Mountains, and in parts of the South, the life of the settlers is frightfully wild. There law is silent or powerless; in those solitudes take place the most horrible and incredible things. We were much amased in Europe at the Hindoo association of Thugs and Phansigars, who strangled travellers so scientifically, and formed a religious sect. The little volume published in Boston, called the Life and Confessions of Murel, prove that the same sort of association, submitted to more refined laws (as was proper for the children of the old European civilization) can exist in the United States. There was the same concord of evil for money, the same cupidity, the same secret and cautious regularity in the execution of murders. It is only necessary to read the trials in the public papers to form an idea of these horrors. It is generally on the banks of the Mississippi that they occur; muddy and blood-stained stream, whose waters, says an American, has engulfed more corpses, and whose banks have concealed more crime than we will ever know. A clever writer could make much of the life of Murel or of Mike; or even of the newspaper recitations of the loss of the Home or the Moselle.

Still, in all this, the ancient nationalities may be traced, the enterprising energy and patient audacity of the Saxon, the indomitable temerity of the Norman, the exaggerated cockneyism and vulgarity of Wapping, the calm sterility and cipher-egotism of Leadenhall Street, the adventurous smartness of the blackleg, the outward and formal rigor of the Puritan. The Old English nationality has not yet had the time to get quiet and refined, nor to transform itself thoroughly; but this will take place, and soon one will no longer recognise its source. Every day furthers the metamorphosis, and few see what is going on under their very eyes.

Precisely as in 1666, the germs of a republic filled America without attracting notice so now a colossal Europe is being

formed there, and no one sees it. What will become of the Puritan civilization submitted to a mathematical education? It is the first time that the experiment has been made, and that philanthropy, the arts, religion herself, are formulised by cube-roots and cosines. Captain Hall says that the pupils of the Military School at West Point lose their names and are numbered. How will it work, this reduction of men to figures? We will know hereafter. Marryatt gives another illustration of this reign of figures, two young women speaking, in a stage-coach, about their new bonnets, do so mathematically.

Such a social organization is not favorable to literature, and does not need it. This nation of laborious ants, of busy bees, of human beings forever at work, who do not take time to eat, who despise leisure, who abhor repose, is in the most detestable position-for the cultivation of art and poesy. Yet there are political orators, Webster, Clay, Everett, Cass:-historians, as Bancroft, Schoolcraft, Butler, Carey, Pitkins, Prescott, Sparks miscellaneous writers as Neal, Stevens, Child, Leslie, Sedgewick, Sanderson, Willis, Hall, Fay, Washington Irving, Herman Melville ;-novelists, Paulding, Ingraham, Kennedy, Bird;-poets, Drake, Longfellow, Bryant, Sigourney, Hallock; -legists, Kent, Story, Hall-but above all that courageous man, who has revealed to the Americans their danger, who has pointed out the reefs upon which their prosperity may suffer shipwreck, FENNIMORE COOPER.

It is strange that the government of masses do not develop mental liberty; it strangles it and for a mathematical reason. When all have rights over us, he who detaches himself from the mass offends all. You cannot unite originality with equality. Elegance, exactitude, magniloquence, affectation may get along with such a position, but humor and liberty, never.

They are trying now in America that stimulating and caustic literature which still exists in France. Our dramatic

representations, have not yet attained to the exciting intensity of a recent drama called "The Infernal Regions." The author does not bother himself about the dialogue: but his piece is filled with the damned and the hanged; with cauldrons, tortures, skinnings, and flames, howlings, gnashing of teeth; a darkness illumined by streaks of lurid light, seas of blood, plaintive wails, unfortunates plunged in boiling pitch, and devils tearing off with their pincers, long shreds of human flesh. All this replaces, with advantage, Eschylus and Sophocles, Shakspeare and Corneille.

CHAPTER V.

OF SOME ANGLO-AMERICAN POETS.

SECTION I.

JOEL BARLOW, DWIGHT, COLTON-WASHINGTON, A HEROIC POEM ROBERT PAYNE AND CHARLES SPRAGUE - DANA, DRAKE AND

HALLECK.

PIERREPONT-WOMEN-POETS-STREET

AND

IN a certain American Collection, the editor, apropos to the very innocent novels of Frederika Bremer, writes six pages against fiction in general and the novel in particular. "Positive and practical life," quoth he, "is enough for man ; imagination is dangerous; arts are evil." Let the Americans be tranquil. They are not in the slightest danger of ruin from imagination and refinement. In another part of the same work, philosophy is treated in the same way. In a word the highest faculties of the mind are anathematized; and what would frighten us, were it not for the reparation of the Future, is that European civilization appears to be sinking into this hollow of thick materialism opposed to the progress of human destiny.

American civilization, born of prose, built upon prose, struggling with matter, and only esteeming matter when made

useful to the body, has neverthelesss its poets; nas a crowd indeed of them, and naturally enough; Poetry costs them nothing; they make their verses in their lost moments, as one plays ninepins cr 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 Propyloum 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.

In the way of counterfeiting, they are quite at ease. One 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 ist too young. The freshness of those gulfs of foliage, old as the world, and sunlight breaking into rainbows over immense