From The Saturday Review. Chaucer and Spenser, and those of the Narrative Poems which are really metrical tales, and turn, like fables, on the description of simple incidents. It is natural that an author should regard with partial fondness his more elaborate efforts; and Mr. Hunt, like Southey, does "not pretend to think that there is no merit in the larger pieces," and, like him, appeals to the fact that "they have not ceased to be called for by the public." We attach very little value to this test. It varies with the attractiveness of the subject, the notoriety of the writer, and the greater or less urgency of the puffing. Undismayed by their alleged popularity, and by the assertion that the first is the " finest narrative poem which has appeared in the English language since the time of Dryden," we pronounce "Rimini," "Corso and Emilia,"

THE POETICAL WORKS OF LEIGH HUNT.* LEIGH HUNT was one of a class of authors who fail to achieve eminence chiefly because they are overshadowed by the vicinity of greater reputations. Ambitious men, of powers below the highest, should choose & line of their own. A thirdrate physician may become immortal by cultivating one of the waste places of natural science, and a barrister who has scarcely held a brief in Westminster Hall may dash into the attorney-generalship of an obscure colony. It is the same in literature. The public prefers relative to absolute excellence. With a just economy of time it will read a book, or go to see a sight, which is reputed to be the first of its class. It does not care to discriminate between the comparative elevation of two different careers, or to balance the "The Palfrey," and even "Hero and Leandifficulty of success in that which is open der," to be second-rate productions, deficient and that which is crowded. Mr. Leigh in originality, and but for their pictures of Hunt wrote, and wrote well, in a variety of scenery very little above the level of the styles, but in each one he was fairly beaten prize-poem. It is perhaps worth while to by some contemporary poet. The "Story of Rimini" contains some fine passages, but as a whole does not approach the best of Byron's narrative poems. "The Palfrey," and "Wallace," are poor beside Sir Walter Scott's lays and ballads. The "Ode to the Sun," perhaps the highest flight of poetry in Mr. Leigh Hunt is much more successful the volume, falls short of the simplicity and in what may be called "cabinet pocms," grandeur of the "Ode to Immortality." where sustained power is less necessary than "Godiva," though it contains the choice poetical sympathy and grace of expression. line, "Hear how the boldest naked deed "Mahmoud," "Kilspindie," and the "Trumwas clothed in saintliest beauty," has not pets of Doolkarnein," are happy examples the strange transparency of Mr. Tennyson's of what is rapidly becoming a lost art-the fragment on the same subject, and is not art of telling a story graphically without comparable to his masterpieces on kindred marring its effect by subjective interpolasubjects. The result is, that although Mr. tions. The mine of self-consciousness had, Hunt has written real poetry, and not mere rhetoric and metaphysics in verse, he is scarcely numbered among English poets, and probably has more honor with the less discriminating but more sympathetic American public than in his own country.

remark, by the way, that the line, "That ever among ladies ate in hall," in that most beautiful passage which describes Elaine's admiration of Lancelot, occurs word for word in Lorenzo's lamentation over the body of Corso.

in Mr. Hunt's earlier days, scarcely been opened to poets. Byron himself, though he formed a kind of dark background to his pictures out of his own blighted existence, sought his materials and refreshed his imagination in the inexhaustible richness of The present volume, as we learn from the nature. Even the misanthropy of Manfred introduction, contains those of his poetical and Childe Harold is not the misanhtropy works, which the author thought worthy of of the hero in "Maud"-the Byronic melpreservation, and the plan of arrangement ancholy is not the melancholy which gives was settled by himself before his death. They its charm to "In Memoriam." Leigh Hunt's are distributed into "Narrative Poems," poetry-more nearly related to that of Keats "Narrative Modernizations," "Narrative than to that of Byron-still essentially beImitations," "Political and Critical Poems," longs to the earlier manner of the present "Sonnets," "Blank Verse," "Miscellaneous century. It abounds in glowing descripPoems," and "Translations." Adopting this tions, ingenious turns, and lively sallies; classification, we should be inclined to give the preference to the least ambitious works -to the Translations, the Imitations of

The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt. Now finally collected, revised by himself, and edited by his son, Thornton Hunt. London and New York: Routledge and Co. 1860.

but it is strictly confined within the dominion of fancy, and never aspires to teach or to interpret. Perhaps its most attractive characteristic is the cheerful tone which pervades it, in spite of trials and misrepresentations which might well have soured a less equable temper. There is no bitterness of

spirit in the following sonnet "To Hamp-| "Blest be the queen! Blest when the sun goes stead-Written during the Author's Imprisonment, August, 1813:"

Poor Hero looked for no such thanks.

hand,

But to be held in his, would have given sea and land."

Hertain Sword and Captain Pen," with its accompanying notes, detailing the actual horrors of battle-fields, is a downright and vigorous attempt to discourage war by a In fact, several of the occasional poems simple revelation of its cruel mysteries. are suggestive of that excruciating game" Is a murder in the streets worth attendcalled "conglomeration," in which rhymes ing to-a single wounded man worth carryhave not only to be written on a given text, ing to the hospital-and are all the murders but two subtantives, chosen by a stranger to and massacres and fields of wounded, and the subject, must be woven into the texture the madness, the conflagrations, the famines, of the composition. In justice, however, to the miseries of families, and the rickety Mr. Hunt we will quote the sonnet on the frames and melancholy bloods of posterity, Nile, which was avowedly struck off in this only fit to have an embroidered handkerchief extemporary fashion, and is certainly a very thrown over them? Must ladies and gengood specimen of its class:tlemen' be called off, that they may not look that way,' the sight is so shocking?

"It flows through old hush'd Egypt and its sands,

Like some grave, mighty thought threading a dream,

And times and things, as in that vision,

As of a world left empty of its throng,

And the void weighs on us; and then we
wake,

And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
'Twixt villages, and think how we shall

Does it become us to let others endure what we cannot bear even to think of." We are far from ridiculing such language as this; for we believe that some good may be done by speaking the truth during lulls and lucid intervals; but it is of no use flying in the face of mankind when the fit is on them. Our opinion of human nature is such that we have more faith in the influence of commercial considerations than in direct appeals to humanity. People who might be moved by the calm discussion of "War" in Mr. Helps' essays, shake off the impressions produced by "Captain Sword and Captain Pen" as they would shake off the harrowing recollections of the sick-chamber or dissectingroom, and relegate the subject to the hopeless category of necessary evils.

In most of Mr. Hunt's poetry there is a Our own calm journey on for human sake." delicacy of sentiment and a freedom from One poem in this collection is remarkable, mannerism and straining after effect which not so much for its artistic merit, as for the redeems many faults. There is room in litmoral ends which it is designed to advance, erature for the pleasing as well as for the and which are categorically announced in the acute and profound; and in these days it is prefatory remarks. The long and bloody a positive relief to read either prose or poetry wars arising out of the French Revolution in which point has not been studied to exhad excited in sensitive minds a disgust for cess. The aggressive obtrusion of an auall warfare which can scarcely be conceived thor's cleverness is sometimes perfectly inby the present generation. Traces of this sulting, and mars that serene and genial are to be found in most of our poets during temper of mind which the masters of literathe latter half of George III.'s reign. Cap-ture love to produce in their readers.

OUR readers may probably remember a charm- | harsh, priggish kind of man, and scarcely worthy ing little book, which appeared about two years of his very pleasant correspondent. Doubt, ago, called "Letters of a Betrothed." These epistles purported to be the genuine compositions of a lady addressed to her future husband during a long engagement, and were professedly published to show that such a correspondence need not necessarily be of such a ridiculous nature as nisi prius revelations would lead us to believe. They also throw some light on the character of the lover-who, from various slight indications, would seem to have been a stiff,

however, is now thrown on the genuineness of the same author," who turns out to be Miss the work by the advertisement of a novel "by Marguerite A. Power,-the niece, we conclude, of Lady Blessington. Wo say that this suggests a doubt, for we imagine that, though a lady might possibly publish her love-letters if it were quite certain that her name could not be known, yet that she would be scarcely likely to give her friends the power of identifying her as the author of them.-The Press.