al advantages. his mother sends him to Mr. Bancroft's school; or, as Mr. Holland sings, permits him

"To climb the goodly eminence where he In whose profound and stately pages live His country's annals, ruled his little realm." Here the hero surpasses all the other boys in everything, and but repeats his triumphs later when he goes to Amherst College. His mother lives upon the victories which he despises; but at last she yields to the taint which was in her own blood as well as her husband's, and destroys herself. The son, who was aware of her suicidal tendency, and had once overheard her combating it in prayer, curses the God who would not listen to her and help her, and rejects Him from his scheme of life.

In due time he falls in love with Kathrina, a young lady whom he first sees on the occasion of her public reception into the Congregational Church at Hadley. Later he learns that she is staying with the lady whose pet lamb led him such a chase, - that she is in fact her niece, and that she has seen better days. We must say that this good lady does everything in her power to make a match between the young people; and she is more pleased than surprised at the success of her efforts. It has been the hero's idea that human love will fill up the void left in his life by the rejec tion of God and religion; but he soon finds himself vaguely unhappy and unsatisfied, and he determines to glut his heart with literary fame. He goes, therefore, to New York, and succeeds as a poet beyond all his dreams of success. For ten years he is the most popular of authors; but he sickens of his facile triumph, and imagines that to be happy he must write to please himself, and not the multitude. He writes with this idea, but pleases nobody, and is as unhappy as ever.

Meanwhile, Kathrina has fallen into a decline. On her death-bed she tells him that it is religion alone which can appease and satisfy him; but she pleads with him in vain, till one day, when he enters her room, and is startled by a strange coincidence the lamb, which led him to the mountain-top and the consciousness of poetic power, had a scarlet ribbon on its neck, and now he finds this ribbon

"The lamb has slipped the leash by which his hand Held her in thrall, and seeks the mountain-height; And he, if he reclaim her to his grasp,

Must follow where she leads, and kneel at last Upon the summit by her side. And more, Give him my promise that, if he do this, He shall receive from that fair altitude Such vision of the realm that lies around, Cleft by the river of immortal life, As shall so lift him from his selfishness, And so enlarge his soul, that he shall stand Redeemed from all unworthiness, and saved To happiness and heaven." Whereupon, having delivered her message, Kathrina bids him kneel. It is the supreme moment of her life. He hears his mother's voice, and the voice of the innumerable heavenly host, and even the voice of God repeating her mandate. He kneels, and she bids him pray, and, as before, all the celestial voices repeat her bidding. He prays and is saved.

Such is the story of Kathrina, or rather of Kathrina's husband, for she is herself scarcely other than a name for a series of arguments, with little of the flesh and blood of a womanly personality. We have too much reverence for high purposes in literature not to applaud Mr. Holland's good intent in this work, and we accept fully his theory of letters and of life. Both are meagre and unsatisfactory as long as their motive is low; both must yield unhappiness and self-despite till religion inform them. This is the common experience of man; this is the burden of the sayings of the sage from the time of Solomon to the time of Mr. Holland; and we can all acknowledge its truth, however we may differ as to the essence of religion itself. But we conceive that repetition of this truth in a long poem demands of the author an excellence, or of the reader a patience, all but superhuman.

How Mr. Holland has met the extraordinary demand upon his powers is partly evident from the outline of the poem as we have given it. It must be owned that it is rather a feeble fancy which unites two vital epochs by the incident of the truant lambkin, and that the plot of the poem does not in any way reveal a great faculty of invention. A parable, moreover, teaches only so far as it is true to life; and in a tale professing to deal with persons of our own day and country, we have a right to expect some fidelity to our contemporaries and neighbors. But we find nothing of this in "Kathrina," not even in the incident of a young gentleman of fourteen sporting with a lambkin; or in the talk of young people who make love in long arguments concern

ing the nature and office of genius and the intermediary functions of the teacher. Polemically considered, there is nothing very wrong in the discussions between those metaphysical lovers, and no one need raise the question as to how far Kathrina's culiar ideas are applicable to the work of genius bearing her name.

"The greatest artists speak to fewest souls.

pe

The bread that comes from heaven Needs finest breaking. Some there doubtless are, Some ready souls, that take the morsel pure Divided to their need; but multitudes Must have it in admixtures, menstruums, And forms that human hands or human life Have moulded."

Such passages, though they add nothing to the verisimilitude of Kathrina's character, help to make her appear consistent in not laughing at a certain weird poem which her lover reads to her. Few ladies in real life, however great a tenderness they might feel for a morbid young poet, could practise Kathrina's self-control, when, depicting himself as a godless youth imprisoned by phantoms "among the elves of the silent land," he sings:

"Under the charred and ghastly gloom,

Over the flinty stones,

They led him forth to his terrible doom,
And, plunged in a deep and noisome tomb,
They sat him among the bones."

Where, crouching, he beholds, through a "loop" in the wall, "a sweet angel from the skies":

"Could she not loose him from his thrall,
And lead him into the light?
'Ah me!' he murmured, 'I dare not call,
Lest she may doubt it a goblin's waul,

And leave me in swift affright !'"

The question is of the poet himself, immersed in his own gloomy thoughts, and of Kathrina, who could rescue him from them; but she has heard "only a wild, weird story," and her lover is obliged to explain it, and still we are to suppose that she did not laugh. Nay, we are told that she instantly accepted the poet, who

exclaims :

"Are there not lofty moments when the soul
Leaps to the front of being, casting off
The robes and clumsy instruments of sense,
And, postured in its immortality,
Reveals its independence of the clod

In which it dwells?-moments in which the earth
And all material things, all sights and sounds,
All signals, ministries, interpreters,
Relapse to nothing, and the interflow

Of thought and feeling, love and life, go on
Between two spirits, raised to sympathy
By an inspiring passion, as in heaven,
The body dust, within an orb outlined,
It shall go on forever?'

We have no reason to suppose that this is not thought a fine passage by the author, who will doubtless find readers enough to agree with him, if he should not care to accept our estimate of his whole poem. Nevertheless, we must confess that it appears to us puerile in conception, destitute of due motive, and crude and inartistic in treatment. But we should be unjust both to ourselves and our author, if we left his work without some allusion to its highly embellished style, or, having failed to approve the whole design, refused to notice at all the elaborate ornamentation of the parts. Not to be guilty, then, of this unfairness, let us cull here some of the fanciful tropes and figures which enamel these flowery pages. The oriole is "a torch of downy flame"; the "reiterant katydids rasp the mysterious silence"; a mother's loss and sorrow are "twin leeches at her heart"; the frosty landscape is "fulgent with downy crystals"; Kathrina wears a "pale-blue muslin robe," which the hero fancies "dyed with forget-me-nots"; and the landscape has usually some effect of drygoods to the poet's eye. We might almost believe that this passage,

"We touched the hem

Of the dark mountain's robe, that falls in folds
Of emerald sward around his feet, and there
Upon its tufted velvet we sat down,"

was inspired by perusal of Dr. Holmes's ode to "Evening- by a Tailor":

"Day hath put on his jacket, and around

His burning boson buttoned it with stars.
Here will I lay me on the velvet grass,

That is like padding to earth's meagre ribs." But Mr. Holland's fancy is of a quality which transcends all feigning in others. Whatever it touches it figures in gross material substance, preferably wood or some sort of upholstery. When, however, his hero first stood in Broadway, he seems to have found no fabric of the looms, no variety of plumage, no sort of precious wood or dye-stuff equal to the allegory, and he wreaks himself in the following tremendous hydraulic image : —

"I saw the waves of life roll up the steps
Of great cathedrals and retire; and break
In charioted grandeur at the feet
Of marble palaces, and toss their spray
Of feathered beauty through the open doors,
To pile the restless foam within; and burst
On crowded caravansaries, to fall
In quick return; and in dark currents glide
Through sinuous alleys, and the grimy loops
Of reeking cellars, and with softest plash
Assail the gilded shrines of opulence,
And slide in musical relapse away."