supernatural agency was to be introduced, if it had been introduced to save and not to destroy. As it is, the Spectre-Horse is simply terrible, and affects us as unfavorably as the diablerie of Hoffman.

Speaking in general terms of Mr. Dana's poems, and especially of The Idle Man, we are obliged to say, that the author, beyond the exquisite beauty of his style and diction, seldom attains to the truly beautiful. His Edward and Mary is a very sweet love story, pleasantly and delicately told, but it is only a story of ordinary human love, which in no respect rises above the natural order, and is as much within the reach of the gentile as the Christian. But the rest are, for the most part, dark, gloomy, and morbid. They are terrible, rather than beautiful, and recall too vividly the general effect of the novels of Godwin and Charles Brockden Brown. We do not mean to say Mr. Dana copies or imitates these writers, nor imply any thing against his originality both of style and thought, but he writes with the same morbid spirit that they do, and leaves on his reader a painful and unhealthy impression. His Paul Felton is a powerfully written story, but it is fearful. It displays in the most masterly manner the workings of a richly endowed mind, left to its own solitary musings, strong passions, and deep affections without steady principle, and grown morbid ; but scarcely any thing in the world would induce us to give it a second reading. The author in it is true to our morbid or fallen nature

placed in the circumstances he imagines, and subjected to Satanic influences; but he must pardon us if we intimate, that, let the case stand with him now as it may, when he wrote the story of Paul Felton, he did not at all understand the philosophy of the case he so powerfully and fearfully sketched. His hero wanted two things, the infused habits of grace, and an enlightened conscience. The errors and defects of Paul did not arise from the solitude in which he was brought up, nor from his mingling so little in general society. Had the boy been baptized, had he been well instructed in Christian doctrine, and been under the direction of a wise master of spiritual life, the circumstances in which he was placed and his manner of life would have favored enjoyment and the growth of virtue. But as it was, he had nothing of the grace by which the Christian lives, and the little knowledge of Christianity he had was just enough to give him a scrupulous conscience in matters not of moment, and a lax one in all else.

Paul Felton is the conception of a Calvinist, and is an admirable illustration of Calvinism in real life. Calvinists have no adequate instruction in Christian duty. A few minor things they are taught, and if in regard to these they keep tolerably clear of sin, they are satisfied with themselves, and have no trouble of conscience, however grossly they may sin in matters of real spiritual magnitude. This is the case with the great majority of them. They satisfy themselves, and maintain their self-complacency on matters of little consequence, and leave the rest to take care of itself. They can without remorse destroy the widow's house, if they do not forget to make long prayers. If they "pay tithe of mint, and anise, and cummin," they can with a self-approving conscience pass over "the weightier things of the law, judgment, and mercy, and faith." But when one of them fails in small matters, his conscience takes the alarm; he is filled with scruples; he becomes morbid, he grows mad, and plunges into the most fearful crimes and hideous sins. The basis of this character is pride and spiritual ignorance, oftenest met with in persons of good natural parts, respectable literary and scientific attainments, but unaccompanied by proper spiritual or ghostly direction. Such was Paul Felton, the jealous and tyrannical husband, the leaguer with the Devil, the murderer of his wife and of himself, yet a man of tender conscience, persuading himself that he is in all acting in accordance with conscience, and under the dictates of a superior power.

Mr. Dana in stories of this sort offends Christian morality, not indeed because he paints great crimes, but because he paints them in unchristian colors, from the point of view of mere nature, without directing the mind to their remedy. The saints relate to us crimes of the deepest die, but they do it with inward sanctity of their own, and so as not only to inspire horror for the deeds, but a love for God and heroic virtue. Mr. Dana gives us, in contrast with his bold sketches or finished details of crime and sin, no glimpses of the justice and mercy of God, no gleams of hope in the Divine charity, no heroic sanctity to which the mind and heart, sickened with the disgusting views of sin and iniquity, can turn and find relief and refreshment. The effect on the reader of all the kind of writing he here gives us is bad, enervating, and tends rather to fit one to be a villain and a desperado, than to recall him from error and sin, and to fix his affections on the true and the holy. In meditating on the passion of our Lord, it is more wholesome to dwell on the ineffable love, the infinite mercy of God manifested in it, than even on our own sins for which our Lord suffered on the cross for love to God is a nobler affection than simple hatred of sin. The sinner not unfrequently loathes the sin he continues to commit, but not loathing it because opposed to the Divine charity, or to the possession of God as his supreme good, he is rather the worse than the better for the loathing; because the loathing only drives him deeper and deeper into iniquity, in the vain hope of curing, or at least of concealing itself. Finally, we see now and then a recognition in Mr. Dana's writings of the prevalent and fashionable doctrine of the purifying and ennobling influence of mere human love. This doctrine, however disguised, is nothing but the pander to lust. We know that woman's love, a mere natural sentiment, is half deified, and represented as thaumaturgic; but we have no more confidence in either woman's or man's love as a principle of virtue than we have in any other natural sentiment, nor half so much. Marriage may sometimes reform the rake of his rakishness, as avarice will sometimes cure a man of intemperance and sloth, but it does not elevate him into the sphere of virtue. The fact is, nature is never sufficient, and always does and must disappoint those who rely on it. It must be elevated by grace, and charity must enter, pervade, and rule the domestic circle, or the domestic affections themselves can do nothing for real virtue. The state, and the family, as well as individual virtue, must have a truly religious basis, be based in

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