Rise like a cloud of incense from the earth! Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God! One can not look too often upon Mr. Wordsworth's charming female portrait : She was a phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight: A lovely apparition sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of twilight fair; Like twilight, too, her dusky hair; From May-time and the cheerful dawn; To haunt, to startle, and waylay. I saw her upon nearer view Her household motions light and free, A countenance in which did meet And now I see with eye serene I would add "Laodamia," if it were not too long, and the Yew-trees," if I had not a misgiving planted those deathless trunks before. that I have somewhere In how many ways is a great poet glorious! I met with a few lines taken from that noble poem the other day in the "Modern Painters," cited for the landscape: "Huge trunks, and each particular trunk a growth Upcoiling and inveterately convolved! Beneath whose shade With sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged and so forth. Mr. Ruskin cited this fine passage for the picture, I for the personifications: Ghostly shapes May meet at noontide, Fear and trembling Hope, Silence and Foresight, Death the skeleton, And Time the shadow!" Both quoted the lines for different excellences, and both were right. XXXI. AMERICAN POETS. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. AMONG the strange events of these strange days of ours, when revolutions and counter-revolutions, constitutions changed one week and rechanged the next, seem to crowd into a fortnight the work of a century, annihilating time, just as railways and electric telegraphs annihilate space, in these days of curious novelty, nothing has taken me more pleasantly by surprise than the school of true and original poetry that has sprung up among our blood relations (I had well nigh called them our fellow-countrymen) across the Atlantic; they who speak the same tongue and inherit the same literature. And of all this flight of genuine poets, I hardly know any one so original as Dr. Holmes. For him we can find no living prototype; to track his footsteps, we must travel back as far as Pope or Dryden; and to my mind it would be well if some of our own bards would take the same journey -provided always, it produced the same result. Lofty, poignant, graceful, grand, high of thought, and clear of word, we could fancy ourselves reading some pungent page of "Absalom and Achitophel," or of the "Moral Epistles," if it were not for the pervading nationality, which, excepting Whittier, American poets have generally wanted, and for that true reflection of the manners and the follies of the age, without which satire would fail alike of its purpose and its name. The work of which I am about to offer a sample, all too brief, is a little book much too brief itself; a little book of less than forty pages, described in the title-page as " Astræa-a Poem, delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale College, August, 1850, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and printed at the request of the Society." The introduction tells most gracefully, in verse that rather, perhaps, implies than relates, the cause of the author's visit to the college, dear to him as the place of his father's education : . What secret charm long whispering in mine ear, Speak from thy fountains, O my throbbing heart! Gifts such as purchase, with unminted gold, Smiles from the young and blessings from the old. Is not the portrait of the boy beautiful? The poem goes on: Say shall my hand with pious love restore, How kindness ripened, till the youth might dare. While the gray scholar bending o'er the young, No more I heed the kind or envious gaze, I read a legend that was traced by thee. I see the pathway where thy feet have trod ; · Ye who have known the sudden tears that flow, Sad tears, yet sweet, the dews of twilight woe, When led by chance, your wandering eye has crossed Some poor memorial of the loved and lost, Bear with my weakness as I look around On the dear relics of this holy ground, My dreams have pictured ere mine eyes have seen. |