useful to the body, has neverthelesss its poets; has a crowd indeed of them, and naturally enough; Poetry costs them nothing; they make their verses in their lost moments, as one plays ninepins or billiards, on Sunday, after a long and laboriously industrious week. Mr. Rufus W. Griswold has been pleased to collect in an enormous volume, equal to twelve common ones, the colossal mass of American poetry. An historical introduction serves as Propylaeum to these redoubtable five hundred pages, where gleam the names of more than one hundred indigenous poets. The distinctive sign of all the specimens is common-place; they are all made with a shoemaker's punch. Take off your hats to these epithets, salute these images, they are from the Gradus ad Parnassum. The worn-out forms of Europe make fortunes in the States, as bonnets of passed fashion do in the colonies. The figures are stereotyped; the lake is ever blue, the forest ever trembling, the eagle invariably sublime. The bad Spanish poets did not write more rapidly stantes pede in uno, their wretched rhymes, that the modern American versemakers, bankers, settlers, merchants, clerks and tavern-keepers, their epics and their odes. One In the way of counterfeiting, they are quite at ease. redoes the Giaour, another the Dunciad. Mr. Charles Fenno Hoffman repeats the songs of Thomas Moore; Mr Sprague models after Pope and Collins. One takes the Byronic stanza, another appropriates the cadence and images of Wordsworth. Mrs. Hemans, Tennyson, Milnes, all find imitators. Once the consecration of the British public given, the American counterfeit soon appears. Why should a decrepit and provincial Muse seat herself at the foot of the Alleghanies. I have said above, this nation is too young. The freshness of those gulfs of foliage, old as the world, and sunlight breaking into rainbows over immense cascades, cannot yet bring forth a poesy which possesses the elements of its work, but not the force to accomplish it. The majority of the poets boasted by Mr. Griswold, offer discolored reflections of the metropolis, enfeebled echoes of the British nationality. With most, rapidity of execution and incorrectness of language is strangely joined with a descriptive exaggeration, and a flood of vague, enormous metaphors which express nothing. Some renounce even the grammar, and forget the proper formation of English words. Poet Payne says fadeless, tireless, which are frightful barbarisms, compositions foreign to Anglo-Saxon grammar and analogy. The primitive less, the Gothic laus, the German los, meaning "exempt from," "free of," "deprived of," cannot evidently be united to anything but a substantive, houseless, colorless. This is a simple rule, strictly observed by the Germans, who say ehrlos, furchtlos, but not ehrlich-los, furchtbar-los any more than we say sans honorable, sans rédoubtable, instead of sans honneur, sans crainte.* Now the true poet never destroys the elements of a language but uses them with a wise freedom which makes them more abundant. Faithful to their commercial probity, the American poets generally give good measure, yea, whole tons of mediocre verses; the quantity is to make amends for the quality. The Columbiad by Joel Barlow, Conquest of Canaan by Dwight, Tecumseh by Colton, epics, colossi of cotton and papier maché form a mass of about ten thousand verses which, however, yield the palm of absurdity to the epic entitled "Washington," printed in Boston, 1843. Channing had accused the United States of possessing no *We fear that Mr. Chasles' difficulty is somewhat like the oft-cited Irish flea: when you put your finger on it, it is not there. Neither Mr. Payne, nor any other American man known to us ever said honorableless, or fearful-less. national Literature. "This struck me," says the author in his preface," and I formed a resolution to present my country with an epic." Alas, the honest man had a shop to take care of, and how could one attend to the counter and the necessities of an epic poem. "I had the prudence," says he, "to put off the fabrication of my poem, until I should have made a fortune." It would have been a shame to have spoiled a good merchant without making a good poet. I therefore arranged my affairs, and then retired to the solitude with my imagination. Once comfortably settled in the "solitude with his imagination," the American poet " presented his country" with an extraordinary and immense production, entitled Washington, a National Epic. The opening is simple. Washington is taking tea with his wife. The hero cries out, "For me as from this chair I rise So surely will I undertake this night To raise the people." His wife begs him to take a cup of tea before raising the people, for she was "There by the glistening board, ready to pour Forth the refreshment of her Chinese cups." "Oh my dear wife," says Washington, "my time is not my own And I am come, etc., etc." The world has seen many preposterous epics, but none quite equal to this one. What shall we say of the great men with whom Mr. Griswold has peopled the American Parnassus, Trumbull, Alsop, Clason, Robert Payne, Charles Sprague, Cranche, Legget, Pike, Hopkinson and some fifty others. One of them, Robert Payne, represents Washington standing up and with a drawn sword in his hand, repelling with his breast the thunderbolts, "like an electric conductor, directing the lightning towards the ocean where it is to be extinguished." This herbic lightning rod is the chef-d'œuvre of machine poetry. Some others, Percival has been still more successful in piling up words without ideas. Mr. Charles Sprague, cashier of the Globe Bank in Massachusetts, and who leads a very retired life, fabricates laboriously, after the manner of Pope, didactic verses, agreeable enough he is a republican, American, banking Pope. Mr. Dana, author of the Buccaneer, and Mr. Drake who wrote the Culprit Fay, are of a higher order. Mr. John. Pierrepont, a lawyer and author of "Airs of Palestine," is very moral, monotonous, and unpoetic. Several ladies, Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Brooks under the title of Maria del Occidente, have published poems. Those of the first-named lady are pretensiously puerile, the second is only distinguished by wordy facility, and Mrs. Brooks, author of Zophiel, has a talent which is so fatiguing by its heaps of color, of sound, and of images, the complication of the rhythm, and the fantastic subject, that both mind and ear cry out, hold! The only names which we can single out from this forest of versifiers are Street, Halleck, Bryant, Longfellow, and Emerson. Street is a descriptive poet, agreeable but diffuse, Halleck, superintendent of the rich Mr. Astor, is the author of Marco Bozzaris and of Red Jacket, pure and agreeable poems. William Cullen Bryant is far superior. SECTION II. BRYANT-EMERSON-LONGFELLOW. Bryant has created nothing great; his voice is feeble, melodious, somewhat vague; but pure, solemn, and not imitative. More philosophic than picturesque, the expression of melancholy sensations, born of forest and lake, finds a sweet echo in his verse. The sublime is not his territory; his peculiar charm is a chaste and pensive sadness, which associates itself with natural objects and the beings of the creation; he loves them, and the modest piety mingled with this affection, breathes a pathetic grace upon his verse. Christian and English poet, the gentle solemnity of his poetry emanates from his religious conviction. If he set his foot in the forest, he sees God there. "Come when the rains Have glazed the snow, and clothed the trees with ice; Into the bowers a flood of light, Approach Bend, in a glittering ring, and arbors hide Deep in the womb of earth-where the gems grow, |