MANUAL OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

tranquil, lovely rural scene, like a carved fram vests a still more quiet and charming love-story; the poem is too lengthy for insertion entire, and throughout to allow of dismemberment, we prese as the most beautiful and religious of the mis poems of the volume,

THE Rabbi Nathan, twoscore years and ten,
Walked blameless through the evil world, and
Just as the almond blossomed in his hair,
Met a temptation all too strong to bear,
And miserably sinned. So, adding not
Falsehood to guilt, he left his seat, and taught
No more among the elders, but went out
From the great congregation girt about
With sackcloth, and with ashes on his head,
Making his gray locks grayer. Long he praye
Smiting his breast; then, as the Book he laid
Open before him for the Bath-Col's choice,
Pausing to hear that Daughter of a voice,
Behold the royal preacher's words: "A friend
Loveth at all times, yea, unto the end;
And for the evil day thy brother lives."
Marveling, he said: "It is the Lord who gives
Counsel in need. At Ecbatana dwells
Rabbi Ben Isaac, who all men excels
In righteousness and wisdom, as the trees
Of Lebanon the small weeds that the bees
Bow with their weight. I will arise, and lay
My sins before him."

Barefooted, fasting long, with many prayers;
But even as one who, followed unawares,
Suddenly in the darkness feels a hand

Thrill with its touch his own, and his cheek fan

By odors subtly sweet, and whispers near
Of words he loathes, yet cannot choose but hear
So, while the Rabbi journeyed, chanting low
The wail of David's penitential woe,

Before him still the old temptation came,

And mocked him with the motion and the shame
Of such desires that, shuddering, he abhorred
Himself; and, crying mightily to the Lord
To free his soul and cast the demon out,
Smote with his staff the blackness round about.

At length, in the low light of a spent day,
The towers of Ecbatana far away

Rose on the desert's rim; and Nathan, faint
And footsore, pausing where for some dead saint
The faith of Islam reared a domèd tomb,
Saw some one kneeling in the shadow, whom
He greeted kindly: "May the Holy One
Answer thy prayers, O stranger!" Whereupon
The shape stood up with a loud cry, and then,
Clasped in each other's arms, the two gray men
Wept, praising Him whose gracious providence
Made their paths one. But straightway, as the sense
Of his transgression smote him, Nathan tore
Himself away: "O friend beloved, no more
Worthy am I to touch thee, for I came,
Foul from my sins, to tell thee all my shame.
Haply thy prayers, since naught availeth mine,
May purge my soul, and make it white like thine.
Pity me, O Ben Isaac, I have sinned!"

Awestruck, Ben Isaac stood. The desert wind
Blew his long mantle backward, laying bare
The mournful secret of his shirt of hair.

"I too, O friend, if not in act," he said,

"In thought, have verily sinned. Hast thou not read, 'Better the eye should see than that desire

Should wander'? Burning with a hidden fire

That tears and prayers quench not, I come to thee For pity and for help, as thou to me.

Pray for me, O my friend!" But Nathan cried, "Pray thou for me, Ben Isaac!"

Side by side

In the low sunshine by the turban stone

They knelt; each made his brother's woe his own,

Forgetting, in the agony and stress

Of pitying love, his claim of selfishness;
Peace, for his friend besought, his own becam
His prayers were answered in another's nam
And, when at last they rose up to embrace,
Each saw God's pardon in his brother's face!

Long after, when his headstone gathered mos
Traced on the targum-marge of Onkelos
In Rabbi Nathan's hand these words were rea
"Hope not the cure of sin till Self is dead;
Forget it in love's service, and the debt
Thou canst not pay the angels shall forget;
Heaven's gate is shut to him who comes alone;
Save thou a soul, and it shall save thy own!"

The latest products of our poet's pen are J man's Journal, Poems of Childhood, and Miriam, Poems. They fully sustain the author's previo tation.

Whittier's poetic life has been divided by a critic of the day* into three epochs. The first b ends with his Voices of Freedom, and is called the or didactic, during which Whittier gave merel expression to thoughts and feelings not poetic in th

The transition to the second epoch is reached in of Labor and other Poems, and is more perfectly re his Chapel of the Hermits. This is the epoch of C which themes pertaining rather to the inner life o its experiences and its aspirations-employ the poe and pen.

The Panorama, and other Poems constitute his pa the third epoch, which fully dawns with the appe Home Ballads. This is the period of poetic realism, subject and form alike assume the ideal and poeti "He states God and inward experience as he wou sunshine and the growth of grass. This, with the depth of his nature, makes the rare beauty of his *D. A. Wasson, in Atlantic Monthly, vol. xiii., pp. 333

and poems of piety and trust. He does not try to make the facts by stating them; he does not try to embellish them; he only seeks to utter, to state them; and even in his most perfect verse they are not half so melodious as they were in his soul."*

"This, then, is the general statement about Whittier. His genius is Hebrew, biblical, more so than that of any other poet now using the English language. words, he is organically a poem of the Will.

In other

"Imagination exists in him, not as a separable faculty, but as a pure vital suffusion. Hence he is an inevitable poet. There is no drop of his blood, there is no fibre of his brain, which does not crave poetic expression. . . . He is intelligible and acceptable to those who have little either of poetic culture or of fancy and imagination. Whoever has common sense and a sound heart has the power by which he may be appreciated.

"And yet he is not only a real poet, but he is all poet. The Muses have not merely sprinkled his brow; he was baptized by immersion. His notes are not many, but in them Nature herself sings. He is a sparrow that half sings, half chirps on a bush, not a lark that floods with Orient hilarity the skies of morning; but the bush burns, like that which Moses saw, and the sparrow herself is part of the divine flame."*

*D. A. Wasson.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES was born August 29 Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the age of twenty uated at Harvard University. For a year succee graduation he studied law, but practiced poesy; hi effusions appearing in "The Collegian," a periodi lished in 1830 by a number of the University s Among these earliest poems were The Spectre Pig, E By a Tailor, and The Meeting of the Dryads. This las as we are told in a late edition of our author's poe "written after a general pruning of the trees arou vard College," we present:

It was not many centuries since,

When gathered on the moonlit green,
Beneath the Tree of Liberty,

A ring of weeping sprites was seen.

The Freshman's lamp had long been dim,
The voice of busy day was mute,
And tortured Melody had ceased
Her sufferings on the evening flute.

They met not, as they once had met,
To laugh o'er many a jocund tale:
But every pulse was beating low,

And every cheek was cold and pale.