on subjects nearer ordinary life and of a more cheerful nature than the gloomy incidents of his tales and sketches. P. P. Cooke, (the accomplished author of the Froissart Ballads, who, we predict, will one day take, by common consent, his rightful high position in American letters,) in a discriminating essay on the genius of Poe, published in this magazine for January, 1848, remarks upon this point, "For my individual part, having the seventy or more tales, analytic, mystic, grotesque, arabesque, always wonderful, often great, which his While the stars that oversprinkle From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells. II. Hear the mellow wedding bells industry and fertility have already given us, I What a world of happiness their harmony foretells! would like to read one cheerful book made by his invention, with little or no aid from its twin brother imagination-a book in his admirable style of full, minute, never tedious narrative-a book full of homely doings, of successful toils, of ingenious shifts and contrivances, of ruddy firesides—a book happy and healthy throughout, and with no poetry in it at all anywhere, except a good old English poetic justice' in the end." That such a work would have greatly enhanced Mr. Poe's reputation with the million, we think, will scarcely be disputed. But it could not be. Mr. Poe was not the man to have produced a home-book. He had little of the domestic feeling and his thoughts were ever wandering. He was either in criticism or in the clouds, by turns a disciplinarian and a dreamer. And in his dreams, what visions came to him, may be gathered to some extent from the revealings he has givenvisions wherein his fancy would stray off upon some new Walpurgis, or descend into the dark realms of the Inferno, and where occasionally, through the impenetrable gloom, the supernal beauty of Lenore would burst upon his sight, as did the glorified Beatrice on the rapt gaze of the Italian master. The poems of Mr. Poe are remarkable above all other characteristics, for the exceeding melody of the versification. "Ulalume" might be cited as a happy instance of this quality, but we prefer to quote The Bells" from the last number of the Union Magazine. It was the design of the author, as he himself told us, to express in language the exact sounds of bells to the ear. He has succeeded, we think, far better than Southey, who attempted a similar feat, to tell us "how the waters come down at Lodore." THE BELLS. I. Hear the sledges with the bells Silver bells ! What a world of merriment their melody foretells In the icy air of night! Through the balmy air of night How they ring out their delight :- And all in tune, What a liquid ditty floats To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats Oh, from out the sounding cells, What a gush of euphony voluminously wells! How it dwells On the future!-how it tells To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells! Hear the loud alarum bells- What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells! In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire, What a tale their terror tells IV. Hear the tolling of the bells Iron bells! you feel that deep pathos which only genius can incite you feel the trembling of that melancholy chord which fills the soul with pleasant mourn What a world of solemn thought their monody compels! fulness-you feel that deep yearning for some To the tolling of the bells- To the moaning and the groaning of the bells. The untimely death of Mr. Poe occasioned a very general feeling of regret, although little genuine sorrow was called forth by it, out of the narrow circle of his relatives. We have received, in our private correspondence, from various quarters of the Union, warm tributes to his talent, some of which we take the liberty of quoting, though not designed for publication. A friend in the country writes thing brighter and better than this world can give-that unutterable gushing of the heart which springs up at the touch of the enchanter, as poured the stream from 'Horeb's rock, beneath the prophet's hand.' I wish I could convey to you the impression which the Raven' has made upon me. I had read it hastily in times gone by without appreciation; but now it is a study to me—as I g along like Sinbad in the Valley of Diamonds, I find a new jewel at every step. The beautiful rhythm, the mournful cadence, still ring in the ear for hours after a perusal—whilst the heart is bowed down by the outpourings of a soul made desolate not alone by disappointed love, but by the crushing of every hope, and every aspiration." In a recent letter the following noble acknowledgement is made by the first of American poets-Henry W. Longfellow-towards whom. it must be said, Mr. Poe did not always act with justice. Mr. Longfellow will pardon us, we trust, for publishing what was intended as a private communication. The passage evidences a magnanimity which belongs only to great minds. "What a melancholy death," says Mr. Longfellow," is that of Mr. Poe-a man so richly endowed with genius! I never knew him personally, but have always entertained a high appreciation of his powers as a prose-writer and a poet. His prose is remarkably vigorous, direct and yet affluent; and his verse has a particular charm of melody, an atmosphere of true poetry about it, which is very winning. The harshness of his criticisms, I have never attributed to anything but the irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong." It was not until within two years past that we ever met Mr. Poe, but during that time, and especially for two or three months previous to his "Many who deem themselves perfect critics death, we saw him very often. When in Richtalk of the want of moral in the writings and mond, he made the office of the Messenger a particularly the poetry of Poe. They would place of frequent resort. His conversation was have every one to write like sop, with the always attractive, and at times very brilliant. moral distinctly drawn at the end to prevent mis- Among modern authors his favorite was Tenuytake. Such men would object to the meteor, or son, and he delighted to recite from "The Pris the lightning's flash, because it lasts only for the cess" the song "Tears, idle tears;" a fragment moment-and yet they speak the power of God, of whichand fill our minds with the sublime more readily than does the enduring sunlight. It is thus with the writings of Poe. Every moment there comes across the darkness of his style a flash of that he pronounced unsurpassed by any image exspirit which is not of earth. You cannot ana-pressed in writing. The day before he left Richlyze the feeling-you cannot tell in what the mond, he placed in our hands for publication is beauty of a particular passage consists; and yet the Messenger, the MS. of his last poem, which -chen unto dying eycs The casement slowly grows a glimmering square,— has since found its way (through a correspondent of a northern paper with whom Mr Poe had left a copy) into the newspaper press, and been extensively circulated. As it was designed for this magazine, however, we publish it, even though all of our readers may have seen it before: ANNABEL LEE. It was many and many a year ago, That a maiden there lived whom you may know And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me. She was a child and I was a child, In this kingdom by the sea, But we loved with a love that was more than love- With a love that the wingéd seraphs of Heaven And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud by night Chilling my Annabel Lee; So that her high-born kinsmen came In this kingdom by the sea. The angels, not half so happy in Heaven, Yes! that was the reason (as all men know, That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling But our love it was stronger by far than the love Nor the demons down under the sea THE IDEALS. Translated from the German of Schiller. And wilt thou faithless go and leave me Oh golden morning of my being, Can nothing stay thee in thy flight? Alas! o'er onward billows fleeing Thou hastest towards endless night. The sunny brightness it hath faded, Which made my ravished heart to swell. The sweet belief in forms is vanished, Which would to me in dreams repair; And rude Reality hath banished What was so godlike, was so fair. As erst with prayer and fond desires Pygmalion clasped the lifeless stone, Till the cold marble felt his fires, And its pale cheek with feeling shone: Thus, Nature to my bosom taking, Round her I threw my youthful arm, Till on my poet's-breast awaking She 'gan to breathe and to grow warm. Sharing my bosom's joy and sorrow She understood its every strain, For me she would a language borrow, Gave me the kiss of love again. Then saw I life in trees and flowers, Heard music in the murmuring brook, And of my feelings, of my powers, E'en the inanimate partook. Within my swelling bosom heaving In word and deed, in form and sound. The promise which the bud would show! Alas! how little was the Real, And e'en that little poor and low! Borne on the wing of ardent boldness, His aspirations dared to fly, Nought was too distant, nought too high. How light his course, how free his roving! And round his car of life they press'd. Truth, like the sun, spotless and bright. But scarcely had the lists been entered With clouds of doubt, foreboding ill. I saw the sacred laurels blasted, Upon the rugged path it grew, But who, to me in love adhering, Thou, whom I early sought and found! And thou, so fitly with her mated, To lull the storm, give peace and joys: Industry! which is never sated, Which slowly builds, but ne'er destroys, And still, each day and hour is clearing Prince George Co., 1849. MS. LETTER OF WM. WIRT. The delightful volumes of Mr. Kennedy on the life of Wirt, have re-awakened the interest which attaches to every fragment from the pen of that distinguished man. We are indebted to a friend for the following interesting Letter, never before published, with reference to the Life of Henry and the "Old Bachelor."-Ed. Mess. RICHMOND, Nov. 9, 1816. To John E. Hall, Esq. DEAR SIR,-I send according to your desire, an extract from my MS. sketches of Mr. Henry. You will perceive at once that the passage is selected rather from the interest of the incident, than any effort or felicity in the execution, and I begin to fear, in perusing it in its state of sepa ration from the body of the work, that, in point of interest, it has lost so much by its detachment from the matter which ushered it in, as to be scarcely worth insertion in the Port Folio. Of this however, you shall be the judge. If you conclude to insert it, justice will perhaps require, that some notice should be taken, by an introductory remark, of the allowance due to an extract, divorced from the previous matter which had warned the reader, and prepared him for its enjoyment. This, also, I submit to your better judgment. I pray you not to give this extract the appearance of being published by me, as a specimen of the work. There is a puerility as well as vanity in such a course by which I should feel myself extremely humiliated. If you choose to say any thing of the cause which suspends the publication of the entire work, you may state, as the fact is, that, as yet, the rough draft of it only is finished, and that besides the necessity of revision, for which the Author's professional engagements will probably not afford him leisure until the next summer, it has become necessary for him to consult the archives of other States, particularly of Massachusetts, for the purpose of settling the dates of certain political events in which he has been obliged to differ from some of the historians of the revolution. I lament that the circumstance of my not tak ing the Baltimore papers has deprived me of the pleasure of seeing your Old Bachelors. By-theby, I am under a sort of promise to furnish Mr. Lucas some additional numbers, of gayer character, by way of lightening the too heavy and sombre aspect of my O. B.'s, for he has resolved it seems on a new edition. If yours are of a stamp to produce this exhilarating effect, and you have no objection to putting them into dull comI should be very much gratified as well as pany, relieved, if you would permit him to incorporate them with his new edition-and I am sure that the gentlemen who were associated with me in the preparation of the Richmond O. B. will have the same sense of the honor due our work by your alliance. I never knew until the receipt of your last letter to whom I was indebted for the handsome things, so handsomely said of me in the beautiful little preface to Mr. Lucas's edition of the British Spy. It is certainly one of the best written things in the book-and the praise which it so elegantly bestows leaves me nothing to regret except the consciousness that I owe it rather to your kindness than to any merit of my own. I beg you to believe me, dear sir, With sincere esteem and respect, Your ob't servant, WM. WIRT. NOTICES OF NEW WORKS. THE HISTORY OF PENDENNIS. His Fortunes and Mis- We took occasion last month to commend to the public favor the first two numbers of this charming work. The appearance of No. 3 affords us an opportunity, which we gladly embrace, of considering more at length the literary merits of its author, who has risen in twelve months from the rank of a respectable magazine-writer to the first honors of the English novelist. remaining eight and forty chapters. Mr. Thackeray's works have no affinity with this class. Another sort of bad morality in fiction prevails to an alarming extent in the novel of "low-life." The characters who figure in books of this description are less tolerable than all others, in being very gross, unrefined persons, who are not sufficiently well-bred for the highway, and whose conversation is plentifully adorned with the profane slang of St. Giles's. The principal male performer, (we cannot call him a hero,) generally appeals to the sympathy of the reader by a swaggering bravado under some most righteous sentence of the law, and at last swings at Tyburn with the air of a martyr to the wayward sense of justice of his countrymen. Those who look in Mr. Thackeray's pages for such vulgarity as this, will be disappointed. The scoundrelism of sentiment and the villainy of the melodrama are alike unvarnished by his narrative. There is yet another class of novels that has sprung up within a few years past-those which aim at great politi In forming a proper estimate of the merits and capacity of William Makepeace Thackeray, our readers may be assisted by a few outlines of his biography which we give upon the authority of the Edinburgh Review. Mr. Thack-cal reforms, or theological expositions. Of this school is eray is now about thirty-eight years of age. He is of a Miss Martineau and the authors of the Puseyite fictions good family and was originally intended for the bar, but en masse, who make the main object of their writings the after spending some years at the University of Cambridge, enforcement of some very doubtful proposition in theology went off, without his degree, to the continent, with the view or political economy. It has been well said of these that of making an artist of himself. He spent some time in they cannot avoid a petitio principii in the execution of copying pictures in the French galleries, but as his talent their plan, and that it is just as easy, by imaginary inciin this line was rather of a comic kind and consisted chiefly dents and plots of their own invention, to fortify one docin his being able to sketch rapidly scenes and incidents for trine as another. Mr. Thackeray is not of this school. the amusement of his friends, he soon abandoned the brush Equally free from false sympathy, the affectation of sciand took to the pen. His first effort in the world of let-ence and the cant of reform, our author is content to give ters was a weekly journal on the plan of the "Athenæ- his views of society throngh the pleasant medium of genum," which, though brilliant while it lasted, soon gave up uine, honest love-stories, just such, in design, as in times competition with the firmly-rooted popularity of the older past called forth the tears of our grandmothers, and, when establishments. "It sparkled, was exhaled and went to"- plainly told, will continue to subdue the soul as long as that oblivion which sooner or later awaits all papers and woman's eye beams and woman's lip smiles and woman's magazines. Mr. Thackeray then became a contributor to voice is melody to man. Love in its rightful acceptation, Fraser and Punch, afterwards wrote "The Irish Sketch generous, tearful, confiding, devoted love, with its varying Book" and "Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo," phases on earth, is theme enough for the most brilliant works of an amusing, but not a very superior character, composer to interweave with the expressions of his own and at last struck into that vein of sterling ore of which heart-music, and the soft and doleful air, the old and mo"Vanity Fair" was the first shining specimen, and at which ving story, with which the beauteous Genevieve was wooed he is working with great success in "Pendennis." and won, suffices to unlock the sympathies of the race. It is in unfolding some such narrative as this, that Mr. Thackeray presents himself to us in his most salient point of view-as the satirist, par excellence, of the shooting Folly as it flies, there is no marksman at all comparable with him. Every shot tells. In the world of London around him-no bad epitome of the great, busy world itself-he walks through the French Row and the Italian Row of its "Vanity Fair," seizing upon every foi age. In We cannot better preface our desultory remarks on these remarkable volumes-which bear, in our judgment, about the same relation to his other productions that the finest sculptures of Chantrey bear to the first rude carvings of his chisel, than by a negative description, in pointing out some classes of the modern novel to which they do not belong. We shall presently see, in the prosecution of this design, that our author has hit upon a manner of fictitious composition which, if it be not original, is at least refresh-ble that his keen observation detects, and exposing it in ingly different from the ordinary run of novels since the days of Fielding and of Scott. terms as unmistakable as those employed by Faithful in the allegory, before the jury of which Mr. Blindman was When the school of Mrs. Radcliffe, with all its dear, de- the foreman. Yet is our author no cynic. If he makes lightful terrors, its mysterious tapestries and its moonlight war upon worldliness, he is not affected with misanthropy. minstrels, went into decline, there arose among second-rate The great expanse of society lies spread out before him, authors a new and more vicious one, borrowed from the and if there are arid and blackened spots upon its surface, French, the school of "high-life." The most striking if the slough of falsehood and the desert of selfishness feature of this school is the ease and elegance with appear in gloomy perspective to the eye of the pilgrim, which the dramatis persona contrive to break the ten com- there are yet nooks brightened with occasional bursts of mandments without shocking the moral sensibilities of the the mellowest and holiest sunshine. We do not lay down reader. The venue being transitory, the scene is changed one of Thackeray's novels, where we have encountered readily from England, where the book opens, to the conti-characters, (alas, too correctly portrayed,) of the worst nent, and the hero appears as a German Count, ("honors description, with the impression on our minds that the are easy" in continental Europe,) invested with every world has in it nothing of goodness or of purity. "The quality that can attract admiration. The heroine, who has world," says he, "is a looking-glass, and gives forth to been already introduced as somebody else's wife, falls in every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and with him in a gorge of the Alps, is rescued by him from it will in turn look sourly upon you: laugh at it, and it is the attack of a gang of banditti, and the amiable pair, after a jolly, kind companion ; and so let all young persons take exchanging vows of eternal constancy and affection, run their choice." And is not this a right genial, loving creed off with each other and defy heaven and earth through the | for a satirist? |