Is it peace or war? Civil war, as I think, and that of a kind
The viler, as underhand, not openly bearing the sword.

"Sooner or later I too may passively take the print

Of the golden age

why not? I have neither hope nor trust;

May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint,

Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? We are ashes and dust."

these stanzas on the

the poor "hov

The censor's pen runs scathingly along trail of the crimes of a vicious prosperity, elled and hustled" like brutes in cities; the staples of life adulterated and poisoned; liquors drugged till the murderer's brain is crazed with the "vitriol madness;" mothers killing their babes for a burial-fee;

"And Sleep must lie down arm'd, for the villanous centre-bits Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless nights."

The very jubilee of pandemonium seems to have reached its height, as the poet again demands,

"Is it peace or war? better, war! loud war by land and by sea. War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones.

"For I trust if an enemy's fleet came yonder round by the hill,

And the rushing battle-bolt sang from the three-decker out of the foam, That the smooth-faced snub-nosed rogue would leap from his counter and till,

And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yard-wand, home."

These surely are not Arcadian measures. They tear along with a freshet-force "casting up mire and dirt," what else could they do, rushing through such alluvial? No one can charge the writer with exaggeration who knows the rottenness of our older civilization. The question must lie further back, if anywhere as to the propriety of treating these matters poetically. We shall not discuss this point, but merely record our creed concerning it, that if poetry is to help reform as well as please our race, as we firmly maintain, then it need apologize to no belles-lettres amateur for attacking the wickednesses of the times with whatever weapon shall have strength and sharpness enough to deal deathly blows. Rose-water and kid gloves will not much help this business.

A calmer mood arrests this torrent of invective, and turns our sympathy to the wretchedness of the individual sufferer,

with whose complaints is mingled a sad and sardonic philosothe cloud without the silver lining. This is beau

phy, tiful:

"A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime

In the little grove where I sit-ah, wherefore cannot I be
Like things of the season gay, like the bountiful season bland,
When the far-off sail is blown by the breeze of a softer clime,
Half-lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea,

The silent sapphire-spangled marriage-ring of the land."

And this has more of the old fate than of a Christian submission in its spirit:

"For the drift of the Maker is dark, an Isis hid by the veil.

Who knows the ways of the world, how God will bring them about?

Our planet is one, the suns are many, the world is wide.

Shall I weep if a Poland fall? shall I shriek if a Hungary fail?

Or an infant civilization be ruled with rod or with knout?

I have not made the world, and He that made it will guide."

The atmosphere is oppressive, and we will escape it, with our too heavily laden companion, into some more pleasant reminiscences of his better and happier days. The sprightlier sentiment drapes itself in a lighter verse.

"A voice by the cedar tree,

In the meadow under the Hall!

She is singing an air that is known to me,
A passionate ballad gallant and gay,
A martial song like a trumpet's call !
Singing alone in the morning of life,
In the happy morning of life and of May,
Singing of men that in battle array,
Ready in heart and ready in hand,
March with banner and bugle and fife
To the death, for their native land.

"Maud with her exquisite face,

And wild voice pealing up to the sunny sky,
And feet like sunny gems on an English green,

Maud in the light of her youth and her grace,

Singing of Death, and of Honor that cannot die,

Till I well could weep for a time so sordid and mean,

And myself so languid and base."

They meet, and exchange a single pressure of the hand which sends its magnetic thrill through every pulse:

"And thus a delicate spark

Of glowing and growing light

Thro' the livelong hours of the dark

Kept itself warm in the heart of my dreams,
Ready to burst in a color'd flame;

Till at last when the morning came

In a cloud, it faded, and seems

But an ashen-gray delight."

The poet shows his knowledge of human feeling by ingeniously hinting the reasons which may have produced this gleam of sunlight is it strange that the cooler morning-thought should have suggested that perchance it was only pity of the young man's friendlessness; or perhaps just a kind recognition of early companionship still pleasantly remembered; or possibly a pride of conquest not unknown to ladies fair? He is cunning in arguing the point against himself is he the first or the last who has done this weakness?-in fancying how

"A face of tenderness might be feign'd,

And a moist mirage in desert eyes;"

while at the same time not unaware, it would seem, of some injustice or morbid suspicion in his special pleading :

"For a raven ever croaks, at my side,

Keep watch and ward, keep watch and ward,

Or thou wilt prove their tool.

Yea too, myself from myself I guard,

For often a man's own angry pride

Is cap and bells for a fool."

So it was now, at any rate; for the high-bred heiress confessed, if not in words yet in what is more eloquent, her womanly nature. 'Tis an exquisite picture, full of true life.

"She came to the village church,

And sat by a pillar alone;

An angel watching an urn

Wept over her, carved in stone;

And once, but once, she lifted her eyes,

And suddenly, sweetly, strangely blush'd

To find they were met by my own;

And suddenly, sweetly, my heart beat stronger
And thicker, until I heard no longer
The snowy-banded, dilettante,

Delicate-handed priest intone;

And thought, is it pride, and mused and sigh'd
'No surely, now it cannot be pride.""

Can there be jealousy where there is not genuine and strong affection? These passions are subtilely and strangely related. The profoundest dramatic power has found its richest field of labor in working out the connections between these divinest and most infernal of human susceptibilities. Our artist dashes in, just here, a brush-full of the black-green shading. She has another suitor,

"This new-made lord, whose splendor plucks

The slavish hat from the villager's head."

Her lover is mad. He is just in the mood to abuse everything, and he does it somewhat indiscriminately; but one of his victims deserves all he gets,

a

"broad-brimm'd hawker of holy things,

Whose ear is stuff'd with his cotton, and rings
Even in dreams to the chink of his pence,"

who has come down into the country to preach down the war. The race is not yet run out on each side the Atlantic. And if the servile spirit of their prophesyings shall prevail to poison the healthier blood of the people, and demoralize still more the public heart, in these contests of the last days with gigantic wrongs, possibly some of us may live long enough to begin to feel that we can make the prayer our own

"Ah God, for a man with heart, head, hand,
Like some of the simple great ones gone
Forever and ever by,

One still strong man in a blatant land,
Whatever they call him, what care I.
Aristocrat, democrat, autocrat -one
Who can rule and dare not lie."

The jealousy is as groundless as the earlier suspicions of Maud's insincerity. She steals away from a midnight dance and festivity at the Hall to find her affianced in the garden under its walls, where, as he awaits her coming, the poet takes occasion to put into his lips one of the sweetest of his own faultless lyrics. We must not mar, by dividing it, this charming colloquy with the fragrant denizens of their young mistress's

bower the rose, and lily, and larkspur, and violet, and passion-flower all waiting with one not now a stranger to them for an "airy tread,” while

"Low on the sand and loud on the stone

The last wheel echoes away;"

and we cannot give it entire, at this advanced stage of our paper. They meet, the brother and "babe-faced lord" closely following; hot words, blows, a duel the "Christless code"within an hour; the brother lies in his blood, confessing with his last breath, "The fault was mine," which is not enough

to wash out from the slayer's hand the crimson stain.

"And there rises ever a passionate cry
From underneath in the darkening land-
What is it that has been done?

O dawn of Eden bright over earth and sky,
The fires of Hell break out of thy rising sun,
The fires of Hell and of Hate.

*

And there rang on a sudden a passionate cry,

A cry for a brother's blood:

It will ring in my heart and my ears, till I die, till I die."`

We do not detect any extravagance in the conception or expression of the emotions of this subject of such startling alternations of fortune. We very much wonder at the remark of the critic already criticised that the only counterpart of this character of our poet is Poe's Ravena grotesque conceit which, we fancy, was suggested to that writer by a verse already quoted, the seeming sharpness of the comparison proving too strong a temptation for his self-mastery to suppress. The situations are not improbable, and the passions put in motion are the strongest which thrill and convulse man's heart. The fluctuating tides of hope and fear are delicately managed. One might not choose this person for a bosom-friend, that is, every one might not; but this is only falling back on the wise saw, that tastes differ. It does not impeach the naturalness of the delineation. The thorough minuteness and truthfulness of the painting is severely pre-Raphaelesque; as when the victim of sorrow and disappointment picks up a sea-shell on the beach and thus soliloquizes. Who writes so, save Tennyson?