the crowd, "He shall go." And I went. Almost at the same moment, the two boats were launched into the surf, and headed as nearly as might be for the hull of the ship. For two or three minutes, I only remember being whirled and hauled and jerked in every conceivable direction, and holding on to the boat's gunwale with all my strength to prevent being washed overboard, or hurled into the air. The first thing I saw distinctly was, that the two boats had become entangled with a sort of raft, or mass of sails and cordage, formed by the spars and rigging which had been torn away from the ship. It was alive with the heads and limbs of human creatures, and wild and stifled outcries of despair arose from every part of it. Several drowning wretches, apparently sailors, caught hold of our little craft, and we dragged them in. I saw something white floating almost under the boat, which resembled a woman's scarf. I clutched convulsively forward and a soft, cold hand grasped mine. At that moment a tremendous wave broke over us, and my hold was gone. Something remained in my hand, which was cut and bleeding. It was a diamond ring. It was the work of a second to clasp it on my finger, and reach out for the long scarf which I now saw drifting again near me, mixed with thick masses of dark hair. I grasped them once more, and a girl's sweet face rose above the waves and lay still and pale on their maddened bosom. At that instant, the other boat was flung within a few feet of ours, and I saw my grandfather towering in her bow, like the Lord of the Tempest. He caught a glimpse of the face I have described, and, with one agonized shriek, and one cry of "Florence, my wife!" he sprang into the sea between us. I saw him no more. Another huge wave swept over us, and we were driven rods apart in the midst of the deep. I clung to my hold, and felt the strength of giants. Luckily, the dark locks and the light scarf had got twisted about my hands and arms, and I cried aloud for help. Burnet came to me, and together we drew over the rails the fairest vision of beauty incarnate on which my eyes had ever rested, just as our frail boat was dashed ashore, and crushed to atoms. "A light here!" shouted I, when I found myself unhurt upon the beach, with my young prize clinging to my garments. A lantern was brought, and its uncertain and gusty flicker fell upon the delicate form of a girl, apparently sixteen years of age, and upon a countenance whose inexpressible and unearthly loveliness gave me a shock like an electric machine. The horrible night, the storm, the howl of the wind, the wrestle of wave and wreck, of life and death, all passed away from before me, and I saw only tranquil sunrise and the still glories of tropic summer. But a pang shot through me like an iron bar as I heard in fancy that awful cry, “Florence, my wife," ringing like a knell. She murmured a word or two in some strange tongue, opened her eyes languidly, and, fixing them on me, said, with a foreign accent and a half smile, "Good boy, how strong you are. You saved me." Then and there I became a gentleman. My grandfather never reached the land. Do you wish to know now why I like diamonds, and why I wear two on my right hand? Ask Florence, and she will tell you. She knows, and she is--my wife. She Such are the freaks of fate. was to have married my grandfather, on her arrival in America. Seven years afterwards she married me. IT RECENT AMERICAN POETRY.* unfortunately happens that a notice of books of verse, written a few months after their birth, when, swaddled in pompous placards, they caught. the eye of the moment, and the newspapers of the next day announced an immortality which the end of the month failed to confirm, is often too much like a crowner's 'quest sitting upon the body. The foot-notes that record the names and dates of the books, are like headstones. The article, itself, is an epitaph. "Come, let us moralize among the tombs," is the half implied invitation of every critic who proposes to discuss the poetic volumes of the past twelve months. "Rubbish shot here," is the uninviting programme. Those dreadful men, who, thirty and forty years since, dwelt among the fastnesses of Blackwood and the Edinburgh, like the Ansyrii, or assassins of the east, in the gorges of Lebanon, and poured down in avalanches of destruction upon poets and other pastoral people below, who were ambling unobtrusively to obliviɔn, have had their day. But even they Could not harm the travelers who carried on their breasts the amulet of genius. Wordsworth, and Keats, and Lamb, and Coleridge, and more recently, Tennyson, have gone up into the delectable mountains of immortality, and echo wonders where the assassins are. Of the books named at the head of this article, there have been many "kind" notices in reviews and newspapers. We do not propose to be “kind,” but, if possible, just: at any rate, honest. It is easy to say that lines are graceful and pleasing and promising. But it is not courteous to measure any bow by a meaner weapon than that of Apollo. To say that a temple is not so lovely as the Parthenon, is to compliment it by comparing it with the best. Anybody can write, with proper care, graceful and pleasing verses. Poetry is the work of genius, whether it be Shakespeare's poetry or Brant's. Alice Cary is a name not unknown in our recent literature. She has published two or three prose volumes, and has now collected her verses into one large handsome book. The first poem, Lyra, a lament," is the key of the whole volume. It is unreal, imitative, luxuriant, felicitous, fanciful, and unsatisfactory. It indicates a mind, which has been charmed with the pomp and diction of old English verse, and it reproduces its quaintness. It is a vague echo of Milton, and of all the old poets, so far as they were pastoral and elegiac. Its landscape is of no particular geographical region. It might be American: it is, in its spirit if not in its details, English. This uncertainty in a poem which regards detail, is a serious defect. The poem might have been written two centuries ago. It has no relation to this time, nor to the spirit of this age, nor to the influence which must have moulded the mind of the author. It is a sweet and cloying echo of an old song. This unreality is its great defect. Read the lines that follow, and remember the nervous, manly grief of "Lycidas." How all the landscape, how ail the pastoral forms and images are brought to decorate that tomb, yet how all details are subjected to the lofty thought of the poem! "Lyra, a lament," begins thus: "Maidens, whose tresses shine, Crowned with daffodil and eglantine, Of April twilights, after sobbing rains, About your bosoms, dainty as new snow; Against your kirtles, like the froth from pails, When lowing heifers bury their sleek flanks Here is a string of very sweet words, and the result is a very weak wailing. The whole poem proceeds in the same * Poems. By ALICE CARY. Ticknor & Fields: Boston. -Poems. By THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS. Ticknor & Fields: Boston.- Poems of the Orient. By BAYARD TAYLOR. Ticknor & Fields: Boston. S. Dickerson: New York. -Felicita, a Metrical Romance. By ELIZABETH C. KINNEY. James strain; it is a repetition of natural details. There is no scope, no rebound. The lovely life of nature, the break of day, have no exquisite promise to this moaning shepherdess. It is merely a lament; and this would be enough if it were a noble sorrow. But, when the survivor of Lyra lives in a world where it is proper to invite "piteous maids” to -Keep your tresses crowned as you may With eglantines and daffodillies gay, And with the dew of myrtles wash your cheeks, When flamy streaks, Uprunning the gay Orient, tell of morn- Pour all my heart in tears and plaints, instead, she has then removed herself from the sympathy of the world, in which Lycidas said to his shepherds, "Weep no more, woful shepherd, weep no more, For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, Flames in the forehead of the morning sky." We do not say that "Lyra" is a poor poem because it is not a good imitation of "Lycidas," but because it deals affectedly with an unreal sentiment; and is an inadequate study from a grand original. Of course we do not mean to charge a malicious imitation upon the author. Lyra" is simply the result of an excitement of poetic feeling by sympathetic and appreciative study of models which are not only poetic, but are poetry. The general sweetness of the verse is, however, much injured by by such a line as this "I think about what leaves are drooping round A smoothly shapen mound." There are many things in "Lyra" that would be positive excellences, if they were not taken from places in which they are characteristic. But they become, by the transplanting, equally real deformities. Thus there is scarcely a word of all the many choicely culled words in the poem that is not to be found in some admirable line of some English poet. This is true, even of the most quaint and fantastic. We need YOL. VI.-4 go no further than Tennyson for many of them; but in Tennyson they are like the hues in a flower; it is impossible to conceive of that flower without those hues, or of that poetry without those characteristics. "Murmurous glooms," starry blooms," "warbled interfuse," " Spring thaws the wold," "ribby blue," "encrown with flowers," -these are all phrases indigenous to the poetry of Tennyson or Keats; but in "Lyra" they are instinctively recognized as exotics. And, although it is not easy to say why they seem exotics, it is an impression which the further reading of the volume only confirms. Is this opening of "Hyala" not a distinct echo of Keats? "Low by the reedy sea went ancient Ops, Tracking for crownless Saturn; quietly From her gray hair waned off the sober light, For Eve, that Cyclops of the burning eye Under the black boughs of a cedar wood, We have said that "Lyra" is the key-note of all the poems. It is so in many ways; by its smoothness and sweetness, and by the fact that it is a dirge. Everything in the volume, with few exceptions, is a dirge. In all the woe of all the melancholy verses of that doomed and much-enduring class of men, the young poets, there is no such awful grief as moans up and down these pretty pages. The book is drenched with tears. It is a sob in three hundred and ninety-nine parts. Such terrific mortality never raged in a volume of the same size before. It is a parish register of funerals rendered into doleful rhyme. "Lyra" dies on the very first page; the "little brother" follows. "The Minstrel" dies; "Miriam" dies; Agatha" is dying, and three men on three gray mules are murdered; "Jessie Carrol" dies. Then the poet, having a spare page,like an undertaker fallen upon a day without a funeral, keeps her hand in by performing a dirge for Keats. Then the mortality is resumed. "Annic Clayville" dies; "Helva" is betrayed; "Nellie Gray" and "my playmate" die. The "Wood Lily" goes mad; "Caroline" dies, and "Lily Lee" is "angelstolen." "Alda" dies. Somebody in Glenly moor" dies. The "mother" dies. He of the "tryst on Rosemaryhill" does not keep his tryst, because he dies. "My brother and I" can only sing of the dead. "Rosalie" dies. "Rinaldo" dies; "she" dies; and yet, with all this remorseless destruction, we are not more than half through the book, and the poet and death have it all their own way to the end. While the havoc is proceeding, girls go into confessionals and convents; they are betrayed, and ruined and lost; "Despair" is invoked; "Remorse" is justified; there is a song, a little premature, "of one dying;" premature, because the next page would certainly have proved fatal to her. On another "off" page the Rev. George Burroughs, who suffered a dreadful death in the "Puritan reign of Terror," is commemorated; and again, in an interval of the epidemic, the poet cheerfully assures her lover "Oh! my lover; oh! my friend, The other "off" pages are enlivened by a "Death-song," Musing by three graves," The Orphan girl," (who, of course, wishes very much to die,) "Doomed," and finally, "The Maiden of Tlascalla" ends her love-lorn life and the life-lorn book together. Of course, long before the three hundred and ninety-ninth page-for over no less space stretches this cemetery-the monotony of misery has exhausted the sympathy and the patience of the reader. There are no grand, heroic deaths recorded, but only such a faint oozing away of life, as the reader might suppose would be the natural ending of "Jessie Carrol" or "Annie Clayville," or "Nellie Gray" and the other unfortunatẹ young women, whose early blight is commemorated. It is all dismal and dreary. It is a sentimental singing of the hard fact of death, as if that were the natural and inevitable corollary of youth, and beauty, and affection. Such verses can only gratify a lachrymose sentimentality. have no thought, and very little natural description. They freely use the conventional accessories of grief, and a forced sympathy of nature with sorrow. But Miss Cary should remember that the loveliest maids sometimes die at morning; and the brightest sun They row. shines every day upon the truest sorProfound suffering is not so fond of grave-yards and black bombazine. There is, in this general swash of tears and tribulation, too much of the Arab hired mourner, or of the Yankee crone, who never misses a funeral. That we may not be thought to speak too strongly, we take the first nine poems in the volume. "Lyra" is a dirge; "In illness," continues the theme; To the Night" concludes it. "The minstrel" dies; "Hyala" shoots "a plump goat."' ""Pictures of Memory" is the story of a little brother's death. "Grand Dame and child" tells of Miriam who dies. 66 'Agatha to Herold," is a blighted girl, who anticipates with pleasure the grave-yard in which she shall soon be laid.. A "Legend of Seville," is of three men who are murdered. The facility with which these "melodious tears" are poured out is wonderful. Rain does not gush more abundantly from an April cloud. Miss Cary has the fluency of improvisation. We could readily believe that there was no especial reason for the end of the book but the firm resolution of the publisher. Such a stream of elegy must be dammed sooner or later, by the publisher or by the public. This fluency, an obvious ear, a luxuriance of fancy, and a ready vocabulary, seem to us to be the excellences of the volume. But, to say the truth, the fancy is not good nor original. Thus: "Where late, with red mist thick about his brows, Went the swart Autumn, wading to the knees, Through drifts of dead leaves, shaken from the boughs Of the old forest trees." No student of poetry can fail to recognize the school from which that figure In these lines, comes. "The first of the September eves Sunk its red basement in the sea, And, like swart reapers, bearing sheaves, Dim shadows thronged immensity;" which we select at random, we have an example of Miss Cary's favourite method of treating nature. But surely the image of a "basement" in a September twilight, is purely unpoetic. Tennyson has well called a heavy mass of thunderous sunset clouds, "A looming bastion fringed with fire," but the form of the expression, and the figure itself, remove from the mind all idea of unrelieved weight, which is inseparable from "basement." And when the appearance which is so described is only the gray gloom of coming evening, the epithet becomes utterly inexpressive and inappropriate. The two succeeding lines are the wildest vagary of a fancy that adopts anything which seems to have a meaning. But why dim shadows thronging immensity are like swart reapers bearing sheaves, except that "swart reapers" and "dim shadows" are both dark, it is not easy to say. Are they like swart reapers bearing sheaves in the daylight, at which time, only, reapers are visible? or how do swart reapers differ in appearance at night from their blond brethren? This might be justly called hypercritical, if the fancy quoted were not a fair illustration of the general range of such conceits throughout the book. Spring is called "the flowery huntress;" snow is "dainty snow;" "the sunbeams, like sentinels move" "through the cloud armies." "White as a lily the moonlight lies," etc., etc. Such conceits as these are neither accurate images nor the result of actual observation. They have a superficial prettiness, which is pleasant enough in its way; but it is not poetry, nor thought, nor imagination, nor even an agreeable fancy. There are several sweet verses scattered through this volume. If the general tone seems weak and morbid, and the vocabulary is borrowed, it would still be strange if an author of such evident sensibility and facility had not done something that we should wish to quote to balance the hard things that we have been compelled to say. Miss Cary writes much better verses than most women who write and publish poetry. That is the highest praise that can be awarded to her. We turn willingly, from the artificial air that characterizes Miss Cary's volume, to the poems of Mr. Parsons. We regard his verse as the most original, polished, and valuable, that has come from any of the recent bards. He is entirely unspotted with vermilion. There is nothing spasmodic, nor morbid, nor strained, nor affected, nor crude, in his volume; and, in these days, such an aggregate of negatives amounts, of itself, to a positive excellence. The verses have a graceful flow and scholarly elegance, enlivened through- With many a brilliant color; Sad thoughts and sunny weather; Agree not well together. The time when friends are flying; This pomp that Autumn beareth, |