Nor would I it should echo to a sound
Less solemn than the service for the dead.
Mine is inferior matter-my own loss-
The loss of dear delights for ever fled,
Of reason's converse by affection fed,

Of wisdom, counsel, solace, that across
Life's dreariest tracts a tender radiance shed.

Friend of my youth! though younger yet my guide,
How much by thy unerring insight clear

I shaped my way of life for many a year,

What thoughtful friendship on thy death-bed died!
Friend of my youth, whilst thou wast by my side
Autumnal days still breathed a vernal breath;
How like a charm thy life to me supplied

All waste and injury of time and tide,

How like a disenchantment was thy death!"

The work by which Mr. Taylor is best known is his Drama of "Philip Van Arteveldt." This may be called the crowning triumph of level writing; it has but one single burst of dramatic passion. It is the reply of Elena, the mistress of Van Arteveldt, who when discovered embracing the dead body of her hero lover is reproached by some as being his paramour-a French knight, with the characteristic generosity and gallantry of his nation volunteers her defence. She interrupts him with the passionate exclamation,

"Thou liest-I was his paramour!"

Mr. Taylor brings down every thing to the same cold temperature of his own reason!' It is in these words that he makes his hero ask a fiery souled Italian woman if she can love him?

"Tell me, sweet Elena

May I not hope, or rather can I hope,

That for such brief and bounded space of time
As are my days on earth, you'll yield yourself,
To love me living, and to mourn me dead!"

And mark how successful this "cold water" dramatist is in quenching the small degree of interest we should have otherwise felt in his

hero! He reverts thus to some hours passed in the scc.ety of Elena, the woman he loves, or affects to love.

(After a pause.)

"Arteveldt.-The night is far advanced upon the morrow, And but for that conglomerated mass

Of cloud with ragged edges, like a mound,

Or black pine forest on a mountain's top,

Wherein the light lies ambushed, dawn were near

Yes, I have wasted half a summer's night!

WAS IT WELL SPENT!

SUCCESSFULLY IT WAS!

How little flattering is a woman's love!

Worth to the heart, come how it may, a world!
Worth to men's measures of their own deserts,

If weighed in wisdom's balance merely nothing."

The cold-blooded, arrogant coxcombry of Philip Van Arteveldt is perfectly ludicrous! Wonderful dramatist, Henry Taylor, truly thou art the tailer of poets, not the ninth part of one!

His other dramatic poems resemble their elder brother, the Flemish hero, and confirm his previous failure unmistakeably.

We are inclined to think that "The Eve of the Conquest," is the best of Mr. Taylor's poems. There is less to offend in it, if there is not more to admire, and truly that is a negative attraction. The fall of Harold is a noble theme, and might well have inspired a true poet to a great exertion, have brought the manner as well as the matter; but it becomes a heavy sluggish affair beneath the levelling process of the author's "reason." He here indeed makes it evident to all that the constituent part of his genius is "common sense." Alas! that his good sense was not sufficient to save him from the attempt altogether! The incident of the poem is well chosen; in a more stirring writer's hand it would have been eminently touching and graphic.

We are introduced to Harold "the eve before the fight of

Hastings"-in his tent. His troubled mind courts repose in vain! exemplifying Young's description.

"Tired nature's sweet restorer-balmy sleep!

He like the world his ready visit pays

Where fortune smiles-the wretched he forsakes,
Swift on his downy pinion flies from woe,

And lights on lids unsullied with a tear!"

He sends for his daughter, who is found kneeling before an altar in her convent! He then makes her the depository of his confession and his vindication. Mr. Taylor's cold unimpassioned style in this scene now and then comes in light admirable effect, as it harmonizes with the solemn predestination under which the Saxon monarch labors; but we miss altogether those escapes of supprest passion, and those touches of melancholy regrets which must of a necessity have revealed themselves. Mr. Taylor freezes his characters with the predominance of his favorite "good sense." He forgets that if his heroes had really possest the good sense he is so constantly claiming for them, they never could have got into the scrapes which constitutes the tragedy of their position.

66 6 A woman-child she was: but womanhood

By gradual afflux on her childhood gain'd,
And like a tide that up a river steals
And reaches to a lilied bank, began
To lift up life beneath her. As a child
She still was simple-rather shall I say
More simple than a child, as being lost
In deeper admirations and desires.
The roseate richness of her childish bloom
Remain'd, but by inconstancies and change
Referr'd itself to sources passion-swept.
Such had I seen her as I pass'd the gates
Of Rouen, in procession, on the day

I landed, when a shower of roses fell
Upon my head, and looking up I saw

The fingers which had scattered them half spread

Forgetful, and the forward-leaning face
Intently fixed and glowing, but methought
More serious than it ought to be, so young
And midmost in a show." "

It is thus that the king concludes his narrative

"Here we stand opposed;

And here to-morrow's sun, which even now,
If mine eyes err not, wakes the eastern sky,
Shall see the mortal issue. Should I fall,
Be thou my witness that I nothing doubt
The justness of my doom; but add thou this,
The justness lies betwixt my God and me;
"Twixt me and William.' "

"Then uprose the King;
His daughter's hands half startled from his knee
Dropt loosely, but her eye caught fire from his.
He snatched his truncheon, and the hollow earth
Smote strongly, that it throbbed: he cried aloud-
"Twixt me and William, say that never doom,
Save that which sunders sheep from goats, and parts
"Twixt Heaven and Hell, can righteously pronounce.'
-He sate again, and with an eye still stern,

But temperate and untroubled, he pursued:

"Twixt me and England, should some senseless swain
Ask of my title-say I wear the crown,

Because it fits my head!"

The king's head differed hugely from that of the monk who declared he was unlucky in his hopes of promotion, that he verily believed if it rained mitres not one would be found to fit him. The closing lines of the poem are very fine and solemn. It seems a piece of sculpture.

"In Waltham Abbey on St. Agnes' Eve

A stately corpse lay stretched upon a bier.

The arms were crossed upon the breast; the face,
Uncover'd, by the taper's trembling light

Show'd dimly the pale majesty severe

Of him whom death, and not the Norman Duke,
Had conquer'd; him the noblest and the last
Of Saxon Kings; save one the noblest he;
The last of all. Hard by the bier were seen
Two women, weeping side by side, whose arms
Clasped each the other. Edith was the one.
With Edith, Adeliza wept and pray'd."

Thus ends "the Eve of the Conquest."

Mr. Taylor's narrative poetry naturally suggests a reference to his contemporaries who have written in that form. We will take his verse, therefore, at his own valuation; and, for the sake of testing his dogma, we will assume that the constituent essence of his own poetry is "good sense." In Byron, every tongue proclaims it is passion, fierce, resistless, human passion; bearing us like a torrent through the breathless space of his narrative. With Scott it is stirring incident, romantic costume, and the reanimated chivalry of the stormy past. Southey clothes his song in the marvellous, the wild, and the elevated! Leigh Hunt is always vivacious, sometimes picturesque, and not unfrequently frivolous; now and then indulging in a pretty image or conceit, when he ought to be voiceless with emotion. Mr. Landor arrays his characters in the classical dress of the antique Greek, and we are repelled from all sympathy by their stateliness and their heroism. Coleridge spirits us away with him to a supernatural region, where the heart is not roused, but where it seems to beat under some wizard spell. Wordsworth makes mountains, waterfalls and lakes represent certain characters, and endeavors to make his voice sound from them as though speaking under certain influences, and in divers words; but, like a poor ventriloquist, he has but one voice, and the monotony of his intonation betrays him. In his drama of "The Borderers" the dramatis personæ are a family of Wordsworths, all differing somewhat in moral or mental calibre, though their dialogue is a curious combat of weaker and stronger Wordswortheanisms. The catastrophe is