MR. EDITOR :-I address you, with some hesitation, on a topic in which all the young poets of the country are deeply interested. They are too proud and sensitive a tribe, Mr. Editor, to undertake their own defence. That defence would be their shame. It would be as though the master of the puppet-show, excited by the jeers of the crowd, should put his head out from behind the curtain, and engage in an angry defence of his puppets. The crowd would receive him with a shout of merry derision, and bestow some pleasant phrase upon him, such as "go it, Read," " go it, Dana," "hang the critics." With such, and other more solid testimonials, the merry world would pelt the luckless rhymster who should undertake his own defence.

There appeared, not long ago, in your journal, a very caustic criticism of the poems of Thomas Buchanan Read. The review had points of wit in it, and was what is vulgarly called a "readable review." I dare say you thought it very readable yourself, for though I am quite sure you never read a line of Mr. Read's poems, you were certainly amused with this very Jesuitical and severe review of them. I, myself, read that review, and conceived from it a very poor opinion of Mr. Read's powers as a poet. A friend of Mr. Read, however, sent me a copy of his rhymes, and, on opening the volume, I was surprised, not to say shocked, to find that a serious injury had been done to that very excellent poet by his ill-natured reviewer. Please you now, send to the publishers for a copy of the work, and sit down, quietly, on a Saturday evening, and read the poems aloud to your family, and when you have done so, peruse what I have here written.

*Lays and Ballads. By Thomas Buchanan Read Philadelphia: George S. Appleton. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

There is no higher literary art than criticism, and none more liable to abuse. It may be so used as to enlighten and delight; it may be so abused as to mislead and offend.

A reviewer, free from prejudice and possessing the power of literary appreciation, confers, by his just severity or his judicious praise, a blessing on the age-on its authors and its readers. On the other hand, a supercilious, rancorous, overbearing spirit, however brilliant-a fulsome adulation, however elegantly expressed—are but false beacons to the student, rocks and quicksands to the hapless aspirant. We are disgusted when personal animosity, or a reckless selfishness and vanity, disguise themselves under an assumed zeal for good taste, sacrificing justice for the display of a flashing wit. But when, with a deep moral indignation, a reviewer rises up to scourge pretence and ignorance from the desecrated temples, he has a mission that cannot be gainsayed; only he must eschew all extravagant expression. Accurately and dispassionately to estimate his author, he must divest himself of preconceptions regarding any particular school, age, or position, and guard especially against an ill-bred disrespect.

As writers multiply, criticism becomes more and more necessary; and it appears more difficult to discriminate as the need of discrimination is greater.

That the copse luxuriate not into a wilderness, many a bough must be lopped away, many a young tree uprooted, but with a judgment as clear to spare as to condemn.

Satire is apt to grow by what it feeds on, and too often the critical censor, beginning in truth and sincerity, becomes excited by success, and, heated in the chase, forgets all but the mad desire to be in at the death.

The critic assumes a nice and intricate responsibility. There is the duty to the

reader, and the duty to the author. The first requires the annihilation of all that is worthless; the second, that no blight. touch the merest sapling giving promise of a noble aftergrowth. He must be humble, withal. If, on opening a book, his eyes chance to meet some frivolous idea, some weak or ridiculous epithet, dull passage or ignorant blunder, he may not, like the mere reader for amusement, throw aside the volume and seek one more attractive; his duty is to look farther, to explore page after page, seeking, if yet beneath the rubbish, some gem of price may not be found.

To the sensitive spirit of the poet a peculiar tenderness is due. It is in poetry as in morals. We frequently set up a standard on the ground of individual experiences and conceptions, and whosoever reaches not that, or is not excellent after a particular pattern of our own, holds a low rank in our estimation. We have known persons of an impulsive and ardent temperament absolutely incapable of seeing any thing good in those of a cool, prudential, or unsocial character, and vice versa. Each man thinks his own position most important, and is surprised, or compassionates, if it be not so acknowledged by another. Like the poor French dancing master, who exclaimed to the wealthy burgher, boasting of his happier estate, "Ah, my God, sir! but you do not DANCE!"

A finely sensitive taste for metrical harmonies, shrinks from the harsh, rough line, though it convey truth and beauty; while the idealist or the sentimentalist seizes the thought and makes it his own, regardless of the measure that conveyed it. We must consider that if one fact is great on this ground, another takes precedence on that. One is mirthful, another is sad. One imaginative, another philosophical. If one delight us with the harmonies of a flowing versification, another utters "thoughts that breathe, and words that burn."

Pope could never have conceived that noble hymeneal song The Epithalamion of Spencer; so neither could Spencer have elaborated the elegant frivolity, the pompous drollery of that delicious little epic, The Rape of the Lock. If Dryden, over a field of glory," drove his coursers of

etherial race," the contemplative spirit of Cowper delighted in

"Rural walks

Through lanes of grassy growth.”

We are equally in the region of poetry with Wordsworth in his crescent shaped "Boat," "soaring away among the stars," or with Goldsmith taking our

'solitary rounds Amidst the tangling walks and ruined grounds" of AUBURN;-with Byron, in the storm upon Lake Leman; or with Burns, turning up the daisy with his plough.

Whether the soul be roused by the trumpet, or lulled by the shepherd's pipe, it matters not, so it be poetry; and these things only are necessary; to appreciate the spirit of the time, and administer to its necessities, holding in the heart the law of love; and being mainly true to one's own nobler impulses. Art may guide, but Nature must impel; and as the flight of a bird depends not wholly on its pinions, but is sustained by an inwardly pervading force, so the poet, soaring on the wings of fancy and imagination, must be sustained by truth and passion from within.

Mr. Read's muse is unpractised; his verses are not equally finished. We cannot apply to him the remark of Keats, concerning Miss -'s music, that "she played without one sensation but the fact of the ivory at her fingers," but rather, that the soul of music is at his finger's ends, only the keys will not always respond. He is always in earnest, and filled with his subject. He appears not to have made versification a study, nor does a natural acuteness of sense preserve him uniformly from the sin of inharmonious and labored verse: This is particularly the case in his contemplative and moralizing vein: the refinements of sentiment seem to hamper his utterance; but in the expression of quick, warm emotion, the verse becomes melodious as it is passionate: at one time flowing with elegance of diction and delicacy of rythm, at another reminding us of the sweet airs of Mozart, played on a false key, or an untuned instrument.

The non-conformity of the ballads to the old-established ballad measurement,

Standing by thee, I look backward, And, as in the light of dreams, See the years descend and vanish, Like thy whitely tented teams.

Here I stroll along the village,

As in youth's departed morn; But I miss the crowded coaches,

And the driver's bugle-horn

Miss the crowd of jovial teamsters Filling buckets at the wells, With their wains from Conestoga, And their orchestras of bells.

To the mossy way-side tavern

Comes the noisy throng no more, And the faded sign, complaining, Swings, unnoticed, at the door; While the old, decrepid tollman, Waiting for the few who pass, Reads the melancholy story

In the thickly springing grass. Ancient highway, thou art vanquished; The usurper of the vale Rolls in fiery, iron rattle, Exultations on the gale.

Thou art vanquished and neglected; But the good which thou hast done, Though by man it be forgotten,

Shall be deathless as the sun.

Though neglected, gray and grassy,
Still I pray that my decline
May be through as vernal valleys,
And as blest a calm as thine."

The sound most sweet to my listening ear,
The child and the mother breathing clear
Within the harvest fields of Sleep."

There are two more stanzas, but there should not have been; the poem naturally and more effectively ends here.

"The Song for the Sabbath Morning," the last two stanzas of the "Night Thought," and the two stanzas describing a runnel and a cascade in "The Light of our Home," are eminently beautiful.

we

Of the "Alchemist's Daughter," would say that the dramatic is not Mr. Read's forte.

Of those remarkable inequalities which denote at once his genius and his lack of cultivation or attention, and which expose him on so many sides to the shafts of criticism, we offer some examples. What unpardonable carelessness, what a complete falling asleep of the muse in the following: "Conquered at last, the flying tribe descries Its ancient wigwams burn, and light its native skies."

One would scarcely credit that the same author produced what succeeds it.

"The pioneers their gleaming axes swing,
The sapling falls, and dies the forest's sire-
The foliage fades-but sudden flames upspring,
And all the grove is leafed again with fire.
While gleams the pine tree like a gilded spire,
The homeless birds sail, circling wild and high;

"MIDNIGHT.

The moon looks down on a world of snow,
And the midnight lamp is burning low,
And the fading embers mildly glow

In their bed of ashes soft and deep;

All, all is still as the hour of death;
I only hear what the old clock saith,
And the mother and infant's easy breath,

That flows from the holy land of Sleep.

Or the watchman who solemnly wakes the dark,
With a voice like a prophet's when few will hark,
And the answering hounds that bay and bark
To the red cock's clarion horn-
The world goes on-the restless world,

With its freight of sleep through the darkness hurled,

Like a mighty ship, when her sails are furled,
On a rapid but noiseless river borne.

Say on, old clock-I love you well,

For your silver chime, and the truths you tell,
Your very stroke is but the knell

Of hope, or sorrow buried deep;

Say on, but only let me hear

For weeks the smoke spreads, blotting all the sky, While, twice its size, the sun rolls dull and redly by."

The expression "twice its size," betrays the want of study; while the close of the line is highly poetic.

Among much that is characterized only by heaviness and mediocrity, we light occasionally upon such lines as the following: "And heard low music breathe above, around, As if the air within itself made sound; As if the soul of Melody were pent Within some unseen instrument, Hung in a viewless tower of air,

And with enchanted pipes beguiled its own despair."

*

*

*

And where the spring-time sun had longest shone, The violet looked up and found itself alone."

"Through underwood of laurel, and across
A little lawn, shoe-deep with sweetest moss,
I passed, and found a lake, which like a shield
Some giant long had ceased to wield,
Lay with its edges sunk in sand and stone
With ancient roots and grasses overgrown."

*

"And swinging roses, like sweet censers, went The village children making merriment."

"Hark, how the light winds flow and ebb
Along the open halls forlorn ;
See how the spider's dusty web
Floats at the casement, tenantless and torn!

The old, old sea, as one in tears,

Comes murmuring with its foamy lips, And knocking at the vacant piers,

Calls for its long lost multitude of ships.

Against the stone-ribbed wharf, one hull

Throbs to its ruin, like a breaking heart: Oh, come, my breast and brain are full

Of sad response-grim silence keep the mart!"

We should trespass upon our limits to indulge in more copious extracts. Our object has been to give fair play, and show that if our author have faults, he has also some of the highest characteristics of the true poet.

Experience is called the great Teacher, yet how often does experience fail. We seem to learn no lesson from the mistakes made in all times of depreciating each new aspirant, simply because he is new, and awarding to genius, too late, the meed that might have cheered, encouraged, and perfected it. We think little of the sunlight that falls along our daily walk, but we strain the admiring gaze to mark, through a telescope, the path of a distant planet.

If we have not mistaken our author, he will not be killed by one critique." There is a vitality in the creations of genius-mowed down by the pitiless sickle, it soon renews its latent growth, and springs afresh in its own glorious atmosphere.